Xbox Media Center be praised!
I just installed this on a linux Ubuntu box, and I used the “Live” version which I put onto a USB drive. So, the steps:
- Download the ISO file from http://xbmc.org/download/
- Burn the ISO onto a thumb drive (or CD)
- Boot your host off the USB/CD, you may need to hit F11 during bootup to get to your BIOS and choose boot media.
- When booting you can either install or boot off the media to see how it works on your setup. Once you verify your setup, you should install.
- Hook up to your TV and stereo and go!
Now, I actually have a file server in my home that stores all my movies in AVI format. So, my XBMC is a very shrunk down system, you could even put it on a small solid state flash drive which would be nice and fast. Then the question is, how to access the files from another server?
I use NFS on my server and mount them on the XBMC host. However, I had to do a few steps to get this going:
- You need to install nfs-common to be able to mount. But, the Live install does not have that by default. So, you need to SSH into your XBMC. This is a little tricky, since XBMC will use DHCP to get an IP address and you may not know what IP it has!
- Find the IP. One way is to use a “pinger” program that will try and ping every IP in your home network range, and once you do that you can try SSH’ing into each IP that turns up. I use PUTTY if on a windows box to do SSH.
- Once logged in, then do “sudo apt-get update”
- Then do “sudo apt-get install nfs-common”
- Edit your fstab file, i.e. “sudo vi /etc/fstab”
- You’ll want to add your file server, usually something like “192.168.2.100:/movies /movies nfs defaults 0 0”
- Make sure you mkdir your mount point (/movies in this example) on the xbmc host, then do “sudo mount -a” and your xbmc host should mount the movies
- In XBMC, go to Video and add “root file system” to point to your new mount point!
- Enjoy!