Those of us that enjoy movies, TV shows etc like to be have access to all these things in one place. If you have a Windows Media Centre running PC anywhere near your TV, you know what I’m talking about. Not a lot of people – in my experience – follow Microsoft’s path and instead go with the community effort of XBMC Media Centre which, is my own personal choice. The media centre that started life on the original XBOX that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux is now coming to your favourite platform of all, Android.
That’s right, Android now has XBMC. Well, sort of, it’s not available as a finished product just set but, with the project being open source, entrepreneurial types have compiled APKs for you to install on your devices, meaning you can enjoy the preview builds. These builds aren’t by any means complete and can be a little janky at times, you know how it is. They are however quite stable and all the functionality you’ve come to love from the Desktop version has made a clean transition and works a lot better on tablets than anything else, for obvious reasons however, there are those that have got it working on the Galaxy Nexus. If you’d like to try out, take a look at this thread on XDA.
Of course, being able to run XBMC on your tablet or your phone is nice and all but, what you really want to do is get it up on that TV, right? There are a couple of ways this is going to happen. Firstly, there are builds of it running on the Nexus Q but, this is a little tricky to get and you have to already have CM9 on the Q for it to even load. The idea of XBMC coming to the Google TV on the other hand, makes a lot more sense and quite frankly I’d be surprised if we didn’t see a build for the TV version of Android before long. It’s going to make that Logitech Revue all five of you bought really worthwhile and would also make Vizio’s CoStar for $99 look like a great buy. There’s no word on when this is coming but, I wouldn’t think it took long before XBMC makes the jump to the Google TV.
For now though, you can only really taste XBMC on a tablet to get an idea of how it feels on Android, the touch skins aren’t perfect but they work okay and if you’ve got a tonne of movies on that 32GB Transformer then this is a great app for you. Don’t hesitate to try it out and as always, we’ll be bringing you the latest as the project progresses.