XBMC Initial Setup

Thanks to Euicho, I downloaded and installed XBMC (version 10.0) to try out for a flashier movie and tv experience, since my normal mode of operation has been to just use Media Player Classic (Windows only) and uTorrent (no automated downloads, little use of RSS).

My first concern before even downloading what organizing the video files to what XBMC expects. For movies, I just put them all in a directory called Movies. For TV, I created a directory called TV Shows with subdirectories with the TV show name and possibly sub-subdirectories for each season. Otherwise, the files themselves, if from torrents, usually have the expected format. I added in both these directories as sources with Videos -> Add source.

My initial reaction was unimpressed. I did see the show information was being retrieved, but it didn't appear that the posters and images were. Eventually (after finally loading), I realized image loading was incredibly slow, as was updates on the weather page.

After reading forums, I found a couple solutions.

One was to create advancedsettings.xml in the AppData/XBMC/userdata directory with:

<advancedsettings>

<sleepbeforeflip>0.85</sleepbeforeflip>

</advancedsettings>

The second was to use: Settings -> System -> Video output -> Use a full screen window rather than true full screen. Both allowed the image and weather loading to be bearable.

I continued to strive toward getting a setup that looked like the screenshots I saw for XBMC, using the default skin Confluence. I went to Settings -> Skin -> Home window options, and hid all options except Movies, TV shows, and weather. Under the now visible Movies menu, I set the view as FanArt using the hidden menu that pops out from the left side. For TV shows, I set both the show name and episode list screens as the Media Info view, and Media Info 2 view for the season list screen.

Here are the results:

Now I can only hope to someday have a dedicated media Linux box using uTorrent and XBMC.