The XBMC Media Canter - A Free Universal Replay System

 

XBMC tutorial: how to set up XBMC to play music files downloaded from Pristine Classical.

Pristine Classical recommends XBMC Media Center software for all audio replay

Plays back all our formats on all plaforms

XBMC Media Center represents perhaps the finest replay software system we've yet seen for handling multimedia for PC, Mac, Linux and other platforms. Free to download, install and run, it's compatible with all of the music files offered by Pristine, including all FLACs, and MP3 + Cue.

Intuitive, flexible and free

Intuitive in use, fast and seamless in operation, XBMC Media Center is perhaps the ideal computer-based system for painless enjoyment of Pristine's enormous selection of music. It can also be used to watch video files up to full HD resolution (dependent on computer hardware specifications).

XBMC Media Center can be downloaded from http://xbmc.org

Enabling Album Artwork for Pristine's FLAC files in XBMC

All of Pristine's more recent FLAC downloads have included cover artwork in jpg format, as well as the cover itself as a PDF. The standard format for this has always been [catalogue number].jpg. However, XBMC by default looks for the file Folder.jpg to display appropriate cover artwork unless authorised to use other file names. As of the end of August 2009 our FLAC downloads will include artwork named to this convention.

If you have a substantial collection of older FLAC files where this is not the case, there are two routes open to you in order to display the artwork in XBMC:

1. Rename all artwork (e.g. PASC175.jpg) within folders to Folder.jpg
   
   
2. Download this small ZIP file and extract it to your XBMC UserData folder. Check out XBMC's full online documentation for the location of this folder on your specific OS. The text file within enables specific use of all our cover art picture files issued with FLACs released up to and including 21st August, 2009.

More information From the XBMC website:

Award Winning Free and Open Source Software

XBMC, recursive acronym for “XBMC Media Center“, is an award winning free and open source software media-player and entertainment hub for all your digital media.

Multi-platform, Internationalized, and Localized

XBMC is a cross-platform software available for Linux, Mac OS X (Leopard, Tiger, and Apple TV), Microsoft Windows operating-system, as well as the original Xbox game-console. With translations to over 30 languages for a worldwide audience. All versions of course completely free of any adware or spyware.

• XBMC for Linux
• XBMC for Mac
• XBMC for Windows
• XBMC for Xbox
• XBMC Live

Community

Over 50 developers have contributed to XBMC, and over 100 translators have worked to expand its reach. XBMC was created by created by a group of like minded back in 2003. XBMC Community Forum today have over 30,000 registered members, nad XBMC had already an estimated userbase of over one million daily end-users when it was only running on the the Xbox platform, and now that XBMC runs nativly on several other platforms as well we estimate that that the userbase have growed exponentionally.

User-friendliness that is Next To Godliness

XBMC is easy to install and setup, and its many beautiful custom user interfaces offers simple very intuitive navigation which are very convenient and flexible, adding to great price verses performance ratio when installed on cheap hardware to this best in class software. With and experience surpases all retail media center systems.

Superb Format and Codec support

XBMC supports a very complete spectrum of of audio and video multimedia file formats and codecs right out-of-the-box, and include features such as playlist playback, audio visualizations, picture viewing, slideshows, and weather forecast functions, RSS feed scroller on your home screen, together with a ever expanding array of community driven third-party add-ons and plugins.

Endless playback capabilities for All Types of Media

XBMC can play most audio and video file formats as well as display images at resolutions up to 1080p FullHD and over with no software limitation from virtually any source, including your local harddrive, CD/DVDs, USB flash drives, the Internet, and network shares, upscaling any lower resolutions videos to the maximum of your displays capability. XBMC can also playback DVD-Video movies with menus from ISO/IMG-images on-the-fly, even when they are in an RAR or ZIP archive. For music playback XBMC offers ReplayGain, gapless, crossfading, cue sheet, and pre-amplification playback option, as well as advanced smart playlists, and chapter support.

XBMC can download or stream Internet video and audio streams, and play Internet radio stations (such as Podcasts and SHOUTcast), and listen to your favorites and discover new music with free, streaming music from Last.fm, among others.

XBMC of course handles all common digital picture formats with the options of panning/zooming, and slideshow with “Ken Burns Effect“. XBMC also handles CBZ and CBR comic book archive files, this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

Online Powered Media Management

XBMC has a database driven video and music library view modes which help organize and filter all of your media straight out-of-the-box in. The video library allow you to easily browse your video content by things like; genre, title, year, actors, and directors, as well as carry our extensive searches on casts and related information. Similarly, XBMC’s music library allows the organization of your music collection by information stored in your music file ID meta tags, like title, artist, album, genre and popularity, as well as having access to powerful search and Smart Playlists features, helping you find exactly what you want in a fast and simple way.

Album and Cover Art

XBMC takes full advantage of broadband Internet connection if available, Artwork is automatically fetched for posters, artwork, fanart, synopsis and reviews on movies, plot, cast and episode information for TV shows, also album covers and artist information for music.

Extendable and Flexible Add-ons

XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Python widget scripts allow normal users to add-on ‘extensions’ with new functionality to XBMC themselves, using the easy to learn Python scripting language, without the need for knowledge of any complex programming languages or the inner workings of XBMC. Current plugins and scripts include a multitude of added functions like Internet TV and radio streams, podcasts, movie-trailer browsers, and cinema guides, e-mail clients, instant messaging, train-timetables, peer-to-peer file-sharing downloaders, IRC, also casual games (sometimes also referred to as mini-games or party-games) such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more.

Fully Skinnable and Customizable Interface

XBMC is noted and highly regarded as having a very flexible GUI toolkit and robust framework for its GUI, (now also proven by the fact that several other software projects have copied it). Users can create their own skins, or choose one of the many already available skins. XBMC uses a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible to everyone. Users themselves can create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites dedicated for XBMC skins trading. Colors, controls, navigation, positioning of elements, animation, even adding additional functionality can be achieved with a skin. “Project Mayhem” is the official skin from Team-XBMC; which is now in its third version, commonly know as “PM3″. Many third-party skins exist and while many are of original and unique designs, a few skins are almost exact replicas of other multimedia software, with skins clones of Apple TV and Front Row, Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition (MCE), MediaPortal, Meedio/MeediOS, HDeeTV, Kaleidescape, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and others. Each skin provides a totally different and unique user experience, all showing just how flexible XBMC’s skinning engine really is.

FOSS (Free Open Source Software)

XBMC Media Centersoftware is distributed as open source under the GNU General Public License, (with a few sub-libraries licensed under the LGPL), and as a non-profit project XBMC is run and developed by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain. Team-XBMC encourage anyone to contribute to the project, submit their own source code patches for new features and functions, improve existing ones, or fix any bugs in XBMC that you might find.

Technical Summary

XBMC is written in the C++ program language (and some Assembly code), XBMC uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) multimedia framework and OpenGL for graphics rendering the Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows based operating-system platforms, and the Xbox version of XBMC uses Microsoft DirectX multimedia framework and Direct3D for graphics rendering, (as the Xbox does not support OpenGL).

“Microsoft”, “Xbox” and the Xbox logos are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other trademarks and logos are properties of their respective owners.