Python in the wide world week - day 1, XBMC

In an effort to actually post something here, I have decided to do a series of "X week" posts. Starting off with a "Python in the wide world week", I'll be exploring some interesting places where Python is used in the real world.

XBMC

What is XBMC?

XBMC is a free and open source media player developed by the XBMC foundation. While it was originally created as a media center for the original Xbox gaming console (hence the name XBox Media Center), it is now natively available on Windows, various Linux distributions, Mac OSX, Android, Raspberry Pi, iOS, Apple TV and Apple TV 2 (download link). If that is not enough for you, XMBC also features it's own (Ubuntu based) Linux distribution so you can easily carry XBMC on your USB key/disk if you wish so.

XBMC became so popular that it spawned loads of forks, many of which are now separate products with many users.

I personally use XBMC on my Home Theatre PC (HTPC) for watching movies comfortably, using my Android phone with Yatse as a remote.

Where is Python used?

The core for XBMC is written in C++, but it uses Python for its many wonderful add-ons, which offer everything from scrapping for metadata, managing your torrent downloads, surfing the web, checking the weather, watching YouTube or Twitch.tv, automatically downloading lyrics and (my personal favourite) automatically downloading subtitles.

Believe me, once you get used to quickly and easily getting the subtitles you won't want to go back to surfing the web, downloading the files, extracting them, pulling them to the player ...