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Recently on friend of mine asked me to help him install plugins to his Linux XBMC HTPC. I don’t have a big experience with that software (I use LinuxMCE on my HTPC). But I thought it shouldn’t be difficult. I was right. The plugin installation procedure is simple. But it needs some preparation steps which aren’t explained clearly and they are not in one place. So, have a look my brief how-to. To help unexperienced users perform that task easier I add a few scree-shots there.

By default (at least in Linux version) the menu ‘Program’ which is used to install plugins, scripts and themes, is hide from the main page. To make it visible go to Settings –> Skin Settings and tick option ‘Show programs in main menu’:


The XBMC plugins can be installed by two ways – by specifying a path to the plugin’s source or using SVN Repo Installer. Just download it and unzip into plugin’s directory ~/.xbmc/plugins/program:
CD ~/.xbmc/plugins/program
wget http://xbmc-addons.googlecode.com/svn/packages/plugins/programs/SVN_Repo_Installer.zip
unzip SVN_Repo_Installer.zip
rm SVN_Repo_Installer.zip
Note! If you don’t have wget or unzip in your system you can install them using apt-get as well as any other program or utility such rar:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wget
After that go to the Program menu. You should see two items there – ‘Program plugins’ and ‘Add source’. ‘Add source’ is used if you have source code of the plugin.

We’re interested to see ‘Program plugins’. There is an only one item – ‘SVN Repo Installer’ which contains a few options:

To install some plugin press xbmc-addons. It’ll show you the plugin’s categories

Let’s install some video plugin:

Here you may see all official video plugins. Choose desire one (Revision3, for example) and the installation procedure will start:

Finally you should see the message about result of installation:

After that the Revision3 should be available in the Video –> Video plugins. The same way desire audio, picture, program plugins can be installed on your XBMC system.