If you’ve got the biggest TV of all your friends, a 7.2 surround sound system that’s causing structural damage to your house, and yet you feel like something is still missing from your setup, then a media center PC might be just the trick. If the only thing you want to do is stream Hitch on Netflix, then you can go ahead and skip this guide, and go check out all the media streamers that will surely meet your needs. We feel obliged to recommend this distribution of Linux to anyone who wants to transform their dusty devices or computers (see above or the official homepage of the project for supported platforms) into a powerful, all-in-one media center. OpenELEC is an acclaimed Linux distribution that does one thing and it does it extremely well. Additionally, XBMC also allows users to manage their favorite TV shows by organizing them into episodes and series, create filters to display or hide certain multimedia content, view entire collections of photos, and much more. It features support for recording live shows (PVR), support for teletext and TV guide when watching live television, automatic download of thumbnails, banners, fanart, and movie information. It allows users to manage their entire multimedia library by categorizing music, photos, TV shows and movies.

XBMC is a well known media center application that turns a standard PC into a flexible and modern Home Theater PC (HTPC) in no time. Being so accessible, users will be able to easily configure various system settings through the XBMC interface.

It is a small, fast and completely free Linux-based operating system built from scratch around the powerful XBMC open source software and engineered to allow users to transform any computer or portable device into a modern media center in less than 15 minutes.įile sharing is supported out-of-the-box, as well as external storage devices. With a full install of approximately 80-125 MB, OpenELEC's hardware requirements are minimal and it can be deployed on Atom, Intel, ION, Fusion, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi ARM, ARCTIC_MC, as well as generic 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.

OpenELEC (Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) is an open source and minimalistic Linux distribution primarily designed to be booted from CompactFlash or other flash-based memory cards or solid-state drives, and used on embedded systems.

Build linux media center pc