Sunday, May 13, 2007

XBOX Media Center (XBMC) headed for Apple TV

An extremely interesting post was put up on the XBMC forums earlier this week. Two developers from XBMC have set out to port XBMC to Linux!

Their plan is to port XBMC to Linux so it can be run on other hardware platforms. Some of the platforms mentioned include PS3, Apple TV, VIA Eden, and a Mac Mini.

This is really exciting news, and in only a short amount of time they've already got it working in Ubuntu Feisty.

You can check out a copy of the code from the XBMC SVN, but it's still very early in development and only provides support for skinners (no video/audio playback yet):
http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbmc/branches/linuxport/
Also view the linux readme here

It's too early to tell what's going to happen with this, but it's very exciting to know that development is being done to bring this amazing media player software to other hardware platforms. The idea would be that you have a bootable USB drive which included a live-cd-like experience to booting XBMC on the device. The livecd you download would need to be specific to the platform you wanted to run it on because of the different drivers and bootloaders that would be needed to make it all work.

For more information or to add in your 2 cents about porting XBMC to Linux / Apple TV / PS3 and other platforms, check out this thread on the XBMC forums:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=26097

or come to IRC Freenode #xbmc

2 Comments:

CalmSandwich said...

Hi, i'm a great fan of all your console hack blogs. I nearly bought a PSP after the XBMC control stuff you demoed. This porting is going to be really exciting when it all happens.
Wish you well in your Hacks.
Ps: I'm paperclipmonkey on xbmc forums.

Unknown said...

Please please please! This would f***ing rock. I've been praying for something like this ever since I saw the keynote when the AppleTV was introduced.... my poor old XBOX can't handle HD video or I wouldn't have ever cared! XBMC is far and away the BEST media player interface ever.

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