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XBMC “Dharma” – Version 10.0

The UN-Official Beginners Guide

For Windows® …

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Table of Contents Prologue................................................................ ................................................................................................ ............................................................................ 4 Downloading and Installing................................ ................................................................................................................................ ............................................... 6 Downloading XBMC. ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ..................................................... 6 Installing XBMC ................................................................ ................................................................................................ ............................................................. 7 Adding Videos to XBMC ................................................................................................................................ ................................ .................................................. 11 Preparing your movies ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ................................................ 12 Preparing your TV Shows ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ............................................ 13 Adding movies to XBMC................................ ................................................................................................................................ .............................................. 15 Adding TV Shows to XBMC................................ ................................................................................................ .......................................................................... 20 The Library ................................................................ ................................................................................................ ...................................................................... 25 The Movies Library................................ ................................................................................................................................ ...................................................... 26 Library Views................................................................ ................................................................................................ ........................................................... 30 The TV Shows Library ................................................................................................................................ ................................ .................................................. 34 Library Views................................................................ ................................................................................................ ........................................................... 36 Adding Music to XBMC................................ ................................................................................................................................ .................................................... 38 The Music Library................................ ................................................................................................................................ ........................................................ 41 Library Views................................................................ ................................................................................................ ........................................................... 42 Adding Pictures to XBMC ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ................................................ 43 The Weather Screen ................................................................................................................................ ................................ ....................................................... 44 The System Menu ................................................................ ................................................................................................ ........................................................... 45

The Official Beginners Guide for Windows |

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

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| The Official Beginners Guide ide for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Prologue

The Official Beginners Guide for Windows | Prologue

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

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Prologue | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Downloading and Installing In this section we will guide you on how to get XBMC up and running. Where to download it and how to set it up using Windows. We assume you have a working and up to date version of Windows to install XBMC. If you do not have or do not want windows you ou can choose to install XBMC Live. This is a version that can run from a memory stick, or a hard drive. There is no need for windows. More on XBMC Live is available in the Advanced Manual.

Downloading XBMC. First, download a fresh copy of XBMC. You can find fi it here or go to your web browser and type in the following url: http://xbmc.org/download

Here you can click on “Windows” and a download window will pop-up: pop

Select Save as to save the file to a location of your choice. For now, just click on DESKTOP so that we can find it easily after we finished downloading it. When the download has finished, double click on it to start the installation and follow the instructions or read the next chapter.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Installing XBMC After you have finished downloading the XBMC Setup you will need to install it. Simply double click on the file that you downloaded. If you have followed our previous instructions it’s located locate d on your desktop. After opening it you will see the XBMC Installation Welcome screen pop-up: pop

To o start the installation, simply click “Next”

The next screen is the licence Agreement. XBMC is free for everyone and published under nder the GNU General Public Licence. For more information about this licence read the information on the screen. Click “I Agree” to proceed.

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Downloading and Installing | The Official Beginners Guide for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Here you can choose which components to install. Just leave everything as it is. Click “Next” to proceed.

This next screen allows you to change the standard installation folder. We strongly recommend leaving this to the default settings. There are some 3rd party applications that will have problems when XBMC is not found in this standard folder. Again, click “Next” to proceed.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The next screen allows you to change the name of the default folder under your “start” and “All Programs” buttons. Just leave it to XBMC so you know where to look if you want to start it ;-) ; Click on “Install” to start art the installation.

If all goes well the next screen shows you the installation progress. On an average machine an installation should only take a few minutes. Keep in mind that some components will be downloaded from the internet. If you are having trouble rouble or if you get an error message after this screen, you can try installing them manually. The 2 components needed by the installer are the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package and Microsoft DirectX Installer. You can download them from here and here or type the following 2 links in your web browser: http:// http:// If you don’t get any error messages you should be presented with the final screen: 9

Downloading and Installing | The Official Beginners Guide for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Congratulations! XBMC is now installed and ready to be configured! You can mark the ch checkbox so that it will start when you click on “Finish”...

