Apparently metadata indexing is coming in a future release – which should fix the problem. Your files have to be named in a particular way because it does not read metadata, and even after this, it still fails to index a lot of my music. Its media indexing system is not very good, however. When I installed it on Ubuntu, my MCE remote immediately worked. It is also generally a bit simpler to use. The main reason to use Boxee over XBMC is the Hulu app based on Mozilla (and a few other apps that are missing in XBMC). The social network aspect of Boxee lets your friends see what you are watching/listening to and lets you recommend shows or songs to your followers. This is pretty lame of the Boxee team, but they are trying to turn Boxee into a business so, there you have it. While much of Boxee is open source – these additions are closed source, which prevents XBMC from taking advantage of the Boxee developers work. Basically it is XBMC plus a cleaned up interface, a social network and a few more key plugins.

Beautiful Interface (Though more complex than Boxee)īoxee is media center that was broken off of XBMC.

This is the main reason I spend more time in Boxee. The one killer plugin that is missing is a Hulu plugin, though. The Onion, Game Trailers), grab subtitles for movies etc… It has a MythTV frontend plugin which is great if you have a MythTV backend somewhere on your network like me – it is pretty new, though, and I find it a little clunky compared to a real MythTV frontend. Beyond playing back your media, XBMC has a ton of plugins ( ) that let you play online content like streaming video (ex. So, you get amazing performance during playback (HD video uses less than 10% of your CPU). It is easy to configure your remote control and video playback utilizes VDPAU on nvidia cards.

XBMC indexes the music and videos on your hard drive or networked drives and plays them back with a lot of elegance. However, it has since been ported to Linux, Apple and Windows (and other game systems).

This media center was designed for the original XBox hardware. I personally run a Mythbuntu system with the following three media centers installed on top of MythTV to organize my local media and watch web content. So, I leave it out of the media center category. However, I find Myth makes a good OS (mythbuntu) and PVR (with a great web interface), but I think it is fairly awful at organizing your media and playing web vids. MythTV itself might qualify in this category. All of them integrate easily with MythTV by adding a simple menu item, and each work greats with remotes and looks good on your TV. The three media centers I list are my favorites. Please express that anger in the comments below. Let me first start off by saying that someone is likely going to be very angry at me for omitting program x, y, z or Miro.

Linux media center distro 2016