XBMC or Xbox Media Center is a free and open source, multiplatform media player and entertainment hub. It has won many accolades already, including the 2006 Sourceforge community choice award for Best Multimedia Project and Best Gaming Project. Also in 2007, XBMC was nominated for community choice awards in six categories. It is currently available for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows operating system.

Update: XBMC 9.04.1 is released!

Update: Feature list and installation of XBMC 9.04 Babylon

XBMC supports common audio, video and image formats as well as breathtaking audio visualisations, skins, weather reporting etc.  It has a number of third party plugins as well. Following post has included screenshots and the installation steps of XBMC Media Center for Ubuntu 8.10.

Let us take a peek into the features included  in XBMC Media Center.

Features

• First of all, looks do matter. XBMC Media Center will give its proprietory counterparts a run for its money, its simply looks stunning. User interface is intuitive and so easy to use. Take a look at the screen shots below.

Sleek  and user friendly. Here is another one.

The screenshot  below is one  taken while playing a video. You can browse XBMC even while playing a video. Looks stunning right? :-)

• Other than being an excellent media player, XBMC has features like neat audio visualisations, loads of different skins, playlist playback, picture viewing, weather forcast etc.  It can even be used as a RSS feed reeder in your home screen. Add to it , a number of third party plugins and addons which altogether makes XBMC an irresistable choice for multimedia freaks.
   
• And of course its works neatly in your Ubuntu desktop. There is also a bootable live CD version of XBMC as well called XBMC Live.

Installation

• The striked off steps below are outdated. Install the latest version of XBMC using this link.

• You need to add the following third party repo inorder to install XBMC Media Center. Goto System-> Administration->Software Sources and select the Third Party Software tab. Click the ADD button and copy paste  the following repo.

               deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-intrepid/ubuntu intrepid main

• After reloading, Goto System-> Administration-> Synaptic and install the packages xbmc, xbmc-skin-*

• That is it. XBMC is installed and ready to use. Goto Applications-> Sound and Video-> XBMC to run the app.

XBMC Media Center is a must for all those multimedia addicts out there. It does worth a try. And enjoy a truly one of its kind multimedia experience. If you are like multimedia stuff, may be you also want to know about Boxee and Songbird as well.