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Adding Videos to XBMC As you know, XBMC is a media center. You have just finished the installation and XBMC is running. You can get a feel for the screens at this stage. Click around a bit and watch wa tch the different screens. Don’t change any options yet though. We will guide you with the options in a later stage. First we need to add our movies to XBMC. After all, that’s why we installed it in the first place didn’t we? You can simply just add different rent folders to your installation and let XBMC get all the movie information from the internet. This will work just fine in the beginning. But over time, you will experience that you delete the movie information stored in XBMC and want to start from scratch scratc h again because you aren’t happy with the information being displayed, or you have re-installed installed windows or are setting it up on a different computer. If you have a large collection of Movies and TV Shows this can be a very time consuming operation. Therefo Therefore we want to prepare you so that in the future, when you add your movies to XBMC again, it will take only a few minutes to add hundreds, even thousands of movies. To properly setup XBMC and have the best and fastest experience it’s best to know a little about the inner workings. We don’t want to bore you to death with how everything works “under the hood” because we still believe that XBMC should work out of the box without hours and hours of configuration. At the moment, it is working out of the box, but often, after our end-users users have used it for a while, they discover there is a whole new world online with tons of add-ons ons and plugins to install adding new functions and tools to XBMC. To prepare you for this it is best to stick to a few standards: A proper pro per folder structure and file naming convention.

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Preparing your movies If you’re reading this, you have already installed XBMC and it is running with the standard settings. Feel free to browse the screens a bit, but don’t change any settings yet. Also don’t don’t be alarmed if you get an error message every now and then. XBMC is looking for movies but is still empty! Before we tell XBMC where are movies are stored let us give you some advice on how to setup your folder structure in windows. There are many advanced anced features in XBMC and in the different skins that rely on a standard folder structure. It can be a lot of work to adapt your entire collection to this new structure, but it is well worth the effort. There are also programs that can help you organise your your movies into a proper folder structure. Lots of users use these programs to download new fan-art art and posters, posters, actor information and trailers. Feel free to give them a try. Some widely used programs are Ember Media Manager or Media Companion. But XBMC ca can do this as well... The folder structure that XBMC works best with is as follows. We have used Toy Story 3 as an example: X:\Home Theater\Movies\Toy Toy Story 3 (2010) (2010)\Toy Story 3 (2010).avi Movies is the main folder. It is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that you store tore each movie in an individual folder! Okay. Here’s the deal: XBMC is looking inside the movie folders and gathers information about it. The information is stored into a file called .nfo. It also looks if there are posters, s, DVD Covers or Fanart available. All this extra information n is stored in files that have a standard filename. filename For example folder.jpg. If you have all your movies in a single folder, there can only be one file named folder.jpg. The folder.jpg file usually is an image or poster of the movie in the folder. But if there are 500 movies in a single folder, then XBMC doesn’t know for what movie that image is. If you have a separate folder for every movie, there can be a folder.jpg in every folder containing a movie. Doing this let’s XBMC scan your folders for movies MUCH faster and you can start using external program to maintain your movie details. There are programs that help you manage your collection of Content of the folder X:\Home Home Theater Theater\Movies\Toy Story 3 movie covers and fanart and will even browse the (2010)\ internet to find movie trailers! Some examples of programs that do this for you are Ember Media Manager and Media Companion. For more information please visit their websites. For more details on the files that XBMC stores in each movie folder please check the advanced manual.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Preparing your TV Shows Just as XBMC stores information in the individual folders of your movies, it also stores information about your TV Shows. The format is basically the same, but there are more files involved.

The folder structure works best as follows: fo Inside your main folder, we called this “Home Theater” in our example we had different subfolders for our movies, TV Shows, etc. Inside the TV Shows folder we have the different shows where each show has its own name. Some users have all the episodes episodes inside that folder, but XBMC prefers them to be split into different seasons as well. This way, you can have different fanarts for every season, adding more eyecandy and wow factor to your setup. Let’s have a closer look at the show “Heroes”.

