Official XBMC Software

The following is a list of all the software XBMC offers. If you have downloaded software not on this list or from a site not specified on this list, then that software has not been offered by Team XBMC or the XBMC Foundation, and we can provide no official support for the use of that software.

XBMC

The only official versions of XBMC may be found in our XBMC Downloads area. Official versions of XBMC will exclusively be hosted at mirrors.xbmc.org, with the exception of certain specific Linux distributions.

XBMC – Development

On occasion, XBMC developers may also create experimental versions of XBMC. If those experimental versions are not listed on this page or submitted by XBMC Team Members in the forum, then they have not been provided by Team XBMC.

-XBMC for Android – Now with experimental hardware decoding for the internal player. For more info, click the link.

XBMC Remote Controls

XBMC Remote Control for Android

An open source, full-featured remote for XBMC. It features library browsing, direct remote control and a slick interface.

Download here

XBMC Remote Control for iOS

Official XBMC Remote is a full-featured remote control for XBMC Media Center.

It features library browsing, now playing informations and a direct remote control.

Download here

A Note on Hardware

Team XBMC does not sell hardware, either on eBay or anywhere else. With that said, several organizations do sell hardware with XBMC in mind, including two of our sponsors, Pivos and Ouya. Team XBMC and the XBMC Foundation does not promote the use of one piece of hardware over any other.

A Note on Development and other XBMC-related News

The only place to receive official news from Team XBMC and the XBMC Foundation regarding XBMC development is via XBMC.org. There are numerous great fan-created and even team member-created sites out there that also focus on providing XBMC-related content and info. These other sites should be considered unofficial and do not represent Team XBMC. If you are uncertain as to whether a piece of news is official, don’t hesitate to email Contact AT xbmc.org.

Update: There was a packaging issue with the Beta1 Windows build that caused some scrapers to not install correctly. This has since been resolved, any Windows Beta1 users should grab the repack available at the download page.

It’s been a mere eight months since Team XBMC released XBMC 11.  If you’ve been following along with us in that time, you already know about most of the new features, changes, and updates that our entire team has been working tirelessly to put into place. But you also know that all those features have only been available in monthly alpha builds.

Now we are excited to say that we are finally ready to roll out the very first beta of XBMC 12 Frodo.

The Name

In the past, we’ve traditionally named our releases after fantastical places like Camelot, Babylon, and Eden. This time around, on the release set to be titled with the letter ‘F’, we decided to take a slight break from that naming process to honor our roots. Ten years ago, an individual with the username Frodo joined the Xbox Media Player team, bringing along his open source software project called YAMP. With the addition of Frodo’s project the three founders, Frodo, d7o3g4q, and RUNTiME, released the first non-beta version of the Xbox Media Player – XBMP 2.0 – as open source software. Frodo then spearheaded the move from XBMP to the more feature rich XBMC, including acting as the primary author for the initial UI engine.

Today, thanks to the three founders’ decision to release open source, hundreds, if not thousands of people have contributed to XBMC in the form of core code, addons, skins, scripts, hosting, evangelizing, and more. Due in part to its open nature, XBMC has been ported to every major viable operating system and architecture. Skilled skinners have succeeded in making skins that resemble almost every major 10′ UI released in the past ten years, along with dozens of completely unique looks seen nowhere else. XBMC can be had on devices as inexpensive as $25 and can be the primary UI for PCs a dozen times more powerful than the original Xbox was. And for all that, it feels like we’ve only scraped the surface of XBMC’s potential, all because three people decided the project would be better off if it were released as free software.

For that reason – and for so many others – we choose to honor our founders and the past ten years by naming XBMC 12 after one of them. Thanks, Frodo. And thanks d7o3g4q and RUNTiME as well. It’s been a great ten years.

The Features

Thanks to an incredibly successful GSoC experience and numerous dedicated developers who have been working on many projects for years, XBMC 12 figures to be one of the most anticipated feature updates in a long time. Features include…

• HD audio support, including DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD, via the new XBMC AudioEngine
• Live TV and PVR support
• h.264 10bit (aka Hi10P) video software decoding for anime
• 64bit support in OSX to match the 64bit support in Linux
• Improved image support, allowing the database to accomodate numerous additional image types
• Support for the Raspberry PI
• Initial support for the Android platform
• Improved Airplay support across all platforms
• Advanced Filtering in the library
• Advanced UPnP sharing
• Translations now powered by Transifex

Of course, that is merely a small selection of the many changes from the past seven months. For a more in depth look, feel free to review the write-ups of the alphas for each month.

