@Janthran I am not entirely sure where to start
As others said it was made for the original xbox at first (and kind of still is with XBMC4Xbox although officially it was dropped not so long ago) as a frontend to mplayer (which also gave ffmpeg and libavcodec). Mplayer is probably the main unix video player software and it is one of the best video players out there (pretty much every open source video player uses it at some level) as it plays just about everything, plays everything well and cuts through most instances of people hosing up the encoding so when XBMC gained a nice GUI (and it has an incredibly customisable one) it became an amazing media player. Given DVD players (expensive or random Chinese stuff only) of the time were still experimenting with maybe having some MPEG4 ASP (divx/xvid kind of) if you encoded it in some arcane manner and burned it in an equally obtuse one it happened that XBMC was then head and shoulders above everything available, other than sticking an actual PC onto a TV, to say nothing of it supporting every sensible network protocol; if you have ever had to mess around with media centre extender, some other media frontend nonsense or worse DNLA then know XBMC back in 2005 for me was reading off every network share that mattered and straight SMB windows shares it did not even blink on. Doubly nice is by the end the xbox was less than the price of a game, played DVDs and had a nice remote (although most seem to have moved to controlling XBMC with a phone these days) and still more than competitive as long as you did not want a PVR/DVR.
To this day I have one under a TV and it works well with the only things it chokes on being some aspects of H264 and silly high res xvid stuff (although it can scale up to 720 if you want it to) and it is my go to choice if someone asks me to build them a media player PC for their front room/home cinema.
Speaking of the PC, with XBMC being so nice it eventually forked off/moved to the PC where it gained a windows port, a linux port for a few architectures and a linux liveCD/standalone install among other things and thus became a top flight piece of media centre software there as well (the GUI became even nicer), it also formed the basis for Boxee but that is a different discussion entirely (there was a point where it was a bit more impressive and some moved to it instead). Oh yeah where others have opted for software decoders the XBMC project (although this might be a bit of a departure) has not traditionally shied away from getting their hands dirty and using hardware decoding or seriously optimised decoding.
On top of this it supports a bunch of plugins to do all sorts of things including stuff like the likes of hulu and netflix, these are traditionally something mobile/embedded devices can do but the operators will tend to castrate them and make them less workable than a PC which this kind of works around (not sure how well for the likes of android though).
Basically there were/are other reasons/options but whenever you hear words to the effect of "sure that TV decoding things is nice, but I have had better since the early 2000's" XBMC is probably why that can be said by many people that know their way around a computer. Given mobile phones and similar devices are in a similarly pitiful stage vis a vis video decoding (hardware grunt is not a problem but the software is not there) this is why people are excited about big players like xbmc, mplayer and even VLC making their way to such devices. That it will probably come configured to do it all right out of the box is the proverbial cherry on top.
Believe it or not what just appeared was not even me in fanboy mode.
We have been keeping a little secret.. the kind that is so much fun to share when the time comes.
![[Truth]](/data/avatars/l/37/37733.jpg?1351072321){kind=avatar}
