I finally got motivated this weekend to load up the old laptop with XMBC, dig out the Apple Remote, and hook everything into our mostly unused television. We now have a proper interface to watch our movies and television shows (legally purchased and format-shifted), without having to dig out the actual disks. I’ve even started boxing up the disks we’ve already re-encoded to save bookshelf space.

The only problem I’ve run into is the configuration of XBMC itself. Much like a lot of open source projects, it assumes you already know how to use it, and that the more features, the better. It took me an hour of futzing about to finally get all my media sources defined in the right places (in the Video section, not in the File Browser, for example), and to get all the folders tagged and imported properly so the Library functions would work. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a cool package – but it could benefit greatly from an improved setup/installation guide.