XBMC Turns Your Android Into A User-Friendly Media Hub: Here's How

XBMC for Android has essentially been available since July, but it was only in beta and nightly form, up until now. While it's not an official XBMC app for Android (but rather a third-party initiative), the developers are claiming that this final version is "user friendly" and will run on most, if not all Android devices.

If you found that the beta versions were a bit on the complex side to set up, then you'll definitely want to check out this latest XBMC installment. However, there are still a few steps you'll have to do before you're fully up and running, but it's by far much easier than it used to be. Here's how to set up the new app.

You'll first need to install MX Player on your Android device. It's available in the Google Play store for free, so there's no up-front costs you'll have to make. Once its downloaded and installed, you'll want to launch MX Player and exit it at least once before installing XBMC. We're not sure why this is, but we're told that it's needed in order to continue.

Next, download and install the "XAF Custom Build of XBMC" to your Android device. To do this, you'll want to navigate to this page on your device's web browser and then click on the appropriate download link. There are links for both non-NEON and NEON devices. To see which one your device is, navigate to proc/cpuinfo in Root Explorer or other file browser on your handset. If you're not rooted, you'll need to download Android System Info.

Once all that's done, you can now launch XBMC and get started managing and watching your video files. It's important to note that if you encounter any errors along the way, make sure to enable "Unknown Sources" under Security -> Device Administration in Settings. Again, it might not be as user friendly as you originally thought, but it's really only a matter of installing a couple of apps before you're able to dig in.

[via Android Community Forums]