XBMC: Your computer’s new best friend

HOW many of us, I wonder, still use our home PCs for their intended tasks of word processing, office work and managing the accounts?

That’s what Windows was designed for, back in the Nineties. But that was before the internet, MP3 music and digital photography. Today, home computers are more often entertainment hubs than office tools, distributing audio, video and even 3D imagery around the house. So it was only a matter of time before someone re-invented the software for the purpose.

XBMC is the window-dressing that will change the way you see your computer forever. It makes bolt-ons like Windows Media Player seem like exhibits in the Science Museum.

The idea is to deliver all your media, no matter whether it’s music, photos or movies, through a single, graphical menu. No technical knowledge is necessary; XBMC finds your content, indexes it for you and displays it in stunning quality. And you can have it today and it won’t cost you a penny.

The program was designed originally to play media on the Xbox games console (XBMC stands for Xbox Media Centre) but it’s been adapted for the PC and other devices. Once launched, it takes over your entire screen and replaces those fiddly Windows icons with big, simple menu choices. It automatically pulls in information about your files from the internet and finds album sleeves, DVD covers and other art.

What’s more, you can add modules to browse and search YouTube and other web services, play games and find content similar to yours.

XBMC is so good you’ll wish it was on your TV, too, and perhaps your tablet. And soon it may be. The developers – volunteers, all of them – have just released a version for Google’s Android operating system, which is powering a new generation of cheap set-top boxes. This incarnation works with a standard TV remote. It’s still in its testing phase but when finished it could, given the right marketing, make the £300 BBC-backed YouView box obsolete overnight.

Meanwhile, XBMC is already available unofficially for the iPad and Apple’s own TV set-top box – but in both cases you will need to electronically unlock or “jailbreak” the device, a process I don’t recommend as it invalidates your warranty.

The PC version requires no such tweaking, and you can have it up and running in the time it took you to read this article, by downloading from xbmc.org.