Installing applications on XBMC Live is actually much easier than you might think. It does require bashing out some code on a shell prompt, but it's relatively easy. You can access the shell via two methods: directly from the XBMC-live machine or remotely via SSH. See below for the details on both methods.

After installing the latest version of XBMC (9.11 repack), I noticed a lot of the small issues I was having with previous builds were fixed in this version. Pretty much everything could be handled via the configuration interface, but I found that I couldn't keep the crossfade option enabled, otherwise I would get a 'failed to initialize audio device' when trying to stream the audio via HDMI and moving from track to track.

I quickly googled the issue and found a recommended solution on an XBMC.org thread, but the blog post they linked to was having a database connection error. I found a google-cached version of the website and figured I would post a copy on my blog as well in case other people are looking for the solution.

If you are having trouble getting XBMC to read the IR commands from your remote from within Windows, I would highly recommend trying IR Server Suite which required little to no setup and got my XBMC setup reading IR signals from my MCE remote in no time.

The remote control (IR system) I purchased was the following:

AVS Gear HA-IR01SV Infrared Certified MCE VISTA Remote Control

I noticed that the traffic coming from search results for 'IR Server' were starting to increase on my other blog post about 'Cheap HTPC with XBMC and IR', so I figured I would add a few more details to this post.

While browsing newegg the other day, I saw a nifty little gadget called a 'nettop' by the name of 'Revo'. A nettop is essentially the desktop version of it's cousin, the netbook. Similar to the netbook, the nettop is designed with lower power consumption, small footprint, and low cost in mind. Surprisingly, the Revo nettop (or Acer Aspire Revo AR-1600 as it's formally known as) makes a decent Home Theater PC (HTPC).