Inside the he “Heroes” folder you can see several subfolders and a lot of files. This might seem overwhelming but in fact they all make perfect sense. When XBMC scans your movies, it just looks at the title of the movie and starts looking for a cover, a fanart and thee movie information such as the plot and actors. With the TV Shows it works the same, except the shows have multiple episodes which are treated the same way as movies. As you have experienced, importing about 400 movies for the first time can take several hours. What if you have 100 TV Shows? Most TV Shows have several seasons and there are shows with over 200 episodes! This way you can easily have 8000 or even over 10.000 episodes on your hard drives. The first time it will take quite some time to scrape all a that information from the internet. But XBMC helps out again and stores all the information it has gathered inside the folders of the show. So the next time you want to import all your shows, it’s mere minutes instead of hours The folder.jpg, fanart.jpg and tvshow.nfo represent the same as they do with the movies. A cover and a background plus show information. You can see there are also “SEASON01.TBN”, “SEASON-ALL.TBN” ALL.TBN” and “SEASON-SPECIALS.TBN” “ SPECIALS.TBN” These are individual covers per season. So not only has the show a cover, when you browse your show XBMC shows you a new cover for each season. You can also choose to list all episodes in one list. The button that allows that has the picture “SEASON “SEASON-ALL.TBN” and the show extra’s like behind the scenes, deleted scene’s scene’s etc go in the extra’s folder which has the “SEASON “SEASON-SPECIALS” folder. Look at the next image to get an idea of what we’re talking about.

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

(Media Info 2 View) Folder.jpg

This file contains a banner or a poster with the logo and a picture of the show.

Fanart.jpg

This file contains a full screen fanart image of the show.

Tvshow.nfo

This file contains information about the show itself, the duration, airdates, the plot, durations and lots more.

fanart.jpg season-all.tbn season01.tbn season02.tbn season03.tbn season04.tbn season-specials.tbn

(Thumbnail View)

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Adding movies to XBMC When you start XBMC for the first time, you are presented with the Main Menu. The Th screen looks like this:

The Main Menu allows you to choose what what you want to do in XBMC. Listen to music, watch movies or tv shows, look at some pictures and other options as well. First select the “VIDEOS” option to open the VIDEOS submenu.

There it is. As you can see it is still empty. It has a drive letter I: which is the DVD Player in the computer we’ve used, and an option called Video Add-ons. More about these options later. Click on “Add Source” to open the next screen:

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. This has opened the “Add Video Source” menu. As you can see it is empty as well. It says because we are adding a new source that hasn’t been defined yet. Let’s click on “Browse” to add a source and tell XBMC where our movies are stored.

XBMC displays a list of possible sources it has found on your computer. This includes all the drives found on our computer. Hard drives, CD-Rom drives, external USB drives, everything. Select the drive that contains your movies. In this example, our movies are stored on drive “H:” which we have selected. Simply click it with your mouse and then keep browsing until you are inside the folder containing your movies.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. As you can see we have arrived in the folder that contains our movies. Every movie is in each own folder and we have added the year of release behind the title. This will help XBMC in correctly identifying the movies if there are more movies with the same title, or remakes. For example the movie “3:10 to Yuma” which was released in 1957 and had a remake in 2007. Now XBMC knows we have the remake and will find the correct information on the internet. Click on “Ok” to continue…

There we go… We have added our first movie source. In the bottom half of the screen we can give this source a name. We have named in HD movies since the folder we have selected contains all our Hi-Def movies. You can add more than one folder here. Just click on “Add” to add a new entry and then “Browse” again to select the source you want to add. Sources can be scattered over multiple drives, even on different computers. Just tell XBMC where to look and it will find… Click “OK” once more…

