Could anyone please educate me on the benefits of XBMC compared to other video apps ? I have read the Wikipedia description but still wondering how is it better than using the apps like MXPlayer to stream videos from your network ? MXPlayer has also got options of H/W and S/W decoding. Considering these HDMI sticks have no H/W decoding, how installing the XBMC can provide a better experience ?
XBMC on Android HDMI mini-PC stick
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XBMC is the alternative to Windows Media Centre, the main advantage is that it's open source which means that it packs way more features and it has projects spanning across different systems like Android, Linux, Windows and game consoles.
Also has plug-in's for iView (and the other channels)
XBMC is also on the cusp of full PVR functionality; i.e. watch and/or record live TV if you have a tuner card in your PC or control another PC with a PVR backend.
The only downside I know of with the Android version of XBMC would be that AFAIK it can't handle .iso image files, which I thought was an Android system limitation, although I did see something the other day about another Android app that can read iso files (can't remember what it was). In any case this won't stop you doing much as you can rip your DVDs to a folder and play them that way.
MXPlayer looks like it is just a media player. XBMC is not.
XMBC features:
XBMC is not for playing random files, it is for using instead of a PVR/PS3/Whatever.