• October
• September
• August
• July
• June
• May
• April

A Few Issues

Needless to say, this is beta software. You should absolutely expect problems to occasionally crop up. At present, we are anticipating a number of issues as we switch XBMC over from the Eden addon repository to a new Frodo repository, including partly broken skins and various scripting/scrapers errors. Please bear with us if these problems do crop up. Additionally, PVR users will not be able to switch channels via the channel up/down buttons using their remotes or CEC due to a slight change in the way PVR keymaps are being handled. We are aware of this issue and should have it fixed by Beta2.

Needless to say, there are several other issues still being worked on, and more will likely crop up during Beta testing. If you would like to report an issue, please search for the issue in our forums first and report any verified bugs in Trac.

As always, if your goal is stability, we recommend that you avoid updating until we have gone gold. If you do decide to install this beta, it is highly recommended that you back up your userdata folder.

Issue Update

Some of you Windows users may have noticed that the scrapers on XBMC 12 for Windows Beta1 were returning an error. This appears to have been an error introduced during the packaging phase that we managed to miss during testing. It appears only to affect users who are doing a clean install and not upgrading.

We are right now building a fix that should resolve this error within the next few hours. Check back on this page, as we will update here when the issue has been resolved.

The fix is now live. Happy downloading!

Conclusion

But enough of all that. Now is the time to get to downloading. Linux users, you in particular will be happy to discover that we’ve finally got our beta PPA up and running, thanks to a number of devs, including our newest team member, wsnipex, and we’ve got an XBMCbuntu iso thanks to the efforts of team member erhnam.

Let us know what you think of the changes in the comments below, or, if you like, via the donation button at the top of the page.

And if you have any problems, don’t hesitate to post about them in our forums and report verified bugs in Trac.

We have been keeping a little secret.. the kind that is so much fun to share when the time comes.

Today we announce XBMC for Android. Not a remote, not a thin client; the real deal. No root or jailbreak required. XBMC can be launched as an application on your set-top-box, tablet, phone, or wherever else Android may be found.

The feature-set on Android is the same that you have come to expect from XBMC, no different from its cousin on the desktop. Running your favorite media-center software on small, cheap, embedded hardware is about to become a hassle-free reality. And as Android-based set-top-boxes are becoming more and more ubiquitous, it couldn’t be a better time. In fact, primary development was done on a Pivos XIOS DS set-top-box. And that is no coincidence, you will notice that Pivos is now listed as an official sponsor (more on that later). XBMC is stable and works great there, as well as on various tablets and phones. Though with Android, as many of you probably know, that is only the beginning of the story.

Enjoy the stereotypical dev-shot low-quality demo video. More video, including phone/tablet usage in the next post.

So what’s the catch? None… in time. Currently, for most devices only software decode of audio and video is hooked up. We considered waiting until universal hardware decode was ready before making our announcement, but in the end decided that in the spirit of keeping things open and working with our ever-expanding community, it made sense to open up sooner rather than later. We are confident that an OpenMax-based player (similar to the one used for the Raspberry Pi) will spring up very quickly. That said, software playback of most media plays quite well already.

Though, there is one exception. As Pivos sponsored a large portion of the port, we were able to work with their vendors to achieve buttery-smooth hardware-accelerated playback on the XIOS DS. It remains to be seen if such hardware-specific features will make it into XBMC mainline or exist as patches for vendors to integrate.

While, as you can see in the video, the port is fully usable and lots of fun to play with, it’s not quite ready for prime-time. We will begin releasing apks for interested beta testers in the coming weeks. But for those who are up to the task, as you would expect from XBMC, the source code is available. We have decided not to push to Google Play until we are satisfied that users with all kinds of devices get the same great XBMC experience. We ask that our users stay on the lookout for evil-doers trying to cash in on XBMC’s popularity. If you see anyone masquerading as XBMC, please be sure to let us and Google know about it.

There is also the issue of having a proper UI for small-screen devices. Typically, XBMC skins have been designed for use on a TV, so use on a small phone can be clunky. But there is nothing keeping skinners from creating more functional touch-oriented skins, like the included “Touched” skin from Jezz_X. With the community’s help, we’re sure to have a more refined version available for inclusion by the time we release a stable version.

There are still many details left to iron out, mainly related to the wide variety of Android devices in the wild. We have not yet decided what minimum requirements will be set, due simply to the lack of extensive testing on exotic devices.

As for taking advantage of Android itself, we haven’t even scratched the surface. There are so many interesting features that we could take advantage of: launching apps, location awareness, speech recognition, on and on. Once the core port is finished up, you can bet we’ll be exploring many new avenues.