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Ok. We now have given XBMC a media source. It knows we have media files in a folder, but what is in there? This screen lets us tell XBMC what kind of files are in the folder we just added. Click on the small arrows and select “(Movies)”. On the right side of the screen we can choose a scraper. By default there is only 1 scraper installed. More on this later. Just leave it as it is. If you want to automatically scan this folder for movies, then click and check it in the lower half of the screen. If you have named your folders like we did in our example, you can also check “Use folder names for lookups”. Normally XBMC will read the filename inside each folder and use that to try and identify your movie. We have named our files identical to our folders so we don’t need it, but if you haven’t changed your filenames and kept the original filenames like ““Saw VI (2009) 1080p avchd dvd9.iso”” then you might want to check this option. It is not necessary because XBMC can still find the correct movie most of the time, just in case… We’re almost there. The last thing we can set are the scraper settings. Click on “Settings” in the lower left corner to change settings of the default scraper. Here we can tune the way XBMC finds information about our movies. Enable Fanart will display a full-screen background image of the movie. You can enable movies trailers and choose the resolution of it, choose the standard language you want the information to be displayed in and lets you also grab the IMDB ratings for the movies. Leave it as it is for now. More details about these options will be in the later chapters… Click “OK” to proceed to the last screen.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. The last thing XBMC wants to know is if you want it to start scanning the folders for new movies. Just click on “Yes” and it will start its scan for movies. If this is the first time you ever did anything like this it might take a LONG time, depending on the size of your collection. If you have worked with XBMC in the past and have all the pictures, artwork and NFO’s stored in your movie folders it will take just a few minutes, even if you have over a thousand movies. You can continue to work with XBMC while it is scanning, so go ahead and click on “Yes”.

There we go, we have finished setting up are movies and are ready to go! Wait for XBMC to finish scanning all the movies. Once the movies are scanned XBMC will have a “Library”. In there here the program stores a list of all the movies it has found, where they are located and which wh images go with it. It finds all this information automatically. The library is the best thing about XBMC. It no longer displays us with a list of movies, but presents you with a stunning graphical interface that will “Wow” you and all your yo friends iends once they see it. Let’s have a look shall we?

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Adding TV Shows to XBMC Adding your TV Shows is also pretty straightforward… It works almost exactly the same was as you add movies, except you tell XBMC that your media source contains TV Shows instead of movies. Here we go again…

Just as we did with the movies, select the “VIDEOS” option from the Main Menu

The VIDEO-FILES screen is where you can choose to add more sources which is what we want to do. Add a new source by clicking on “Add source”

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. This opens up the “Add Video Source” menu again. As you can see it is empty as well. Now let’s tell XBMC where our TV Shows are stored. Click on “Browse” to add the location of our TV Shows to this source.

The “Browse for new share” window opens up again to help you locate your TV Shows. First click on the drive letter that contains your TV Shows and then continue browsing until you are in the folder that contains your shows.

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Once you are inside the folder that has your our TV Shows click on “OK” to confirm that this is the location you want XBMC to scan for your files.

You can also add a second location if you have more than one drive or folder that contains TV Shows. Click on add and follow the same procedure until you have all your locations added.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Here you can see the result. We have added 2 locations for one source. We have named the source TV Shows (DVD Rips) since these 2 locations are rips from the original dvd’s. If you want you can add even more locations for this source, or add a new source with a different name. Personally I like to separate my DVD rips and my TV Rips but that’s personal preference. After adding the 2 locations click on “OK” to continue…

Next thing is selecting the content. We’ve just made a new Media source and now need to tell XBMC what we have stored at these locations. In the top menu you can alter the setting for “THIS DIRECTORY CONTAINS” and set it to (TV shows) On the right there is the Scraper. This scraper does all the work for you. It connects to a website and gets all the information like episode name, airing date but also thumbnails and show information.

As some of you might now, the airing order of a TV show might not always be the same as the order they app appear in on the DVDs that you buy in the stores. These different orders are available on the internet as well and the scraper can set these for you. This is also a reason why you might want to put your DVD rips in a different location than your TV Rips. The TV rips should be sorted by airing date, and the DVD rips by DVD order. Click on “Settings” if you want to change the order to DVD ordering, or click “OK” to start scanning.

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Adding Videos to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. This screen allows you to change the behavior of the scraper. In the previous screen our default scraper was “The TVDB”. It was the only scraper available. You can add more scrapers from the SYSTEM menu and we will show you how to do this later. We mentioned that our media source contained DVD Rips only. To change the ordering of the episodes we have to enable the “USE DVD ORDER” option. The other available options here will be explained at a later stage. Click “OK” to return to the previous screen and then select OK again to confirm the new media source. XBMC acknowledges our new media sources and wants to know if it can start scanning this source for new content. By refreshing the info it will see the data stored in the locations we have set for the media source and download the information from the internet. If you have a large collection you might want to do the laundry or make a huge pot of coffee because this will take a while.

