XBOX Media Center is a free and open source media-player jukebox and entertainment hub for all your digital media.

XBMC is currently available for Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS X (Intel-based Leopard and Tiger), Microsoft Windows, and the original (first-generation) Xbox. We are currently at Beta 1 for our upcoming release codenamed Atlantis. It should be noted that XBMC requires OpenGL 1.4 support, at a minimum, to function. We do however recommend OpenGL 2.0 to fully experience XBMC. Check your graphics drivers to see what version of OpenGL your GPU (graphics processing unit) supports.

XBMC is a cross-platform software available for Linux, Mac OS X, 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.

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 addons and plugins.

Endless playback capabilities for all typles of media

XBMC can play most audio and video file formats as well as display images at resolutions up to 1080p and over 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 gapless playback, crossfading, cue sheet, replay gain amplification, advanced smart playlists, and chapter support.

XBMC can stream Internet video and audio streams, and play Internet radio stations (such as SHOUTcast and 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 library view mode which help organize all of your media stright out-of-the-box. Allowing 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.

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

Extendible and flexible

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 addon 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 skinable 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 a non-profit project that is run and developed by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain. Team-XBMC encourage anyone to submit their own source code patches for new features and functions, improve existing ones, or fix bugs in XBMC.

XBMC media center software is distributed as open source under the GNU General Public License (with a few libraries used by XBMC licensed under the LGPL). Programmed in C++ (and some Assembly), XBMC uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) framework and OpenGL for the Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating-system platforms, and Microsoft DirectX/Direct3D multimedia framework on the Xbox version, (as the Xbox does not support OpenGL).

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this media player software.