Navigate to the zip file on your computer, and select Install. Then, when you head to "Get Add-Ons", you'll see the new repository listed as a choice, and you can browse add-ons from it just like you did the official repository.
While we'd recommend browsing the repositories to see what cool add-ons you find, there are definitely some we'd consider must-haves. Here are some of our favorites all of them are from the official XBMC repository unless otherwise noted. And those are just the ones that come with XBMC.
Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are some of the most popular streaming services around, so it makes sense that you'd want to be able to play them on XBMC.
However, due to DRM and other issues, this is more difficult than it sounds. It requires another add-on to work, and technically plays through your browser, but you can control it with your remote on Windows, which is very nice. There's a similar add-on for Amazon , available here, though it doesn't work with Gotham at the time of this writing.
There is not currently a working add-on for Hulu, though you could use the Hulu Desktop app in conjunction with the Advanced Launcher add-on mentioned below. Our recommendation : These add-ons probably aren't worth the trouble. As long as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon don't support XBMC—which seems more and more unlikely as time goes on—the more difficult it's going to be to play them. Basically, anything you'd find streaming on those channels' web sites, you'll find in this add-on, packaged and ready for XMBC.
What It Does : SportsDevil compiles more streaming sports games than you can shake a stick at or a baseball bat, or a golf club. Most of its streams are unofficial, however, so they're not very high quality and they aren't foolproof. But if you need your sports fix on XBMC, this is one of the best ways to get it.
What They Do : These three add-ons and many others like them grab movies, TV shows, podcasts, live sports streams, and other videos from different streaming sites on the internet.
They are, essentially, insanely huge libraries of just about anything you could ever imagine. They're a little overwhelming at first, but if you can't find what you're looking for anywhere else, you can probably find it here.
Note, however, that many of the streams are unofficial—meaning some of them can be finicky, and some may also be illegal. Use them responsibly. By setting up uTorrent's WebUI , Trasmission's Remote Control , or CouchPotato for Usenet and inputting the right information to the corresponding XBMC add-on, you can check on and, in come cases, even start and stop your downloads from your TV, whether they're on that computer or a remote one. We actually showed you how to use the original Launcher plugin back before add-ons were easy to install—now all you need to do is install the plugin from Program Add-Ons and get to emulatin'.
What It Does : If you'd prefer not to have to restart XBMC every time you add something new to the library or every time your automated system does it for you , you can start up this add-on at the beginning of your XBMC session, and it will automatically scan your library for new content on a certain time interval. What it Does : This neat little extension scans your library for watched TV shows and movies and moves or deletes them based on things like age, rating, and free space on your disk.
You can further configure how it works in its settings. Be careful with this one; if you aren't, you could delete all your movies yikes! Just head to the "Skin" section of the add-ons manager, and you'll find a nice helping of popular XBMC skins that you can install with one click.
Try a bunch out and find one that you like! On the other hand, if you're feeling ambitious—and have a little extra cash to spend on this project—you'll definitely want to check out our guide to building a silent and standalone XBMC media center on the cheap.
It really is dead silent, tiny, an excellent upgrade path from the classic Xbox architecture. Imagine squishing your classic Xbox down to the size of a paperback book—see the picture above—and upgrading the video output to and you've got the awesome nettop-based XBMC build we put together.
Some people will have it easier than others when it comes to configuring their remotes. Speaking from experience here, once you get your remote configured just the way you want, make sure—extra, extra sure! It's a pain to set up remote configuration files, but if you back it up, you'll only be doing it once.
Configuring the basic remote is a great start and many people won't need to venture beyond the basics, but this would hardly be a comprehensive guide if we didn't cover some of the other neat ways you can interact with your XBMC. After recently upgrading to an Android-based phone, I started experimenting with this Android remote control for XBMC —seen in the screenshot above—which essentially turns my phone into a wireless touchscreen remote that can access any of my XBMCs and browse their music and movie collections.
If you have an Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile phone, you'll want to check out the remote applications available for them. It even supports multiple XBMCs so I can swap music in one part of the house while queuing up a movie in another—amazing! Even if you don't have a phone, you can still enhance your XBMC experience with computer-based remotes. XBMC has a built-in web server with a remote tool and a variety of small applications like XBMC Control —seen in the screenshot above—make it easy to control your music or video playback from your netbook, laptop, or desktop—quite handy for changing the music playing through the living room stereo from your office.
Check out our full guide to enhancing your XBMC experience with remote controls for any device for more information. With each new generation of XBMC, the default skin becomes more beautiful. Even with a great default, there are tons of stunning skins that make exploring alternatives to the default quite worthwhile. We highlighted five awesome ones here , and you can browse even more at the official XBMC site —the video above is of Aeon , one of the more ambitious skins around.
Aside from actually enjoying your media, showcasing it with a beautiful, easy-to-navigate skin is probably the best part of XBMC. Without fail, every visitor who sees my setup asks me how much I paid for it and has trouble believing that something as polished and awesome as XBMC is available for free. There simply isn't a commercial media player that comes close to the "The future is now! I won't point fingers, but having played around with many of the commercial media devices on the market, most of them have interfaces that look like they hail from last century.
Read up on skinning your XBMC install here. If you want to keep on top of the latest skin developments and really see how far designers are pushing XBMC, you'll want to keep an eye on the skinning forum at XBMC.
You'll find sub-forums there for popular skinning projects like Aeon, Confluence, and more. I've logged quite a bit of time over the years reading posts on the XBMC forums; it's a great place to get very specific help on nearly everything related to XBMC from install issues to little tweaks for your favorite skins. If showing off a glossy new skin catches peoples attention, you won't believe how impressed they are that you can do things like display all movies with a certain actress in them, browse by director, or at a glance look over the media information and see immediately if a movie is in HD, what kind of audio channel it uses, and see a summary of the movie or view a trailer.
Earlier this year we put together an extensive guide to getting your media collection in shape for XBMC. While the XBMC media scrapers do an admirable job on their own, there's no substitute for storing information about your media collection with the actual media collection instead of in the XBMC database. Things run faster, restoration after a hard drive crash or an XBMC reinstallation takes minutes—instead of hours, hours, and more hours of rescraping your collection—and you get fine tuned control over your media.
If you've ever had to leave your XBMC running for a 12 hour marathon of movie and music scraping or you've been annoyed at frequent mistakes from scrapers, you should take the time to clean up your media and start storing the media info with the media itself and not within the XBMC database.
It's not as intimidating or as time consuming as it sounds, but you'll definitely want to make a weekend project of it if you've got a huge collection. Just be prepared to continually explain to guests that you didn't pay anything for the awesomeness they are experiencing.
If you use your XBMC to watch downloaded and ripped television shows, you really need a system in place to automate the process before you get buried under unwatched and weirdly named episodes. Check out this guide to fully automating the flow of television shows from the tubes to your XBMC server to learn how to take television shows from torrents to neatly named and filed away without any interaction on your part.
If you've never wrestled with cataloging lots of television shows before, we can't emphasize enough how much time an automated system like this will save you.
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