# Is XMBC similar to PlayOn?



## Rob Dawn (Jan 11, 2006)

I've been using PlayOn for a week now and like the ability to play things from my Hulu queue as well as CBS.com & NBC.com on my HD DVRs. But I don't do this often enough to merit the $40 expense.

Reading a bit on http://xbmc.org/ it sounds like maybe this will do the same thing as PlayOn but there isn't much info on XBMC's site.

So I'm hoping someone here already knows the answer for me! 
Will XBMC allow the same playing of Hulu, etc. content on my HD DVRs?

Thanks!!!


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## Fluthy (Feb 9, 2008)

XBMC can stream the movies to your DirecTV box, but the box does the actual decoding of the video. Currently the DirecTV does not have a large number of codecs it will play (MPEG-2 at a low bit rate). I think you would be better off with something like TVersity to stream movies or Hulu ( I think it does that) to your box. The TVersity software will do the trans-coding to the correct DirecTV format. I use to use TVersity which is free for awhile, but didn't like the final results. I now just have a mini computer hooked up to my TV on a different input and use XBMC which works great! Playon is great because it does Hulu, netflix, etc... but as you said it cost $$$. I would be great if DirecTV could improve their media share to support more formats.


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