With my Xbox Media Center (XBMC) installed, I booted it up for the first time. First impression: “Wow, this boots up quickly”. It’s only takes 10 seconds from when I click the power button to the Home screen. That’s faster than my Tivo (version 1)!

Navigating around the menus with my Xbox DVD remote from my couch, it became quickly apparently that this is a really polished distribution. The default skin looks great, and the animations between menus are slick. You can even reskin the menus to look like Window Media Center or AppleTV.

From the “Video” area, I was blown-away by how many “sources” of video you can add.

Out-of-the-box, you can watch videos from the Xbox DVD or hard-drive, an FTP, or a SMB/Windows share. There are also some other weird options like ReplayTV, TuxBox Client, UPnP Media Servers and XBMSP Network Servers (an open protocol that boast a long list of clients or almost any O/S). To give you a sense of how polished this menu is, you can browse the machines on your network to look for SMB/Windows shares. You never have to type something in like \\192.168.168.2\YOURSHARE. You also never have to open up a config file on the Xbox via FTP. Almost everything can be configured via the GUI.

Using a SMB share, I set the default video location to a be my Movies directory on my Mac, the default audio location to be my Music directory, and the default pictures location to be my Pictures directory. I can now browse all my downloaded videos, iTunes music, and iPhoto photos right on my TV (assumed my MacBook is powered-on ;)).

XBMC can play almost anything. It appears to be using the MPlayer media player (my favourite player for Linux or Mac) so it can play Divx, Xvid, MOV, Mpeg, DVD rips, practically anything you can download! And it can stream all those videos right off your network shares i.e. you don’t need a big hard-drive in your Xbox. When I click on a video, it buffers and starts playing within 5-8 seconds.

Another nice thing about MPlayer that I’ve used in the past: it has no problem starting to play an incomplete video file. If you’re in the middle of downloading a video (linearly, not via Bittorrent), you can start playing in XBMC before it’s even complete. A nice feature if you’ve got decent download speeds and you can’t wait to start watching a video.

I have a Sharp Aquos 32″ HD LCD TV, and something that has plagued DVD-players and PVRs that I’ve attached is their inability to deal with the 16:9 aspect ratio. I usually have to resort to a combination of using the Zoom feature on the TV, and fiddling with the ratio on the device to make sure I see as much picture as I can. I hate a 4:3 image stretched to fill the screen (everyone looks fat), but I also dislike when I get a weird film aspect ratio that can fit more than a 4:3, but can’t fit 16:9.

XBMC does the best job of resizing video aspect ratios to fit my 16:9 screen than I have ever seen. From the first time I booted it up attached via component video, it has recognized my screen size dimensions and pushed out 1080i to match my LCD. There is a great settings menu where I can even adjust the overdraw of the image so I can make sure nothing is being cut off. Every video I play is always resized to the correct dimensions of the screen without being stretched. If you are watching a video with black bars encoded into the file (which is really stupid, but happens from time-to-time with a rookie encoder), it can even automatically cut-off the black bars for you and hit the maximum dimensions of your screen. I’ve never seen a DVD player that can do that

As for audio, I connect the XBMC to my 5.1 channel receiver with digital audio cables. It’s pumping out AC3/DTS 5.1 when appropriate. When I watch an Xvid encoded with 5.1 surround sound, I can hear the correct back channels. SHOUTcast internet radio is built right in. And check out some of the visualizations with translucent track-info overlay (with album art if you have it):

I won’t go through every feature of XBMC, but essentially, it really is a media center powerhouse. I’ve heard people say that it’s everything the AppleTV should be, and after trying it out, I have to agree. With an expanded hard-drive it easily matches the features of AppleTV if you’re downloading your own videos, and it does so without breaking a sweat. There’s no need to reencode the videos you download (and let’s be honest, with the iTunes library being so small, you’re probably downloading Xvid/Divx) before playing them on XMBC, like you have to with AppleTV.

The AppleTV mod community is hard-at-work hacking that box as well and I have no doubt that they will more than match XBMC very soon. With built in wifi, a beautiful form-factor, and updated hardware, I think the AppleTV mod community is going to blow-away everyone with what they can do. However, for now, the Xbox Media Center has won the coveted space in my media set-up next to my PVR. Only a convergence heavy-hitter (DVD + downloaded content + PVR) can knock it off its post. Maybe it’s time to give Mythtv another look