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XBMC is the successor to Xbox Media Player (XBMP). It is a complete rewrite of XBMP by the same developers, and was publicly announced in October 2003. Like XBMP, XBMC's source code is based on MPlayer, a mature cross-platform, open source media player that is known for playing propietry file formats without having to pay license fees.
XBMC takes full advantage of the Xbox's ethernet port, using the Internet Movie Database to obtain pictures and reviews, and CDDB for CD track listings. It can also play files from a Windows share (including ISO images of DVDs), as well as internet video streams, plus play and record MP3 radio stations.
XBMC supports Python scripts, so users can add functionality without an illegal copy of the XDK. Current scripts include services like TV, cinema and weather guides, scripts to control PVR software and hardware (MythTV, TiVo), radio station browsers, email clients, a game, and even P2P file sharing ( BitTorrent, IRCInternet Relay Chat (IRC is a form of instant communication over the Internet. It is mainly designed for group (one-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels but also allows one-to-one communication. IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen ()
Although XBMC is licensed under the GNU General Public LicenseThe GNU General Public License is a free software license, created by the Free Software Foundation, version 2 was released in 1991. It is also referred to as the GNU GPL or, simply the GPL . The purpose of the GPL is to grant any user the right to copy, m, it is written for use with Microsoft's XDK and so is not legally available as an executable program. Users are encoraged to compile their own binariesAn executable or executable file in computer science, is a file whose contents are meant to be interpreted as a program by a computer. Most often, they contain the binary representation of machine instructions of a specific processor, but can also contain using the XDK and the daily source codeSource code (commonly just source or code is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. In modern programming languages, the source code which constitutes a software program is usually in several text files, but release, rather than downloading illegally released executablesA compiler is a computer program that translates a computer program written in one computer language (called the source language into an equivalent program written in another computer language (called the output or the target language . Introduction and h.