XBMC is a programme that turns your computer into a media station that makes most things look pale in comparison. Of course, it’s open source, and thus free. It’s relatively quick to go to http://xbmc.org/ and download it for the platform you want (It’s available for linux, windows & mac), and just the clean install is great. The programme itself downloads information from IMDB about ratings, genre, actors etc which it applies to your films. Do you need subtitles for the film? No problem, with a few keystrokes XBMC will find the right subtitles for your film. With a few keystrokes in the settings, we quickly change so that we get the weather in our current location presented, as well as change the language to Swedish. There are a variety of user interface designs to choose from, but I would recommend going with the default, as many of the additions we make can then clash with themes other than the default. Feel free to look at the default theme screenshots.
The only thing that was tricky with the basic configuration was that it took me a while to realise that I had to right-click / bring up the context menu on my movie catalogues and specify whether they were movies or series, before that they didn’t show as movies but only files. The rest was as easy as can be.
All these features that are available are great, but to get it 100% the way you want it, you’ll probably want to spend some time configuring the programme. The things we would like to fix are:
- Get the remote control working
- Replace the default RSS feed
- Add Swedish Play channels
- Add Swedish Radio
Get the remote control to work
There are lots of different remotes that you can buy for your HTPC that work well. Microsoft’s own remote control supports XBMC right from the start, but if you have any other remote control than that, you immediately get problems. This happened to yours truly who uses a Veris RM200 together with iMON. Fortunately, with this remote we can specify that we want to use it as a keyboard in the iMON settings, and also define macros for which button should go to which keystroke. On the XBMC website we can find most of the keyboard combinations(http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Global_Keyboard), but far from all. For all ‘Special keys’ and special functions there is no documentation, and to get this list I had to read line by line in the .xml files. Here is my proposal for a default configuration for RM200:
- Play: p
- Pause:
- Stop: x
- FastForward: f
- Reverse: r
- Skip next: .
- Skip forward: ,
- Record:
(There is no record function, so this only takes screenshots) - DVD Subtitles: l
- DVD Menu: m
- Fullscreen:
- Bookmark: q
- Thumbnail: o (Diagnostics)
- Timer: i (Media info)
- Audio: c (Context menu)
- Zoom:
(Switch between screen modes) - “My Videos”: Ctrl e
- “My Pictures”: Ctrl i
- “My Music”: Ctrl m
A tip for some remote controls may be to switch off specific system buttons. If you have windows for example, you can look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216893 where it is described how to turn off / turn on that functionality.
If we do not have a remote control, this does not matter. There are both iPhone and Android applications that help us control our XBMC. This works just as well! Just search for ‘XBMC’ in your app store and it will be there. Big minus to Apple for not releasing the full version of XBMC on their platform.
Replace the default RSS feed
By default, XBMC shows its own news feed. I personally find that rather boring. Instead, we might want to show something more fun, or something with a bit more relevance.
My tip is to use the Top 10 feed. You can find this here:
http://sfanytime.com/Text.mvc/rssfeed/4/sv/SE/
Otherwise, we can go to SF Anytime ourselves and choose the feed we want. They have a variety to choose from, here we can limit ourselves to a specific genre etc.
http://sfanytime.com/Text.mvc/rss
Do you have any tips on feeds that might be interesting? Feel free to share in the comments!
Add Swedish Play channels
There are lots of add-ons for XBMC that are not on the officially supported list. A list of different collections of this type can be found at http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Unofficial_Add-on_Repositories.
To add the Swedish Play channels, we simply go to the Official page with the Unofficial Add-ons and download & install the XOT repository. Then we just go into add-ons, and then we have the option to install files from the XOT server. Then we add the XOT Framework and then there are a number of different packages of channels that one can add. These are just to run in all of them, and then it’s done! To filter out only the Swedish then you go into XOT and in the settings there is the possibility to hide everything except what is in Swedish.
Add Swedish radio
It is also possible to add Swedish Radio channels. This can be done very easily yourself by finding the radio stations you want, and then creating .m3u playlists that connect you to the radio station, but a pretty good list & installation tips can be found on henrikans blog. Note that at the time of writing, the address of the file is not correct. It should be http://svampbob.dyndns.org/ubuntu/swedish_radio-XBMC-0.1.zip.
Have fun with your HTPC!