With the release of XBMC 12.2 and GSoC, not to mention some behind the scenes work going on, an April cycle announcement was not published; however, thanks to a new process, both the April cycle and May cycle builds were built rapidly and efficiently (and on time). We have now switched from our old Billy the Buildbot to Jenkins for building our automated monthly alphas and nightly builds. Jenkins is quite a bit more intelligent and faster than our old buildbot, and we’re excited about the switch. In the future, for those who just can’t wait for a write-up about the newest alpha but tend to steer clear of the bleeding edge of nightlies, the new build should always be available on the 1st of the month at mirrors.xbmc.org/snapshots.

With that said, we’ve now completed months #3 and #4 of our monthly development cycle, and there’s a lot to talk about.

System-Wide – FFMPEG v1.2 and Settings Refactor

Without a doubt, the two biggest developments over these past two months have been the bump to v1.2 of FFMPEG and the Settings Refactor performed by Montellese. The list of changes for v1.2 of FFMPEG is frankly enormous, so if you’d like to see the list, check it out at the link.

The Settings Refactor is like-wise quite huge, but worth discussing in a bit more detail. Previously, settings were entirely dependent upon XBMC’s graphical user interface (GUI). If you didn’t manually change a setting in that interface, the setting could not be changed. Skinners had no access to the settings. Outside applications (like the official Android and iOS remotes) couldn’t interact with them. Any attempt by users to run XBMC as a server were hamstrung by the fact that you couldn’t actually control most of the server features without physically launching the XBMC GUI.

This refactor separated settings from the GUI, so now all of those obstacles can easily be overcome. In addition, because settings are no longer dependent on the GUI, we can do a lot of interesting things that were not previously possible.

The Basic settings are, indeed, basic.

For the first time, settings can now be reset to default, so everyone who discovers they’ve completely screwed up their audio settings finally have a fallback. The reset feature is fortunately quite narrow. It only applies to the window you are currently looking at. So, for example, if you reset your audio settings, you won’t accidentally reset your video settings too.

The settings GUI also has now has “settings levels” including Basic, Standard (default), Advanced, and Expert. The default Standard shows fewer settings than the previous default, and Expert is still a work in progress, but is likely to house a number of the settings that used to exist solely as part of the advancedsettings.xml.

Finally, with this separation, skins now have the power to show actual explanations of what each setting does, so users are no longer forced to puzzle over “Preferred Audio Language” or “Vertical blank sync.” Skinners can present a simple description that may easily explain the setting in non-developer speak.

For more info, feel free to visit the Settings System wiki page, which is still fairly new and incomplete, but which will ultimately be the main source of Settings info.

System-Wide – Other

Multi-touch support is now available generically on touchscreens. Multi-touch gestures currently are limited to swipe backwards, two finger context menu, image rotation, and pinch to zoom. For a list of our touchscreen interactions, see our touchscreen keymap.

Airplay now includes volume control.

Movie sets management has been made moderately easier, as users can now clear sets and add movies to sets from the context menu.

The web interface remote can now send keystrokes from your physical keyboard to XBMC. So if you have the web inteface remote open on your laptop and you press up, the XBMC GUI selector on your HTPC will move up. If you press down, it will move down.

UPnP now supports the tracking of file state, so watched status and resume from last watched points are updated instantly across machines.

Conclusion

With the exception of a few fixes (keyboard presses in Android should work quite a bit better now, for example), most of the major changes for the past two months have not been platform specific. This means pretty much everyone should be able to play around with all these new features.

And of course, as always, this is merely a very small sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of changes, visit our April Merge Window page and our May Merge Window page. You may notice that we’ve begun tracking the merging of new features into our public Team Member forum discussion area, rather than on Github. With luck, this should make it quite a bit easier for users to follow along with development.

Now, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, it’s time to start downloading. Be aware though, that this is very alpha software with potentially numerous bugs. There is a very good chance that this alpha will break on you.

• Windows
• OSX and OSX-x86-64
• Android
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Ubuntu users, please point to the unstable ppa as described in the Linux instructions

How to Contribute

If you use this cycle’s build, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac, provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like.

As of yesterday, all of those who applied for Google Summer of Code should have gotten their replies from the Google Open Source group. We are very excited to be working with the four students who were selected and are only sorry that we couldn’t select more, as there were quite a lot of excellent submissions this year.

For those curious, the select entries and students were:

Improved Support for Linux Windowing Systems – SmSpillaz (previously the window manager for Ubuntu)

Improved Database Layout – adamsey

Profile-base DLNA and Transcoding – alcoheca (continuing his fantastic UPnP work from last year)

Aggregate media from multiple sources and present them in unified library view – pieh

We are incredibly excited to see what benefits come from all these projects and invite you to follow along in the forum threads. To keep those threads clean, we ask that you refrain from posting in them if at all possible.

Good luck students and mentors!

A few months ago, some of you may remember that a number of news sites wrote articles under the apparent mistaken impression that a site making a modified version of XBMC was an official XBMC source. For the most part, most of those sites (with the exception of Engadget) updated their original stories with a clarification after a quick email was sent by Team XBMC.

Then on May 4th, the group behind the modified version sent out another press release, and once again Engadget appears to have posted an unclear article. The Team has once again tried to contact Engadget for a correction, but Engadget has remained silent.