I could write for days about how the port started, how it was accomplished technically, what tricks were used, etc, but I will save that for a (somewhat more personal) follow-up post. There is much to say about the process that would likely bore most readers, but I will try to answer the questions that come up in the comments as much as possible in that post. The port was a big effort with many contributors, many thanks to Davilla, Memphiz, Phaeodaria, Montellese, Topfs2, and everyone else who was involved.

Full disclosure: I have been working for Pivos for the last few months, where I suggested the port-work and XBMC sponsorship. I hope our users join me in a thanking them for supporting XBMC and allowing me to work on the port (among other things) during the day. Be sure to check out the Pivos forums, where discussions and unofficial builds are bound to spring up quickly.

As mentioned previously, we have now moved into a monthly development cycle, in which we merge new features at the beginning of the month and then perform bug fixes through the rest of the month. This means, at the end of every month, developers, bug-reporters, and those willing to deal with potentially highly unstable builds can try a snapshot from the current development cycle, and the organization, in turn, will have a more stable and predictable development process. For those of you who would prefer a stable version of XBMC, we will always recommend the most recent stable release (XBMC 11.0), but for the brave, you are welcome to try the end of the month build. To give an idea of just how unstable/alpha these builds can be, there will almost certainly be months in which some platforms won’t actually have usable builds. As always, we recommend you backup your userdata folder before upgrading.

With that said, let’s review some of the more notable changes in the June Changelog.

Airplay Updates

Two major updates have occurred on the Airplay side. First, AirTunes have finally been implemented on the Windows side. This means you can send both music and video from your iOS and iTunes devices to XBMC for Windows.

Second, when sending AirPlay music to XBMC, XBMC can now read the metadata sent in the stream and display the music information (e.g. title, author, coverart, etc.) on the screen. Unfortunately, this is only possible when sending audio from iTunes. iOS devices use FairPlay encryption, which XBMC is not totally compatible with at this time.

GSOC Updates

The efforts of our GSOC students are beginning to come to fruition. Montellese has been working over time to make the XBMC library faster and smarter. This month he has managed to push two fixes/updates to the library. First, movie sets now sort in a manner that better fit the rest of the library. In the past, movie sets were simply listed at the front of the movie library, like folders in front of files. Now, they are sorted based on the category. For example, the average rating of the movies inside the set would determine where the set would reside in a “sort by rating.”

A second new GSOC feature by Montellese should drastically speed up movie listings over JSON-RPC, which will greatly benefit mobile remote users and anyone else accessing the library from non-local devices. In the past, every call to XBMC’s movie library required spitting out every item in that library, even if the remote device was only looking for a few items. Now, a device can just pull those items it needs at any given point, for a massive time saving. Read more…

As mentioned previously, we have now moved into a monthly development cycle, in which we merge new features at the beginning of the month and then perform bug fixes through the rest of the month. This means, at the end of every month, developers, bug-reporters, and those willing to deal with potentially highly unstable builds can try a snapshot from the current development cycle, and the organization will have a more stable and predictable development cycle. For those of you who would prefer a stable version of XBMC, we will always recommend the most recent stable release (XBMC 11.0), but for the brave, you are welcome to try the end of the month build. To give an idea of just how unstable/alpha these builds can be, there will almost certainly be months in which some platforms won’t actually have usable builds. For example, the iOS build will not be available this round. As always, we recommend you backup your userdata folder before upgrading.

With that said, let’s review some of the more notable changes in the April Changelog.

First on the list is a major reshuffle of XBMC settings. In the past, many of the controls for allowing XBMC to interact with your network were found on the Network page. Because the Network group was primarily being used for interacting with various external services, the Network page has been entirely replaced with a Services page. The “Internet Access” setting, which was the only other purpose of the Network page, has been moved to the System page.

XBMC has quite a lot of services to deal with these days!

Next, extending XBMC’s default ability to scrape sets, we’ve now added a new “Sets” submenu item.

For all you iOS users out there, we have an even more exciting announcement. Those of you with iPads, recent iPod Touches, and recent iPhones that are running XBMC will now be able to switch your screen from the local screen to your TV using one of the available TV Out cords provided by Apple.  Then, you can use your local screen as a remote control. Or, to put it more succinctly, mirroring for XBMC is now enabled. For a video on how this works, see below. (Note: as already mentioned, the lack of an iOS build for April means this feature will not actually be available until iOS nightly builds start back up again. Keep an eye on our social network pages, as those will likely be the first places with news on the builds.)

