After getting mbox up and running, it was finally time to put the m in mbox. This is going to be a very short post, because the guys over at XBMC have an excellent tutorial on their Wiki on how to get XBMC running on a minimal Ubuntu install. All I did was follow (a subset of) the steps over here. The walkthrough is pretty extensive, and like me, you might not need or want to follow each and every step, but the basic part to get everything up and running is in there and described in good detail.

The second most important thing for me was to be able to control XBMC remotely with my iPhone. Even before buying the components, I checked whether that’d be possible, otherwise I wouldn’t have been building mbox in the first place. But luckily some guys in Australia, under the name of collect3, have built a really nice iPhone app called XBMC Remote that does exactly what I want.

There were some problems with <record></record> showing up in album names with the latest XBMC release, however this has been fixed in version 1.7.7 of the iPhone app. So, again lucky me, because I don’t have to write all about the work around I used to use to fix that particular problem…

To conclude, I was pretty amazed of the power of both XBMC and the remote iPhone app. It just works! I’m already happily using this setup for over a month now, and I still have nothing really to complain about.