Linux has no shortage of audio and video players, but if you want to devote you whole system to multimedia use, you need the Xbox Media Center (XBMC). Although initially designed for the Xbox gaming console, XBMC has been ported to other platforms. The Linux port of XBMC that I use is quite usable, especially for video playback, despite the fact that not all XBMC features have yet been ported.

XBMC began life as the Xbox Media Player with its first open source release in 2002 before growing into an all-in-one media center app in 2004. The developers began porting the media center to Linux only last year. Currently precompiled binaries are available for various Ubuntu releases. If you don't use Ubuntu, you can also compile XBMC from source.

Like a typical media center XBMC can display images and play audio and video content from various internal and external sources. XBMC is skinnable, and the default Project Mayhem III theme is very slick.

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