Sling Media has given public demonstrations of its SlingCatcher product at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The SlingCatcher is a Set-Top Box that seamlessly delivers broadcast TV, Internet-based content and personal media to the TV, capable of pulling content from multiple sources and places while providing easy navigation and playback.
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I wanted a way to take the oodles of music,video, and pictures on my aptly named "Media Drive" and play it view/listen to it on my tv/stereo. So I did my research there are 2 well known commercial products that do this; the above mentioned SlingCatcher and the yet to be released DivX GeijBox. Both were estimated to be at least $200 retail which is far more than what I planned to spend. So after some more research I decided to go with Xbox Media Center or XBMC for short. I bought a used xbox from GameStop ($60 w/ 1 year warranty), and $40 for a used GameShark and SplinterCell game needed to softmod the Xbox. A hundred dollars and a half hour later I was streaming all types of video to my new Xbox Media Center. All for about 1/2 ($100) of what other products cost. Heres a feature set...
Quote:XBMC can be used to play/view the most popular video/audio/picture formats, and most other multimedia formats (including many more less known formats).
Which can all be played directly from a CD/DVD in the XBox DVD-ROM drive or from the XBox's built-in hard-drive, XBMC can also play multimedia from a computer over a local-network and media-streams directly from the internet.
XBMC can play DVD-Video movies (with and without menus) from ISO/IMG images and even ZIP/RAR-archives.
XBMC has playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations.
XBMC can in addition run python-scripts written for XBMC as plugin widgets.
XBMC has a simple and user-friendly user-interface, it's easy to use, it's convenient, flexible and offers a great price/performance ratio.
