Guides, tutorials, tips, and tricks on home media, streaming, media players, and home theater devices. In addition, other relevant topics such as downloaders and library organizers are also covered.
The Broadcom Crystal HD cards (BCM70012 and BCM70015) bring 1080p HD video decoding capability to low powered media centers and netbooks. Software decoding HD video strains the CPU and many cases causes stutters and skips during video playback. In this post, I will explain how to install Broadcom Crystal HD … read more
XBMC is an awesome media center application. I have previously written several posts on it. With all the customizations that I have been doing with my XBMC setup, it became more important than ever to backup my XBMC configuration files. But I wanted a simple and automatic solution. I could … read more
DLNA allows you to play home network media on all compatible devices over the network. Last year I wrote a post on how to setup MiniDLNA, the free media server software in ubuntu 10.04. I also pointed out the limitations of MiniDLNA media server and why I moved away from … read more
After a while of accumulating videos my “xbmc” folder grew several folds in size. If you search around, you will find that several people report this problem. The culprit here is the Thumbnails folder or cache that keeps accumulating thumbnails, most of which become obsolete or useless over the course … read more
Few days back, I published a post describing how to configure the Chinavision MCE USB remote to work with XBMC and Logitech Harmony Remote. I did further research and reading after this and ended up improving my setup. Since XBMC Dharma, the “keymap.xml” file no longer exists. It now called … read more
I have described how I setup my Ubuntu-XBMC based HTPC in several of my previous posts: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/?p=252 https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/?p=279 https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/?p=285 I bought the Wireless USB PC Remote Control Mouse for PC as a cheap IR remote / receiver to control my HTPC. It sells for about $7 on Amazon. This USB … read more
XBMC is a great media player, very well suited for HPTCs. There are several XBMC addons that stream videos from the internet. In this post, I am doing to describe how to play Amazon Prime Videos on XBMC (both free and rented videos), running on a Ubuntu system. With the … read more
I recently purchased a Patriot Box Office based on all the rave reviews it had as a multiformat HD media player. It is being touted as the best media player for sub $100. For wifi capability, I purchased the AirLink101 AWLL6075 Wireless N Mini USB Adapter due to its known … read more
Like I explained in my previous post, I have an Ubuntu Server playing HD audio and video using Turtle Beach USB Audio Card and Broadcom CrystalHD. Pulseaudio worked when using VLC for some reason I did not get Dolby/DTS passthrough from XBMC. So I had to remove it as I … read more