XBMC is an award winning media center application. XBMC is easy to use, looks slick, and has a large helpful community.
Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available.
Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart.
There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.
What's New in This Release:
· With Beta 3, we’ve fixed playlist issues, altered some misbehaving Library buttons, provided a little more control over the way movie sets are scraped, and cleaned up numerous other small bugs.
· On top of the many bug fixes though, we are pleased to officially announce the first beta of XBMCbuntu. With this beta release, we have chosen to slightly shift the focus of the pre-built XBMC Live install. In the past, XBMC Live was optimized for a pure set-top box experience. In the switch to XBMCbuntu, we are pushing to a more traditional ‘buntu approach that emphasizes first trying and then ultimately installing XBMC onto the local machine.