Recently I have spent some time on the side helping out the XBMC team. It all started a long time ago when I ported Rhapsody to the XBox. I always wanted to add visualizations to it. I managed to add the publicly available goom viz plugin but was very disappointed with it. I then decided to go another route and look at integrating Rhapsody in XBMC (since it had so many cool features including viz plugins support).

While I knew it would be completely illegal, I still decided to start working on it. My grand plan was to use the new Rhapsody feature: UPnP. So I decided to write my own UPnP library. First called SNDK, then Pluto and now Platinum, it took me more than 3 years to get it to where it is now. A while ago, I decided to integrate it in XBMC. I went on IRC, started talking to some people (Spiff). Next thing I know, I am part of the team! Well I hope I didn’t disappoint. It took some serious thinking/hacking to get UPnP working on the XBox (it doesn’t support Multicast so it’s kinda tough) but it’s working! XBMC rocks with UPnP.

Some new and interesting projects spawned out of XBMC. Plex and Boxee are two projects that inherited from XBMC and the Platinum SDK. Thanks to the Platinum SDK, Plex, Boxee and XBMC can access content from a UPnP Server such as TwonkyVision, TVersity or Windows Media Player. Additionally they can serve media (Audio/Video/Photos) to UPnP clients such as the XBox 360, the PS3, Sonos devices, Windows Media Player and more.