On the library front, in addition to Names, Year, Runtime, and many others, a new Date Added sort field has been enabled. This field works slightly differently than the old “Recently Added” sorting. Rather than sorting the files by how recently they’ve been added to XBMC, the files are now sorted by when they were added to your local computer or server. This way, when refreshing an old show, that show won’t suddenly take up all the spaces in your Recently Added field. Instead, Recently Added really will only show items that you have recently added to your collection.

Finally, Addon, Remote Control, and Skin Developers will be happy to hear that yet more json-rpc controls and websocket support have been added, along with PictureInfo tags.

Conclusion

For a full list of all the April changes, feel free to take a look at our list of closed April milestones. Also, keep an eye out for the May Cycle. Our developers are working extra hard to hopefully include one of the most requested feature additions of the past two years. Feel free to make some guesses as to which feature that is in the comments. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading now!

In a continuation of the series begun with our write-up of the USB-CEC adapter, we would like to take the time today to highlight another adapter out there that makes controlling XBMC dramatically easier. This week, I’d like to introduce Chris (psuedo7 in the forum), who will be telling us a bit about the project FLIRC.  I’d also like to invite any other software writers or manufacturers to contact me in the forums at username natethomas, if you have come up with a new and unique method for improving the usability of XBMC and would like to share your project.

Take it away, Chris.

Hello XBMC.org Readers,

My name is Chris (or pseudo7 on the forums). I’ve been an XBMC user for about 3 years, firstly using my mac then using a shuttle box running Openelec (so I didn’t have to keep connecting/ disconnecting my MacBook Pro).  I love XBMC: the application, the project and everything it envelops.

(Disclaimer – whilst I am “staff” (Read: a forum moderator) on the FLIRC forums I am not employed by Flirc and do not benefit directly, financially or otherwise, from the project I am about to discuss.)

I have recently come across a product which has enhanced my XBMC experience, and I wanted to give back to the community and share my findings about Flirc.

Much like the previous Pulse-Eight article, my intention is to highlight what I think is a great product that many users may not have heard about that dramatically simplifies the process of building an XBMC htpc.

What is Flirc?

Flirc allows you to pair your same television remote to your computer with easy one-time setup software.

Flirc is a small USB infra-red (I.R.) adapter that receives I.R. commands from a remote control. Read more…

It’s been over a year in the works and today we are excited to announce that XBMC 11.0 is finally ready and available for download. You can find XBMC 11.0 here.

XBMC 11.0 Milestones include Addon Rollbacks, vast improvements in Confluence (the default skin), massive speed increases via features like Dirty-region rendering and the new JPEG decoder, a simpler, better library, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, better handling of unencrypted BluRay content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in OSX (to match the already available feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, an upgraded weather service with geoip lookup, and much, much more. Check out the highlights in the summarized changelog.

The new Confluence

In addition to our many software improvements, we’ve increased our reach in the realm of hardware support since Dharma was released. Eden marks the first in-sync stable release for the Apple TV2, iPad, and other iOS devices. We’ve vastly improved the method by which we handle input, including heavily upgrading JSON-RPC support, making remote control support much, MUCH simpler in Windows, and enabling unique methods of device communication with hardware. And now even AMD devices are supported for GPU video decoding in Linux to some extent, thanks to the inclusion of VAAPI.

Beyond XBMC 11 for Windows, Linux, OSX, and iOS, we are also happy to announce XBMCbuntu Final.

XBMCbuntu is very similar to past versions of XBMC Live. By default, the user boots directly into XBMC, and if he/she chooses, he or she will never see the underlying OS. However, unlike Live, XBMCbuntu is now built upon a full LXDE desktop environment, which has a web browser (Chromium) with a fully updated (and updatable) version of Flash built-in and a GUI package manager ready to install and update all of the normal Ubuntu programs a typical Linux user might use. The user may now toggle between XBMC, which auto-starts, and a normal desktop if he or she chooses. And, perhaps most exciting for many users, XBMC will now be upgradeable, both from command line and from the GUI package manager, without fear of crashing the XBMC experience.

Naturally, those users who do not want to see the desktop will never need to. When you boot your computer, you will be booted directly into the XBMC homescreen, just as you are right now. The only clear difference is the new power underneath the hood. Those users who have already installed the Beta version of XBMCbuntu can upgrade to final using the apt-get upgrade commands.

There are truly an incredible number of updates and improvements between Dharma and Eden. But don’t take our word for it. Download XBMC 11.0 Eden now.