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).

KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos.

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.

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

Acoustic Reality is a Danish company that sells speakers, amplifiers, storage devices, cables, and other products to build top-shelf home entertainment centers.

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a media center application for Linux, Mac, and Windows that allows you to manage/watch/listen to/view your videos, music, and pictures.

A 20-page downloadable whitepaper compares 10 free media center applications, including Boxee, Elisa, Entertainer, Freevo, MediaPortal, My Media System, MythTV, Neuros OSD, Plex, and XBMC.

I recently got a PlayStation 3 from my wonderful girlfriend, and one of the reasons I wanted one was for its great possibilities of being a media center. I installed MediaTomb on my Linux machine (Gentoo) and after half an hour of configurations, it was ready to stream content to the PS3.

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.