If you have been wondering whats the best software for your HTPC. Right now. there is only one XBMC.
I have been a religious follower of this excellent, open source, FREE software since my Xbox days(4 to 5 years ago). Back then, it was the best dashboard that you could load to the black box(still is), now is the very best HTPC software, media playing powerhouse out there, for miles.
Its supported on every platform(Win,X10,Linux,Xbox) and today they just release their first stable version (Atlantis).
What it can do? maybe, what it cant do?
It can play every type of file you can imagine, even compressed ISOs of some dvd that you may have laying around in your hard drive. It has a killer UI, lots of eye candy, intuitive navigation, skinning support, scrapper support, it has a incredible helpful community, etc
If you want to load it up for your xbox, you can go ahead and download the release from this guys.
http://t3ch.yi.se/
You wont find xbox compilable files in the XBMC page(for legal reasons) and also this release a little more pimp out.
Also a good tip, is to get some good 1080p wallpapers. For the majority of skins you can choose a folder in each category to setup your images, this will make them change every time you change a category. It will even make it a look better than it looks originally. You can get a good pack of 1080p images(backdrops) in here
So instead of showing you some random screenshots, I am going to show you a couple pictures of my rig running XBMC, Its just amazing how XBMC looks in its all 1080p glory (Picture quality maybe bad, the camera guys is not very good 
).
Hopefully with this, you go ahead and delete the old software you have been using and get XBMC
It looks amazing!
What HTPC have you installed XBMC in? Im looking for a good one (i preffer linux in It)
Thank you
Mi htpc will be the computer that you see in the left side.
I build it as a mid-high end gaming pc, but its also used as HTPC.
This are the components
Asus Maximus Formula
Q6600 G0
NVidia 9800 gx2 SSC
4gb Corsair Dominator 8500 5-5-5-15
ZeroTherm Nirvana
Anten 8500 Quatro True Power
LightScribe DVD BURNER
5x Noctua 012
1x Raptor 150, 4x 500 gbs WD
THis is the actual build thread of the PC(In Spanish), if you want to check it out.
http://www.antiscreeners.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4417&start=0
Pix
I’ve been using XBMC for a while now too, but I have had a problem with it. I have a very very similar computer build as you and the problem I’m having is that when I play high def movies through XBMC it is sometimes choppy. I had to switch over to WMP with coreAVC codecs to get it to play back smooth. Do you have any idea what the problem is? My cpu usage isn’t even close to maxing out so that shouldn’t be why it’s chopping out. Thanks for any help.
If you have a similar CPU as mine. Then I guess you have set on the video settings some kind of video interlaced and its killing the CPU when playing MKV. Have you try playing around with your video settings?.