Anyone running XBMC?

[Gingerbread Man]

Just switched from Windows Media Centre to XBMC as I fancied a change. First impressions of XBMC are top rate. Just wondering who else is using it and what good plugins/ add ons you are using?

Currently got iPlayer, Icefilms, TVCatchup (in mids of getting working).

[BlueMR2]

I use it, I have a few plugins but I don't really use them, I mainly use it for watching films, good fun using cover flow and scrolling through the covers to find something you fancy watching.

[Gingerbread Man]

I see there is a way to tie in Blu Ray playback through an external program. This is my next challenge. But all in all, I'm sold so far.

[HellDiver]

I've run it on PC, on an AppleTV and currently running it on an AppleTV2. I wouldn't use anything else. The AppleTV2 version on XBMC is still work in progress, but is perfectly useable.

[oola]

I have XBMC on my Apple TV 1 but I've not really used it as I use Boxee instead. What does everyone think of XBMC as a comparison to Boxee??

[budgie smuggler]

XBMC is great fun, especially if you enjoy fiddling about with settings, skins, plugins etc.

I've reached a point where my setup is good enough that I'm ditching all my CD/DVD/Blueray boxes (all the info is scraped from IMDB or similar) and just playing everything from the media centre.
I've used MakeMKV to rip all my doovds and blurays to the hard disk, will subtitles, commentary etc. Works really well.

[Gingerbread Man]

budgie smuggler said:

I've used MakeMKV to rip all my doovds and blurays to the hard disk, will subtitles, commentary etc. Works really well.

I've ripped all of my DVD's without compression to my hard discs. Current;y I've not ripped any of the Blu Rays. My thoughts were that these would take up a lot of space per film. How much do you compress yours as I wanted to retain the quality.

Never did make my mind up you see.

David

[qube_TA]

I use it on my ATV it's great, however there's a spin off called PLEX which I think is better.

http://www.plexapp.com/

[budgie smuggler]

Gingerbread Man said:

I've ripped all of my DVD's without compression to my hard discs. Current;y I've not ripped any of the Blu Rays. My thoughts were that these would take up a lot of space per film. How much do you compress yours as I wanted to retain the quality.

Never did make my mind up you see.

David

MakeMKV does basically straight through from the disc. DVD=4-6 GB, BluRay=20-30 GB.

To save space for BluRay, use MakeMKV then run Handbrake on it with Constant Quality level 22 or 21. Think they come out between 6 and 12 GB with full quality audio (remove all audio tracks and re-add as passthrough). Picture quality is great, but ripping 1080p is a bit time consuming.

For BluRays I don't care as much about, I resize the picture to 720p, and let it compress the audio tracks using LAME. Still very very good, much better than over the air HD.

Edited by budgie smuggler on Monday 5th September 19:21