As soon as you click “Yes” XBMC will start scanning the source you have just added and you can monitor its progress in the top right screen.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The Library The Library ibrary is at the heart of XBMC. Once you have told XBMC where to look for your media files and let it do its magic and scrape all the information about the movies, movies shows and clips from the internet, the library is filled with information. There are two main libraries in XBMC; XBMC One for your video and one for your audio. The video library is split into a movie library, a TV Shows library and a Music Videos Library. When you add a new source, XBMC asks you what is inside that source. You select either movies, tv shows or music videos. XBMC does the rest. Once you have added all your movies, TV Shows, Music and Music videos into XBMC you can export the library. This is one of the most powerful tools in XBMC. Remember when we told you that XBMC works w orks with standard files inside each folder? The folder.jpg and the moviename.nfo? When you export the library, XBMC writes all these files automatically to these folders. The next time you import the movie it doesn’t have to download all the information from rom the internet but just reads the files in your folder and adds it to the library. As you can imagine this is MUCH faster than downloading the information from the internet again and again. You can also share a library with different computers in your house. house. That way if you update your library in the livingroom, you don’t have to update it in the bedroom or on any other computer. You can do this by using a program called MySQL. More information on how to do this is in the Advanced User Manual. First, let’s have a closer look on what the library looks like…

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The Library | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The Movies Library In the Main Menu you have a menu option called “VIDEOS”. This brings bring you to the sources you added before and allows you to open and browse them. The content of the sources might not be the same as the content of the library! If XBMC was unable to identify one of your movies it will not be listed liste in the library, so it’s always good to check if all your movies were correctly identified. In the “SETTINGS” menu from the Main Menu we can modify the Main Menu so that it will add the options “MOVIES” and “TV SHOWS”. With those two menu items enabled, we can go to the library directly which most users prefer. More on how to activate those menus later… First, let’s have a look at our libraryy shall we?

In the Main Menu click on “VIDEOS” to open the videos section in the screen below: Here is the main video screen again. Notice how it says: “VIDEO – FILES” in the top left corner? These are breadcrumbs and show you exactly where you are in XBMC, just like navigating a website. If you click on the picture of the little white house, you’ll be transporter directly to the main menu wherever you are. From this screen you can browse through your video files that you added to XBMC earlier. You can play a DVD from your DVD Player, watch online content with the “Video Addons” button or add more video sources. More about all these options later. To browse the movies that we have added to our video-sources video sources just select the name. Click on “HD Movies” Movies”, this is the name that we chose when we added the source, to open the next screen.

The Official Beginners Guide for Windows | The Library

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Nice. As you can see the movies are listed and the front cover of the movie is being displayed as well. Some eye candy to make browsing our movie collection a little more interesting. This is not all though. This isn’t even the library yet. This is just the folder structure as it exists on your hard disk. In fact, the titles that you see aren’t even movies! The titles are the folder names as they exist on your hard disk. To watch a movie you have to open the folder and select the movie file manually. Then the movie will be played.

Let’s change this behavior and enable the Video Library. To do this, click the “LEFT” key on your keyboard or move your mouse to the far left of your screen until a new menu slides in as in the picture on the right. In this new menu that slides in you have to enable the library mode by selecting it. You can see the small blue light being lit when it’s active or grey when it’s not. Notice the “breadcrumbs” again on top? Now it says “VIDEOS – LIBRARY” so you’re still in the videos section but you’re browsing the library instead of the folders on your hard disks. Once you have selected the “LIBRARY MODE” you return to the VIDEOS screen where yo you can choose which library to browse.

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The Library | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. In the video library screen select “Movies” to go to your movie library. Later, there will be more options to choose from, but so far we have only created one. Go ahead, click on “Movies” and watch it open your movie library.

As you can see this screen looks almost identical to your “VideosFiles” screen. The only thing different now is the background and a rating behind the movie title. This background image is called “FANART” and is widely available on the internet. XBMC knows some of these sites and will choose the standard image to display. We’ll explain how to change it later in this manual. This screen is the “LIST” screen. It means the movies are being displayed with the “LIST” layout. The list screen is the one with the least amount of graphics. It merely shows you a list of the movies, a fanart background and the dvd cover from the movie called a “THUMB”.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. To see more information about the movie, we have to open the movie information screen. You can do this by right clicking with your mouse on the movie of your choice and selecting the “MOVIE INFORMATION” button, or click the “I” on your keyboard.

