back to article Open sourcerers port media centre to iOS

Open source media centre front end XBMC will now run on the iOS-based second-generation Apple TV. And the iPad. And the iPhone 4. Installing XBMC on any of these gadgets requires them to be jailbroken, of course - as the XBMC team notes, "you won’t be seeing XBMC in the app store any time soon, since it directly competes with …

COMMENTS

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  1. paul 97
    Thumb Up

    hopes for Android

    I'd love an android port - tegra 2 especially. Bonus points for android as you wont need to jail break.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Almost worth buying an iPad...

    ... almost.

    It wouldn't compete, it would utterly destroy.

    XMBC mauls anything MS or Apple have ever done with regard to media playback into insignificance.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      ...or an Apple TV

      Would be curious to know if the ATV2 is still limited to 720p - also, can it use the USB?

  3. Vitani

    What?

    Buy a cheap one off eBay? They're going for more on there than Amazon charge for a brand new one!!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Superb news!

    Well done!

    Been waiting for XBMC to be developed for iOS on Apple TV2! I can now look at retiring my age old original black XBOX and finally buy and Apple TV, hack it and put proper media centre software on it!!

  5. phuzz Silver badge
    Stop

    XBMC on appleTV

    The trouble with the original apple TV is that it is woefully underpowered as a generalised media PC. Fine for apple's own content, but really struggles to play an avi (for example). That was my experience with the early version of XBMC on apple tv a year or so ago.

    I don't know what the new one's like though.

  6. IanPotter
    Megaphone

    Gah, timing!

    After I'd gone and bought a Zotac Zbox to do the same job. That's at least £60 I could have saved.

  7. JaitcH
    Unhappy

    Enough to make Jobs check out of hospital

    Not only have they hacked their way into his Walled Garden, violating all that is dear to him but they have also breached his Treasury by rendering iTunes unnecessary.

    Even changing screw head formats has been defeated ... and it's still only January.

  8. Gadget Rage is BAD
    FAIL

    iPad why?

    With apps like VLC and Cinexplayer i can already play all my videos on iPad and iPhone without jail breaking anything

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Except

      Just tried 'em.

      It's a bit like comparing chalk and cheese. XBMC far surpasses both. Far easier to use and "just works" out of the box.

      1. noodle heimer

        Does it actually run over the network, not via bonjour?

        If xbmc discards bonjour in favor of actual networking, it would be very interesting. If it's still using bonjour, less so, as it took me several days to sort-of, kind-of get the ipad working at the house - I run a wifi network on a different lan segment from the nas and handing the bonjour traffic off was, at least for me, not working at all.

    2. Colin Guthrie
      FAIL

      VLC.....

      Hand in your Geek Card. You need to jailbreak to get VLC these days. The official App Store model is incompatible with the GPL license of the VLC codebase and it was removed. If you already have it installed, then good for you.

      I just hope that this kind of tablet+TV architecture will help push XBMC into a more MythTV architecture. I use both media systems for the bits they do best, but much prefer the frontend of XBMC, while loving the backend/PVR capabilities of MythTV. For me the ability to install several frontends for MythTV trumps the fact that XBMC is essentially a standalone architecture. So a shared metadata database and video/music/image-source's for accessing it from any XBMC frontend would be an awesome upshoot from these developments :)

  9. Tom Samplonius
    Go

    Re: iPad why?

    @Gadget Rage is BAD: "With apps like VLC and Cinexplayer i can already play all my videos on iPad and iPhone without jail breaking anything"

    VLC has already been removed from the AppStore. It is against Apple, so Apple removed it. You should also remove it from your iPad.

  10. irrelevant

    1080p

    I love XBMC, at least in it's XBOX version - I've got it installed on four of them around the house, indeed, that's all they were bought to run! Would love to have some cheap, quiet, hardware that would allow me to pay 1080p vids, though. (The original Xbox just isn't up to that!) I've a suspicion that anything apple would not fall into the "cheap" category though..

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MythTV

    Does anyone know if you can convert mythtv installations to xbmc? I'm getting a bit fed up with myth and xbmc seems quite nice...

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