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!

We are now finished with month #2 of our monthly development cycle for XBMC 13 – Gotham. This month we see new features for iOS, Android, and PVR, as well as a new notification system, a new method for sorting images, and much more.

iOS

Dev ulion has added a boatload of new items to XBMC for iOS this month, including speed and stability fixes, along with a few major new features.  XBMC is now able to continue playing audio in the background on iOS, with support for the native media controller bar as well as headphone controls on the lock screen and multi-task bar. In order to continue playing music, the user will need to press play again in the multi-task bar or lock screen or with the headphone controls.

Music will also resume after an interruption such as a phone call. Additionally, thumbnail art and other info about the audio currently playing will be available on the lock screen, though this feature requires iOS 5+. Keeping video running in the background is not yet supported.

This provides for yet another means of controlling media around the house. Now, you can send the media from XBMC on your iOS device to other uPnP devices with Play Using and actually control that media from your iOS device while XBMC is running in the background. While video running in the background is not controllable on your iOS device, video IS controllable in the background if it has been sent to other devices using Play Using.

Android

While very few features visible to the user have been included this cycle, a number of major under-the-hood features have been included by TheUni which will allow XBMC to better communicate with Android and other Android applications in the future. The specific future actions this will allow remain to be seen. Additionally, starting XBMC as the launcher should no longer result in a crashes and black screens.

PVR

In PVR news, there an Electronic Program Guide (or EPG) button has been added to the Home Screen as a submenu item for Live TV, so that users can now have easy access to a list of all upcoming content. Additionally, when tuning a channel that isn’t currently working, XBMC will now be able to show what channel you’ve landed on.

System-wide

Many users turn off their RSS feed in XBMC and rarely visit the front page of XBMC.org, which means they may find themselves unaware that a major release has just occurred. With this cycle a pop-up has now been incorporated by Martijn that will occasionally check to see if a new version of XBMC is available. If it is, the user will be prompted to visit XBMC.org and download. The pop-up can be easily dismissed. Upon the release of XBMC 13, the pop-up will only show for final releases and bug fixes.

This pop-up is especially noteworthy at it is one of the first issues posted in our public Team Member discussion area in the forum that’s been resolved. With luck, that will become more and more useful as an area for open, public discussion.

The bug that was causing all the crashing early last month, due to two conflicting addons, has been resolve. The issue at the time was that both addons depended on each other, creating an ugly infinite loop. That particular infinite loop is no longer possible.

User rubpa has added a new sort method for images. Now, users can sort by the date the pictures were taken, data that is stored in the EXIF timestamps of every image.

Finally, theuni and Montellese are working on two projects that seek to unify things.

Theuni has unified dependencies. This massive project has provided the Team and other developers a much cleaner, simpler, faster, and easier building process. From this point forward, there should be significantly fewer problems as we release each monthly development cycle alpha.

Montellese, meanwhile, is unifying the touch input system. Theoretically, this should make a single change to the touch input system result in correct solutions across all the touch platforms, as well as making it much easier to add touch input to additional platforms as they arrise.  At present, Android and iOS have been included with this cycle. Soon, Windows and Linux touch input systems should also be included.

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the March changes, feel free to take a look at our list of March milestones. It’s quite a long list this month. Also, keep an eye out for both the April Cycle and other stories on the blog. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just 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.

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!

Sranshaft's Immersive skin is a leading candidate for new default XBMC skin

After extensive contract talks and negotiations, we at XBMC are excited to announce an early agreement to work with Microsoft to replace the now defunct Windows Media Center with XBMC for Modern UI (formerly “Metro”) using a new skin, such as Sranshaft’s Immersive.

This agreement is quite an opportunity for the Team. While we cannot yet go into full details, Microsoft is essentially performing what is called an “acqui-hire.” As the codebase is licensed under the GPL, it’s impossible to put the figurative genie back into the bottle. So instead, rather than acquiring the company that owns the code, they are electing to acquire the people who spend the most time working on the code.

The good news is that this means the entirety of Team XBMC will be working, in the very near future, full time on all that XBMC goodness you’ve grown to love. The even better news is that we will, officially, be porting XBMC to Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows phones, along with the future Windows Blue. As a very substantial portion of our user base is Windows users, this will be awesome news indeed. Likewise, I think it can be said without fear of doubt that Windows RT has been and will continue to be a resounding success as an embedded platform, and we are excited to join in that success!

The only big downside is that, unfortunately, we must make some tough decisions about where to put our resources. To that end, all current XBMC Team members will, from this point forward, be wrapping up any current work on non-Windows platforms. With the release of XBMC 13, the official version of XBMC will revert to a single, exciting platform.

One major feature of this change will be a big upgrade in how we perform releases. From this point forward, major releases (such as XBMC 13) will continue to be free. Likewise, the codebase remains open source, so users will always be able to build their own. But we’ve determined to incorporate something very much like the Microsoft MSDN program for our monthly alpha build cycles and beta releases. Users will be charged a small monthly recurring fee and will have complete access to all our freshest and most recent builds, along with all older builds!

We are extremely excited about these developments and would love to hear your opinion in the comments below. In retrospect, given Microsoft’s history of city code-names, such as Chicago and Memphis, we think it very fitting that we selected Gotham as the code-name for XBMC 13!

For more news on these exciting developments as they occur, visit www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/.