We have been attending LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany since wednesday the 11th.

As always it has been a great experience and we have meet a lot of interested people, both current users and hopefully new users.

As you can see, we have been pretty busy demonstrating the system, most people have been pleased that we run on so many platforms including iOS

User Meetup

For the fun part, we are having a user meetup this evening @ Hops & Barleys. The adress is Wühlischstr 22/23

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For the third year in a row we are going to exhibit on LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany.

The exhibition is running from May 11 to 14 at the Berlin Fairgrounds (Messedamm 22) in hall 7 (S-Bahn station Messe Süd, next to the Deutschlandhalle).

We will be in hall 7.2.a booth 101.

If you are in Berlin, come and join us in the booth for a chat, competitions and a walkthru of XBMC.

We will be running XBMC on Linux (ASRock ION 330), OSX (MacBook Pro), iOS (Apple TV 2, iPhone, perhaps iPad) and Windows (also MacBook Pro). Further Malard is bringing an OpenELEC htpc running XBMC and hopefully the new “XBMC” remote.

The ones attending seems to be me (blittan), mdd, vdrfan, probst and Malard. So we will be covering german, english and swedish languages.

For everyone using XBMC and on location in Berlin, we are thinking of having a meetup at some nice pub/bar and grab a few beers and chit chat with us?

Since we are not native Berliners, suggestion on good bars, pubs and restaurants are more than welcome.

A while ago ASRock Europe kindly lent me an ION 330 to try out as my new HTPC equipment. Got it delivered and started unpacking. It was packed in a neat box along with a hdmi to dvi adapter, a support cd and an anti-slip pad. The case looks just as good as it does on the pictures. Installed it with hdmi to my 37″ LCD TV and optical toslink to my surroundsystem. Booted it up and because it was a sample it came with Windows Vista preinstalled.

Installed XBMC quickly to it and took it for a testspin using AEON as a skin, since it’s pretty demanding on the hardware. Navigation inside the skin seemed fine, noticed that it was a lot smoother than the NVIDIA ION box I had tested before. So surely there is a benefit from having a dual core Atom 330 instead of a single core Atom 230. Did not see any real sluggishness in the skin. Music playback and picture browsing was fine and the little I tested plugins it worked fine as well.
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As promised, here are some pictures of the NVIDIA ION box which were so kindly lent out to us during LinuxTag. Big thanks to NVIDIA for making this happen :)

Before sending it back to NVIDIA (with a tear in my eye, wanted to keep it ;) ) I gave it a quick testspin, since I didn’t get to play with it all that much during LinuxTag. My impression of that small box was that no matter what you fed it the playback didn’t stutter and was smooth and crisp. I have watched blueray on PS3 using the same TV and although that was fine, I don’t think the NVIDIA did any worse. Too bad my friend wasn’t home so we could try it out on his reference projector :(

Click for slideshow

Anyways, I will also post some pictures from linuxtag.

Click for slideshow

Yesterday we set the booth up, and now people are droping in. The ION box is playing 1080p stuff great, I am surely impressed. We even got to borrow a zotac :)

booth

Acer Aspire running XBMC for windows



Ion box, compare to the apple-tv remote next to it :)



Zotac box <3 (this one wants to go home with me) :P



Big screen :)

ps. watch a live feed here

For the upcoming release of XBMC 9.04 Babylon, we really need to get the following languages up to date or if you can translate into a language not currently supported by XBMC it would be great. There are two files that needs translations, XBMC language file and the translation for PM3.HD skin.

Catalan
Chinese (Simple) — Chinese (Simple) for PM3.HD
Chinese (Traditional) — Chinese (Traditional) for PM3.HD
Croatian
Czech — Czech for PM3.HD
Danish — Danish for PM3.HD
Dutch
Esperanto
German — German for PM3.HD
German (Austria)
Hebrew
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian — Italian for PM3.HD
Japanese
Maltese
Norwegian — Norwegian for PM3.HD
Polish — Polish for PM3.HD
Portuguese
Portuguese (Brazil)
Romanian
Russian — Russian for PM3.HD
Serbian
Slovak — Slovak for PM3.HD
Slovenian
Spanish
Turkish — Turkish for PM3.HD
Ukrainian

How to do this? Easiest way is to use our XBMC translator tool. Then submit the translated files to our tracker using your forum username and password (CaSe Sensitive!)

For usage and more info see our wiki

Thanks in advance :)

* The following languages are covered by either team XBMC or an official translator. English, English (US), Finnish, French, Greek, Korean, Swedish.

* If you feel like you want to be an “official translator” please email me.

Good news to all translators out there. rwparris2 (most of the coding) and myself (ideas and small coding) has done a conversion script that allows us to take use of the i18n format used on launchpad.net.

This script is still in early beta and not open to the public yet. Will post another blogpost and also a forumpost on this when it’s final.

This ensures us that we will get some more translators to maintain languages and also we might end up with more languages covered. For you as an translator, you have the abillity to choose between the “old way” using XBMC Translator or use the nice online translation option on launchpad.net

If you are activly maintaining a language and want’s to be an “official” translator for that language (meaning that you will activly translate and commit) please feel free to drop me a mail.