XBMC Mediacenter

I want to use my notebook to show movies and pictures on my TV. This is very covenient when I want to show pictures to many people or watch a movie comfortably from my sofa. Most of my media I have stored on a small NAS which serves the media by DLNA. I found that XBMC fulfills my requirements.


sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock/xbmc-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc


In order to have XBMC running in fullscreen mode in a dual screen setup (notebook + TV) I needed to do some trick:


sudo apt-get install wmctrl

This little script fires up XBMC in fullscreen mode:


#! /bin/bash
# Launch XBMC in windowed mode, then use wmctrl to remove the titlebar


# Start XBMC without blocking this script
xbmc &


# Wait for the XBMC window to appear
status=0
while [ $status -eq 0 ]
do
    sleep 1
 status=`wmctrl -x -l | grep "XBMC Media Center" | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`
done


# Force XBMC window to fullscreen
wmctrl -x -r XBMC Media Center.XBMC Media Center -b toggle,fullscreen