I want to hack XBMC. Where do I start?

[brian]

Hey, I want to learn to hack and modify XBMC. In particular, I’d like to hack Rocky5’s XBMC4Gamers to skip the login screen and automatically log me in, but I’d like to learn enough General XBMC development/hacking to be able to do that, understanding how it works and what I’m doing. I figure that the first step is to learn Python, and given how much I like braces in my code I probably should start that first.

However, learning Python alone is not just that easy — do I need to know Python2 to work on XBMC? If not, should I learn Python2? And I’d imagine I should learn Python3 either way. And then, how does it work with XBMC? Does it run some scripts on boot or something? Do they generate menus? (I guess they must, but how does that work?)

Thanks!
Brian

[Dan Dar3]

Hey Brian,

That is a brillitan idea. XBMC4Xbox is C++ interanlly, an XML framework for UI and Python for coding extensions.

See a lot of useful links to start with here:
https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/wiki/Development_Notes

as well as the Development tab up here in the forums.