A lot of customers ask us why sometimes XBMC doesnt start up, or it just displays a black screen. We ask them how they are turning off their XBMC and android box at night and are usually told that they simply press the red ‘Power’ button on the remote no matter what the box is doing at the time.

XBMC is like a ‘computer within a computer’. It is its own operating system and thus needs to be shutdown correctly after each use. Think of it like using some software on your PC and then pressing the power button whilst the software is still running. Pretty soon your software isnt going to run very smoothly as it hasn’t had chance to tidy away the files it was using before closing down. Please see below our recommendations for keeping XBMC running smoothly.

It is very important that XBMC is exited from in the correct manner. The way to do this is from the XBMC home screen, for the older Confluence skin, navigate down to the small ‘Power’ icon in the bottom left corner of the screen and select it. If using the new Aeon interface, scroll along the menu ribbon to the option ‘SHUTDOWN’ or ‘POWER’ and select quit below) A pop up window saying ‘EXIT’ will appear. Choose this to exit back into the Android home screen. This will shut down XBMC safely.

Exiting out of XBMC in any other way can result in a corrupted configuration. The following are examples of exiting XBMC incorrectly:

Pressing the ‘Home’ button on the remote, whilst in XBMC to take you back to Android homescreen

Pressing the red power button on the remote to switch off the whole box whilst within XBMC.

Removing the power chord from the back of the box whilst in XBMC or whilst in Android (the box must always be powered off using the red power button on remote first, before removing the power chord)

The same can be said for exiting out of android. The red power button on the remote needs to be used to shut the box down, and only once it is on standby can the power chord be removed.