That’s better. Here we have lots of movie details. We can read the movie plot and see lots of other information about the movie. On the bottom menu we can choose “Play” to watch the movie, but we can also click on “Cast” to see who’s starring in the movie, or click on “Trailer” to watch a preview. More about all these options later.

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The Library | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Library Views To change the layout of the screen, click the “LEFT” arrow on your keyboard again, or move your mouse to the far left of the screen to open the options menu. Click once on “VIEW: LIST” to change your layout to THUMBNAIL

The Thumbnail View There it is. The thumbnail view. The list is gone and you are left with all the covers of your movies. If you like this layout just leave it from here. If you want to explore the others views then open your options menu again by moving your mouse to the far left or press the “LEFT” key on your keyboard, and click on “VIEW: THUMBNAIL to change it to “POSTER WRAP” …

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The Poster Wrap View…

The Fanart View…

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The Library | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The Media Info View…

Or the Media Info 2 View. The Official Beginners Guide for Windows | The Library

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. As you can see there are different views to choose from. Just pick the one that you like best best. You can also change small details about each individual view. To do that go to the options screen by clicking “LEFT” on your keyboard or moving your mouse to the far left eft and check and uncheck the different options and just see what happens. You can change the sorting order to “YEAR” for example. That way the latest movies are being displayed first followed by the older ones. XBMC comes with standard screens. They are part of something called a “SKIN”. The skin is a collection of screens that XBMC uses to display all of its options. The standard skin in XBMC is called “CONFLUENCE”. It is a good looking skin, is user-friendly and has lots of options, options so you can fine-tune your personal installation of XBMC. More info about all the options in the advanced section.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The TV Shows Library After setting up the movie library it has become time to do the same for the TV Shows. In the Main Menu go to the VIDEOS button and press “RIGHT”. “ RIGHT”. This will open the videos submenu and allows you to directly go to the TV Shows Library. Use the “UP” and “DOWN” key to go to “TV SHOWS” and press “ENTER”. And look what we have. The crew of Battlestar Galactica staring us in the face… Here you find a list banners that XBMC has downloaded of the TV Shows XBMC has found in the media source you specified earlier. Go ahead and browse to your favorite show and press the “I” key to see what happens next…

The Information screen gives you further her details about the show you have selected. Episode information, airdates and a show description is amongst the information XBMC has downloaded for every show it has found in the media source you specified. You can close this information screen by pressing ing “X” or you can watch the cast of the show and browse the seasons and episodes is has found. The other options will be explained at a later stage.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. After you have pressed “X” from the information screen you are being returned to your TV Show overview. view. Use the “UP” and “DOWN” key again to go to your favorite show and press the “ENTER” key. This opens the show of your choice and gives you an overview of the different seasons it has found. When you press the “DOWN” key you will see that for every season eason XBMC has downloaded a different image, just as if you were browsing through your real DVD Collection. Go ahead and select Season 1 by pressing “ENTER”. If you don’t have this “SEASONS” screen don’t panic. If the show you selected only has 1 season, XBMC will skip the season selection screen automatically. Now you’ve reached the Episode List. As with the different seasons, XBMC has downloaded an image for every episode it has found in your media source. Browse with the “UP” and “DOWN” keys again to select the episode you want to watch and press the “I” key to see a plot description of the episode you selected, as well as the date it aired the first time, the rating it got and tons of other information. If you do not wish to see the information but simply imply want to watch the episode, then press the “ENTER” key on the episode of your choice.

