The Broadcom Crystal HD cards (BCM70012 and BCM70015) bring 1080p HD video decoding capability to low powered media centers and netbooks. Software decoding HD video strains the CPU and many cases causes stutters and skips during video playback. In this post, I will explain how to install Broadcom Crystal HD … read more
XBMC is an awesome media center application. I have previously written several posts on it. With all the customizations that I have been doing with my XBMC setup, it became more important than ever to backup my XBMC configuration files. But I wanted a simple and automatic solution. I could … read more
After a while of accumulating videos my “xbmc” folder grew several folds in size. If you search around, you will find that several people report this problem. The culprit here is the Thumbnails folder or cache that keeps accumulating thumbnails, most of which become obsolete or useless over the course … read more
Few days back, I published a post describing how to configure the Chinavision MCE USB remote to work with XBMC and Logitech Harmony Remote. I did further research and reading after this and ended up improving my setup. Since XBMC Dharma, the “keymap.xml” file no longer exists. It now called … read more
I have described how I setup my Ubuntu-XBMC based HTPC in several of my previous posts: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/?p=252 https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/?p=279 https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/?p=285 I bought the Wireless USB PC Remote Control Mouse for PC as a cheap IR remote / receiver to control my HTPC. It sells for about $7 on Amazon. This USB … read more
XBMC is a great media player, very well suited for HPTCs. There are several XBMC addons that stream videos from the internet. In this post, I am doing to describe how to play Amazon Prime Videos on XBMC (both free and rented videos), running on a Ubuntu system. With the … read more
In the previous post, I explained my audio problem with Turtle Beach USB Sound Card and XBMC. I read several posts mentioned in the previous post and did a lot of “trial and error” work. I learned that at this point pulseaudio cannot passthrough HD audio. However, I did manage … read more
In previous posts, I provided an overview of the process and the i explained how I installed CrystalHD drivers. In this part, I will describe how I compiled and installed XBMC from source with CrystalHD support. If you have not already installed all the dependencies, then check my previous post … read more
In a previous post, I provided an overview of the whole process that I went through. In this part, I am going to describe the procedure I used to install Crystal HD drivers. Before you even begin the process, you will have to install a bunch of files that are … read more