This new skin was released for XBMC a couple days ago. MediaStream by Team Razorfish is a community effort that has been going on since October 2007. It’s is a very polished piece of work as you can see in the video and need nearly no configuration and tinkering to get it working right.

This skin has replaced my other favorite Aeon for now. One other skin that I am looking forward to is the new default Plex skin. The Plex team has teamed up with the CenterStage team to bring a default skin for Plex in the coming weeks. Judging by the preliminary demos and screenshots, it is going to be a cracker.

To watch it in HD, just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might have heard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.

Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.

I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.

Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.

There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.

The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)

The wonderful music blog mecca The Hype Machine has released their 2007 Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist comes in three sections: The Best 50 Songs, The Best 50 Albums and The Best 50 Bands. It was compiled by extensive analysis of the data they collected from music blogs around the internet throughout 2007.

If you are into Indie, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Link

Awdio brings the music playing in many of the respected clubs, venues, festivals, etc. from around the world to your browser. Since there is always some kind of clubbing going on around the world at any given point in time, there is always something cool to listen to on Awdio. Montreal’s Stereo is rocking as I write this.

This is a very cool idea. I hope they stick around..

www.awdio.co.uk

Check this out:

sleeveface: one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.

www.sleeveface.com

There is also a fantastic Flickr pool that has over 750 awesome photos.

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

We will be paying artists directly.

Read the rest here.

Click on the picture for a bigger version to get those saliva glands kickin into overdrive.