If you have an extensive amount digital media (music, videos, pictures, etc.) and are looking for a great way to access / ‘deploy’ it throughout your house, a media center is the way to go. There are several packages available (both free and commercial) which accomplish this, but one you might want to give a good look at is XBMC.

XBMC was originally developed for use as an X-Box dashboard, but has since evolved to where it also works on Windows, Linux and Mac computers. Some features of interest include:

• Plays almost every video and audio format out there today
• Features a Music Visualization system for something spectacular to look at while your music is playing
• Stay uptodate with the latest headlines of feed of your choosing with, with the RSS Scroller on your home scree[n]
• Ftp Server and Client

XBMC is open source, so it is completely free to to use. On top of that, it seems to be developed fairly aggressively with updates released often.