XBMC cross platform beta released
posted Sep 20th 2008 6:45pm by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: home entertainment hacks, news

It’s been a big week for the XBMC team. They announced the release of their first cross platform beta in preparation for a full release in October. XBMC started as a media center project for the original Xbox, but has expanded a lot since then. The new beta works on Linux, OSX (Leopard and Tiger), Windows, and Xbox. They’ve created XBMC Live, so you can get XBMC up and running quickly either by booting from the CD, from a flash drive, or using it to install to a disk. People have been writing add on apps too, like the XBMC Remote for iPhones.
This summer we covered both Boxee, a social version of XBMC, and Plex, the original XBMC OSX fork.





I like xbmc, but I don’t like the rabid fanboys who ask to see it on every platform, including hand-helds that already run a minimal gui and their own mplayer.
Maybe I just don’t like pointless Gui’s, or maybe I never gave it a good try since winlirc isn’t supported in the windows port. But to layer a gui on top of a gui starts seeming very pointless to me.
It is cool that there is more development, maybe I will see winlirc support and be able to give it a try on mw windows box.
I love it for my xbox, except for the obvious lack of HD decoding power. Why can’t XBMC for the Xbox360 be used apart from a “media center” edition of windows running on a PC? No technical reason, just money-grubbing Microsoft.
Posted at 10:30 am on Sep 21st, 2008 by nubie