The Three Best Linux Media Centers

"MythTV itself might qualify in this category. However, I find Myth makes a good OS (mythbuntu) and PVR (with a great web interface), but I think it is fairly awful at organizing your media and playing web vids. So, I leave it out of the media center category. I personally run a Mythbuntu system with the following three media centers installed on top of MythTV to organize my local media and watch web content.

"This media center was designed for the original XBox hardware. However, it has since been ported to Linux, Apple and Windows (and other game systems). It has an extremely beautiful interface. XBMC indexes the music and videos on your hard drive or networked drives and plays them back with a lot of elegance. It is easy to configure your remote control and video playback utilizes VDPAU on nvidia cards. So, you get amazing performance during playback (HD video uses less than 10% of your CPU)."

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