While I love my Asus Nexus 7 from Google, it has limitations as an all you can eat media device. I quickly hit a wall, particularly when trying to view HD footage. In same cases, the video would play with no audio. In other cases, the media file would refuse to stream from my server and want to copy itself to a local directory. In most cases, even once copied across (if space would allow) the movie, music video or television show would not play. I was happy to live with these limitations, even on my rooted device. Several months back I downloaded the Drippler app. I thought this would give me additional hints and tips on getting the most out of my first ever tablet. An article appeared explaining how to enable the Nexus to play every format of media. I read up on the article, which took me to a webpage via Chrome. The answer was my beloved XBMC. I knew it had been ported over to Android but was unsure of how well developed it was on the platform. I was about to find out, while not available in the official Play market, I was able to download directly and install on my rooted device. Within a moment or two, I had it linked to my server locations and it was scrapping the internet to pick up all the information on my movies, television shows and music videos.

While I am committed to building a media centre with XBMC as the operating system on top, that is many years away. I am happy to have XBMC back in my life, even if in this limited form on my tablet. Sure, there are some bugs and teething problems you would expect. The most promising development that XBMC has arrived on Android with a bang and development continues on various fronts.

While some people may wonder what the point of having media centre software on a seven inch tablet, it is great to now have a single media source, rather than multiple applications with various degrees of usability. I hope XBMC lands on Google Play soon.