XBMC

Certain media players offer more features for audio files while others are more focused on video files. XBMC provides equal amounts of tools for music, videos and images. The program serves as an excellent media center, on Windows, Mac and Linux, regardless if you prefer to spend your time listening to music, playing videos or simply looking at images. Also, its modern and elegant design can make your experience completely different than what you are used to.

You can think of XBMC as a lightweight operating system, designed specifically for managing and playing media files. The full screen mode is displayed in full screen mode and its options are presented as large buttons, to make them easier to spot. Even if you run XBMC for the first time, you won't have to spend too much time looking around, trying to find a particular option. What's more, you may customize the interface and apply different skins.

Music, videos and images can be organized in separate sections of the interface, which can be accessed instantly from the home screen. In all cases, the files can be imported, managed and played in a similar fashion. You can import entire folders from the hard drive, switch between different view modes, like on a Finder window, filter your files and more. Videos and images can be viewed on the entire screen. If you wish to perform other actions while playing a video, you can return all the way to the home screen and keep your video playing in the background. While a media file is playing in the background, the program will display a set of playback controls on the home screen, so you don't have to return to the files to stop or pause them.

Besides media files, XBMC allows you to manage a wide range of plug-ins. You can scroll through a long list of special applications, download them from the Internet and install them. They include mail applications, RSS editors, TV guides, cleaners or backup utilities for your media library and much more. You can also find separate plug-ins for the image, video and music libraries.