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The Library | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Library Views One of the great things of XBMC is the freedom it gives you in customizing how you want things being presented to you. You don’t have to be a programmer to change the complete look and feel of XBMC. The different library views will do this for you at the click of a button… Go back to the TV Shows Library by pressing “RIGHT” on the “VIDEO” option in the Main Menu. You see the overview again with h the banners of your TV Shows. Now press “LEFT” to open the submenu on the left hand side. Here you can change the view, just like we did in the movie library. Go ahead and select “VIEW: WIDE ICONS” and press “ENTER” Now you have changed the “WIDE ICONS”” view to the “MEDIA INFO” view. This view looks completely different. The banners have been replaced by a text representing the show. But as an extra you now get the number of episodes each show has, and you don’t have to press the “I” key anymore to see more details. You can also see a smaller version of the fanart image that is being displayed in the background. Go ahead and change the view again. This time select the “MEDIA INFO 2” view mode.

In this view mode your banners are back. They replaced the smaller version of the fanart that was being displayed in the background. The list is less long giving you a better view of the fanart image in the background. As an extra bonus this screen also tells you how many episodes out of all episodes have been watched. Choose the view you like the most and select it by pressing the “ENTER” key.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Now here’s the cool thing. You can do this for the individual screens. So you can select “WIDE ICONS” to list your shows but use the “THUMBNAIL VIEW” to list your seasons. XBMC will remember these choices and apply them to all your TV Shows. The view modes for your movies are not affected if you change the view mode in your TV Shows.

And YES. As you might have guessed this also goes for the episodes screen. What you see on the right is the “MEDIA INFO 2” screen. Here you can see a brief description and a snapshot of the episode you have selected. Again, a different view mode from the other two screens. You can change them as much as you want. XBMC will remember ber your last settings and apply this to all your shows automatically. Have you noticed the small white checkmarks after the first five episodes? XBMC keeps track of the episodes that you have watched already! So when you’re watching an episode or two every eve ry evening, XBMC will show you exactly where you left off, the next time you browse the show again. A small but very powerful tool.

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The Library | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Adding Music to XBMC Aside from the obvious ability to play movies and tv shows XBMC is also perfectly capable of p playing music. It comes with build-in in support for almost every format you’ve ever heard of. “normal” mp3 and wav songs, but also the FLAC format which is becoming more and more popular is supported out of the box, as are a multitude of other formats. Let’s tell XBMC where our music is located and see what it does with it shall we? Just like we did with the videos, we’re going to add a media source first. Select the “MUSIC” option from the Main Menu and select “Add source”.

Here we are in the he “Add Music Source screen” To tell XBMC where our music is located we have to click on “BROWSE”. This opens up a browser windows where you can browse to the folder that contains your music collection. Select “Browse” to proceed…

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. Here is the browser window with an overview of our hard disks, CD-Rom Rom or DVD drives and all other sources windows has detected. Browse to the folder that is containing your music collection and select “OK” to continue.

We have entered the source we want XBMC to use to scan our music collection. In the lower half of the screen we can give a name to this media source. We’ve chosen to simply name it MP3. If you have more than one location, you can repeat the steps and click on “Add” followed by “Browse” again in to add more locations for this Media Source. XBMC will combine them all into one big source and scan all entries for music. When you are finished adding locations select “OK” to proceed…

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Adding Music to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows. The locations have been added and it’ss time to tell XBMC to start scanning for our music. Select the media source we have just added and open the context menu to see the options we have at our disposal. Select the “Scan Item To Library” to start this process.

That’s all there is to it. We’ve ve added our music locations to XBMC and currently it is scanning tthese folders for files it can handle and adds them to the library. rary. Go to the next chapter to find out more about TThe Music Library.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The Music Library Just as with the movies and TV shows XBMC also keeps track of our music in a library. It downloads the covers from the albums that you have and displays them for you to easily browse your music collection. No more CD’s that got lost, are misfiled, got damaged or lend to a friend and never returned. XBMC keeps things organized and easy to access. Let have a closer look at the library. From the Main Menu go to the “MUSIC”” option and instead of selecting it press the “RIGHT RIGHT” key to open the music submenu.

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Adding Music to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Library Views

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

Adding Pictures to XBMC

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Adding Pictures to XBMC | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The Weather Screen

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

The System Menu

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The System Menu | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

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“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

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The System Menu | The Official Beginners Guide Gu for Windows

“Dharma” The UN-Official UN Beginners Guide for Windows.

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