XBMC has made monumental developments since it was first designed for the original Xbox to double as a media player. Over the past 10 years, XBMC has released 13 versions of the open-source media player and they are now set to release a 14th, Helix.
However, as soon as the latest version arrives, out goes the XBMC name. It was announced last August that along with the Helix version, comes a new brand for the multi-platform media center – Kodi Entertainment Center.
XBMC to Kodi
The XBMC foundation opened up about the choice of letting go of the current name. There have been issues with the mishandling of the name, being used as alleys of fooling users to buy boxes with hacked versions of the software.
As the legitimate foundation themselves have no legal hold over “XBMC”—because it was based on the Xbox name – they were left powerless to do anything about problems arising from the misuse of it.
Furthermore, support for the Xbox platform was foregone a few years back and the XBMC name just ultimately lost meaning. True and understandable as that may all be, the name is still something to be missed.
The hacking of the software is easy to imagine and hard to combat because XBMC is mainly an open-source software project. Their source codes are readily available to the public in a github repository.
While the hacking issue is an obvious con, greater pros have come from the open-source nature of the software: Keeping everything open-source has allowed for further development of the software, creation of numerous add-ons, audio and video plugins, skins and themes, web scrapers, etc – giving users great freedom to personalize their media center.
This significant factor has made XBMC so attractive to users.
More importantly, XBMC’s capabilities make up a long list, from handling a variety of audio and video formats, image formats and container formats, to reading physical digital media, even supporting network protocols such as SMB, UPnP, FTP, to name a few.
With the network protocols in place, users will find little trouble syncing between computers or mobiles as XBMC can be run on almost all platforms available, Android included. The guide at the end will show you how to install XBMC on your Android device.
Apart from syncing media, XBMC also enables streaming through an internet connection to play worldwide radio stations, video streaming from YouTube, Netflix, etc., as well as streaming over peer-to-peer.
But what of the Xbox?
Many of their competitors are derivatives of the XBMC software itself. There are about 30 or so projects that sprouted from its base software, one of which is the XBMC4Xbox.
As the foundation is letting go of the Xbox-centered name, albeit some 4 years after letting go of Xbox support, certain developers would not let the gaming console go abandoned. The team continues development of the software to provide support for the Xbox platform.
The project should definitely be given credit — they are upholding the legacy and original purpose that the XBMC was made for.
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