If you're reading this article I'm sure you already know that the XBMC team already makes an official remote for Android, but for me I wanted a way to leverage widgets so that I wouldn't have to open an app every time I wanted to do something simple like pause whatever is playing in XBMC. After some searching around that's when I came across the free Yatse Widget XBMC Remote.

We had mentioned awhile back when we wrote all of our XBMC guides that one of our favorite skins was the Aeon MQ 3 because of its sleek appearance and customizability. I'm happy to announce that the developer of the skin released the first stable version (and first public version) of Aeon MQ 4 over the weekend, and like prior versions it won't disappoint.

One of the best things about using XBMC as my chosen media center software is the community behind it that develops plugins and software to make it easier to integrate throughout my household.

In the Windows 8 Microsoft is making sure users see the Metro interface first thing when the OS boots up. Even if you drag an application like XBMC into the Startup folder it won't work exactly as you expect. Doing that will cause XBMC to start with Windows 8, but it will be running in the Desktop portion of the OS.

When we wrote up all of our previous XBMC guides we also covered an excellent iOS app that could be used to control all of the XBMC instances running in your house. While the app, XBMC Commander, is very polished and well worth the $4 in my opinion there will always be users looking for free alternatives.

So after weeks of XBMC-focused posts we are wrapping it all up with a summary of all the guides we wrote, along with some helpful posts from the official wiki and forums pages.

People have a hard time believing that since I own both an iPhone and an iPad that I decided to build a few home theater PCs (HTPCs) with XBMC rather than getting a few Apple TVs. I was looking for customizability and versatility, which is something the Apple TV doesn't provide.

XBMC has a built-in web interface that you can use to control media playback on any of your XBMC instances. The nice thing about the web interface is that it lets you quickly navigate your media library to see what you have available.

The XBMC developers added AirPlay support in version 11, and this is one of the features that really drew me to the software. One of the very reasons I contemplated getting the Apple TV was because of the streamlined AirPlay support, but with the addition of AirPlay support to XBMC 11 I thought that it would also fit my needs.

A lot of people assume that using an application like XBMC means that you are pirating all of the material you are going to watch, but there are plenty of legal video streaming solutions available as well. There are a bunch of developers that have put together plugins so that a lot of online video streaming sites can be accessed directly through add-ons in XBMC.

While XBMC is a versatile piece of software there are always a lot of things that advanced users wish they could configure, but the developers can't possible cram it all into the XBMC interface. That's where the advancedsettings.xml file comes into play.

Now that you have XBMC set up and configured it's probably good to run through a test to see how well your system performs. I've been able to run through a 1080p flawlessly when I followed all of the buffering recommendations we covered yesterday. Not all videos are created equally though, and as a result you may find that some 1080p videos work fine for you while others don't.

Almost all of the videos that I watch on XBMC are streaming over the network from a central computer. While the idea sounds great that means that my home network becomes yet another component that can lead to performance issues in XBMC. I'm going to share my experiences so that you can get your system working smoothly with as little effort as possible.

In XBMC one of the things that is probably the most important is to get the software hooked up to your personal media. This includes media from all of your various collections like videos, pictures, and music.

When setting up my XBMC instances, I wanted to have a central machine in my house serve up all my media, and for that I chose to use my Mac OS X Lion machine. Since my XBMC machines are being powered by Windows 7 I ran into a bit of a predicament. In Mac OS X Lion, Apple started using the SMB2 protocol that Microsoft introduced in Vista back in 2006.

We've already shown you how to change the background images used by the various menu entries on the home screen, but the Weather menu can be tweaked even more if you're using the Aeon MQ 3 theme. There is a nifty feature buried in the skin settings that lets you use dynamic weather backgrounds that change based on the current time of day and local weather conditions.

Yesterday we covered how to install new skins in XBMC, and today we are going to show you how you can customize the backgrounds skins use for each of the entries on the main home screen menu. When I hover over the movies menu, for example, mine will rotate through over a dozen photos that I downloaded of my favorite movies.

When you first get rolling with XBMC out-of-the-box, you may not be overly enthusiastic about the appearance. By default XBMC 11 ships with the Confluence skin that, while it looks clean, can easily be replaced by one of the other user-made skins. The most impressive one that I found is the Aeon MQ 3 skin which sports a very modern look that is sure to impress anyone that sets eyes on it.

One of the problems you may encounter when setting up your XBMC on your TV is that it doesn't fill the entire screen or portions of the picture are flowing off the screen. If that ends up being the case, there is an easy way to correct the problem either using the software for your video card or settings in XBMC.

If you are using multiple instances of XBMC throughout your house one thing you'll definitely want to consider is setting up a shared MySQL database that can be used to retain data about the media you have. A good example of this is saving the status of where you left off in a video.