This is a disappointing outcome. We would rather not have had to point this issue out, but we felt it was necessary to let our users know that this modified version of XBMC is not an official release from our developers and should not be considered one. Official releases will always come from xbmc.org and will be clearly laid out on our Software page. Any software you come across that is not in that list should not be considered official XBMC software and will not receive support in our forums.

Update: It appears the lack of correction may simply been a case of bad timing. The author has replied and posted a quick clarification. Thanks to the staff of Engadget for the fix!

About a month and a half after the release of XBMC 12.1, we are happy to announce XBMC 12.2 with substantial fixes  for 12.1 and 12.0 across all platforms. Fixes include:

• Fixed infinite loop on addon dependencies, resolves crashing problem that arrose immediately post 12.1 launch
• Numerous UPnP fixes
• Memory leak fixed when XBMC is minimized
• Various Raspberry Pi playback fixes and software codec support
• Fixed OSX audio mixing
• Fixed some audio-related crashes in Linux builds
• AirPlay fixes
• Bluray folder resume-bookmarks now work
• Ability to scan for new content on file folders has been reimplemented
• Language updates from Transifex

Fixes from 12.1 included:

• XBMC now supports using OSX’s default output device for audio as well as hardware decoding with Intel GPUs in OSX
• XBMC no longer hogs audio for Linux and on resume audio will continue to work in Linux
• Full iPhone 5 resolution is now enabled
• Volume buttons on Android devices now control Android volume, rather than XBMC volume
• Volume buttons on OSX devices once again control OSX volume, rather than XBMC volume
• Player optimization on the Raspberry Pi, including more efficient playback, better subtitle support, and many crash fixes
• iOS 6 support on the AppleTV 2.
• XBMC does not crash when listed on the AppleTV top shelf
• Added support for additional Xbox 360 controller types
• Broader and more intelligent support for CEC devices
• Fixed problems with several addons due to broken binary read/write in our python interface
• Language fixes, including 7 new languages: Albanian, Burmese, Malay, Persian (Iran), Tamil (India), Uzbek, Vietnamese
• AirPlay fixes, including making discovery of XBMC more reliable on OSX
• Numerous crashing and stability fixes across all platforms

For all users interested in maximum stability, we highly recommend that you update from 12.1 to 12.2. This is the XBMC you were looking for.

Updating

To update to XBMC 12.2, please visit our download page, which includes downloads for Windows, OSX, and Android, and instructions for Linux, iOS, the Apple TV, and the Raspberry Pi. XBMCbuntu users can see these instructions for upgrading to 12.2 using ppa:team-xbmc/ppa.

If you have any problems read the Frodo FAQ, the Raspberry Pi FAQ, or the Android FAQ, depending on your version.

How To Help

If you would like to help with XBMC, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac, provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like.

For those of you who are tracking and submitting bugs: You may notice that Github has an “Issues” section. The Team would very much appreciate it if you did not submit bug reports through that section, but rather continued to use the forums and Trac. At the moment, the Team is using Issues as a concise means of grouping and identifying particular bugs that they gather from the forum and Trac sources. Thanks for your help!

Hey all you students, now is the time to beginning applying to work with XBMC on your favorite project this summer during 2013’s Google Summer of Code. To apply:

1. Take a look at the XBMC Ideas page
2. Prepare an outline for your GSoC proposal using our outline guide
3. Visit the Google Summer of Code 2013 homepage and click Apply for Students.
4. Once you’ve finished, head over to the GSoC XBMC subforum and tell us about your proposal. Potential mentors will be browsing that sub-forum looking for interesting projects, so speaking up there will be the best way to get noticed and selected.

We are excited to read the great proposals, so get on it!

In between coding up exciting new features, we have been hard at work pushing as many fixes as possible into the next bug fix release of XBMC 12.  With 12.2, we’d like to ask your help in performing some bug testing, prior to the release.

Broadly speaking, we are only looking for “crash and burn” reports. If XBMC resets on you or randomly crashes or something similarly major, we’d like to know about it with a note in the forum. If you elect to be a tester for 12.2pre, we would very much appreciate a debug log along with your crash report. Any reports without a log will be ignored. To make your report, we suggest visiting this thread.

To get XBMC 12.2pre, simply visit our Test Builds page, and download the most recent test build for your system with the name “Frodo” at the end of the file.

For more info and to make reports, see the testing thread on our forums.

We are excited to announce to everyone that we have been accepted as an official GSOC 2013 mentor organization this year. GSoC 2012 was an incredible success for XBMC  and XBMC users, as our Library, scrapers, and media server services took a massive leap forward, and we got an awesome test suite as icing on the cake. We have high hopes that students will come up with yet more brilliant ideas for this summer.

So, from now until April 22nd, we would like to encourage all our student users (and other interested students) to visit our GSOC Ideas Page, review some of the ideas we think might be good ones, and feel free to provide your own ideas in the Student Project Proposal area.

Alternatively, feel free to jump into the #XBMC IRC room on Freenode and chat about any project you’d love to cover or visit our dedicated GSoC 2013 forum area, where other users, potential mentors, and team members can give you feedback on your idea.

From April 22nd to May 3rd, we encourage any interested students to apply at the GSOC home page to work with XBMC. After that, we’ll notify applicants whether we get to work with each other according to the GSOC schedule.

All of us at Team XBMC are looking forward to getting some good work done this summer, and we’d love for you all to work with us!