Naming Filter: Hive mind, please help us name our open source OS X media center application!
I have been impressed by the hive mind's creativity when it comes to naming things, most recently the
Lawyer Golf Team.
Sorry for the long explanation that follows, however, I think coming up with the best name is going to require a little bit of context.
I'm currently working on an open source project (free as in beer and speech) that is a recent fork of the well known and highly regarded
XBMC project. In fact, I shamelessly plugged it
here in an ask.mefi answer earlier. As many of you may know XBMC originally was called XBox Media Center. It was an app that could be run on a hacked XBox that allowed you to play media on your XBox (divx, h.264, mp3s, etc) pulling the media either from local disks or across the network using windows shares, ftp, etc. What made it a media center, rather than just a media player (like the excellent VLC and Mplayer) the application also has a great skinnable navigation and metadata system. XBMC will scan your media library (which in most cases would be located on a computer somewhere else in the house) automatically guess what piece of media the particular file was, and download and associate the appropriate meta-data. This would allow you to look for movies or songs based on Genre, Year, etc, all while flipping through the DVD's or CD's cover art. The interface is also optimized for use with a remote control, to make it easier to use from the couch than say QuickTime. It's easier seen than explained, here is
YT video of it in action running the xTV skin (a skin inspired by Apple Tv).
A little over a year ago the core XBMC.org team decided to start porting what many consider to be the best media center application ever written, to other platforms starting with Linux. They have made great progress and they have already have a highly usable application for Linux. About 6 months ago myself and a few others decided to embark on an OS X port of the application, based on some amazing progress that the head of the new OS X port had made in just a few weeks. There was already quite a bit of pent up demand, as many thought the Mac Mini was an ideal HTPC (Home Theater PC) platform, again discussed
here. We started out as a part of the larger XBMC team until very
recently, both teams decided that we had enough philosophical differences that it made sense to amicably split up. Up until the project had been called XBMC on OSX and/or OSXBMC. We have currently been using the OSXBMC name as a place holder until we come up with a better name. There are a few reasons for wanting a name change, the big ones are :
- Having XBMC in the name does not differentiate us enough from the original XBMC.org project (the original XBMC guys have politely asked us to make our name a little more distinct) and it perhaps it makes it seem like an XBox is required to use the application.
- Something a little less "acronymy" would be nice, more in the tradition of Mac apps.
- It's possible that someday we will release versions of our (keeping in mind that at this point "our" software is 98% composed of XBMC's code) on platforms other than OS X, so we would like to get away from having the platform in the name.
The project's home page is
http://www.osxbmc.com if anyone could possibly want or need any more information.
Thanks very much!
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posted by trondant at 5:58 AM on June 3, 2008