Organize Your Media with XBMC
So, you’ve got a terabyte of media on your
home PC—movies, music, TV shows, the
works. On top of that, you like to watch
streaming videos on the web and listen to
Internet radio. Isn’t the future great? But
how are you getting at all this media? Do
you keep all your fi les in folders on your
desktop, or are they just sitting on a NAS
box? Maybe you use something like iTunes,
and then fi re up your browser to get at
streaming content.
There’s a better way.
What you need is a media front end,
which can help you organize and access
all your media, whether it’s fi les on your
system or in the cloud. In this article, we’ll
show you everything you need to do to get
XBMC—a popular media front end—up,
running, and customized. –ALEX CASTLE1
GETTING STARTED
Before you begin, consider these
questions:Is XBMC right for me? XBMC (originally
designed as the Xbox Media Center for
hacked Xboxes, but now mostly for HTPCs)
is the most compelling and full-featured
media front end currently available (image
A). However, not everyone needs a media
front end. If you’re a music-only sort of
person, for instance, you might be better
off using iTunes or Foobar. If the only me-
dia you need is streamed from Netflix, then
you’re better off just sticking to the site.Is my hardware
ready to run
XBMC? Fortunately,
XBMC does not
come with heavy
system require-
ments. As long as
you’ve got a semi-
modern computer
running Windows,
Linux, or OS X (don’t
worry Mac-haters,
we’re only going
to focus on the Win-
dows version in this
article), you should
be able to run
XBMC. Really, the
most stringent re-
quirements will end
up coming from the media fi les themselves. If
your computer can run HD H.264 video, then
it’s more than suffi cient for XBMC.Is my media organized? Your media
doesn’t need to be immaculately organized
to use XBMC,
but it does need
to be somewhat
orderly. First,
your music
needs to be
properly tagged.
Like most other
music organiza-
tion soft ware,
XBMC uses ID3tags to let you search through your music
by its artist, album, or genre. If your music
doesn’t have ID3 tags, you’ll lose out on a lot
of functionality. If you purchased, download-
ed, or ripped an MP3 in the last few years, it’s
almost certainly got ID3 tags, but some older
fi les might be missing them. If that’s the case,
check out our article on using MediaMonkey
to automatically add tags to your library at
http://bit.ly/cr84JK.
Your video library doesn’t need any
sort of tags, as XBMC uses “scrapers” to
retrieve that data automatically from online
databases. All the same, it’ll make your life a
whole lot easier down the line if your videos
aren’t spread out willy-nilly all over your
hard drives. The best thing you can do is put
all your movies in a single folder, and all your
TV shows in another, with sub-folders for
individual series/seasons (image B).2
INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE
XBMC takes some work to get set up,
but the soft ware installation itself is
dead simple. Just download the latest Windows
installer at http://xbmc.org/download and run
it. You get some options about what compo-
nents to install, but the defaults will be fi ne for
now—you can change anything you need to
later on. You’ll also be asked where you want
XBMC to save its data and plugins (image C). If
you choose to store them in XBMC’s program
folder, you’ll have to choose to run XBMC with
administrator rights, but it will be easier to copy
your XBMC install to a diff erent computer,
plugins intact.
A When the installation’s done, fi re up XBMC.B
C
R&D^
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