Every major operating system has more than one media center solution for users who can't spend a day without watching a movie or listening to music. In Linux we're all familiar with MythTV and Freevo, two media center applications that are so appreciated they even have got their own distributions. Freevo is highly configurable, and Freevo 2 SNV builds look promising.

Linux has come a long way in support for multimedia and graphics. Today we will see how to transform Ubuntu 8.10 into a media center platform. You can achieve this using various software like MythTV and Boxee, but we're going to use XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center).

MythTV now has a new competitor and that is Boxee. Boxee is a "social media center" that is based upon the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) with versions for Linux, Windows, and MacOS X.

The XBMC project has released version 9.04 of the popular open source media center application. Ars takes the new version for a test ride to see how it compares to Boxee.

Boxee is a new entrant into the increasingly crowded open source media center space. The company's eponymous application is billed as a "social media center" -- melding a smorgasbord of social networking services into an XBMC-based media center designed for the couch-centric user.

XBMC has definetely got reasons to get popular these days.XBMC (Formely Known as Xbox Media Center) is basically a free and open source cross platform media centre to suit all your media needs. It is written in C and using some python. Comes with a large codec support so that you can play all your media files with ease. It outperforms the default media center.

The Ubuntu Media Center project chose Elisa as their core infrastructure to push the free sofware media center effort forward.

XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center) is a free and open source application for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Xbox, that can turn your Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or 8.10 into a veritable media center platform, with video playback, streaming videos, audio, images, playlist playback, slideshows and more.

Lauri Taimila has released his media center "Entertainer" under the GPL, and is calling for Developers. Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution. It uses python, the gstreamer multimedia framework, and the Clutter UI-library, which allows sleek OpenGL animated user interfaces.