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.

We are pleased and excited to announce to everyone that we have been accepted as an official GSOC mentor organization this year.

From now until the 26th, we would like to encourage all our faithful student users (and other interested students) to visit our GSOC Ideas Page, review some of the ideas we think might be good ones, and then feel free to provide input on any ideas you may have 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.

From March 26th to April 6th, 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 pleased to announce that the video sync bug introduced has been resolved and Release Candidate 2 released in record time.

For those of you who skipped RC1, a review of major changes since Beta 3 may be found in this post. Additionally, you are welcome, as always, to review our coding changes on Github.

Meanwhile, those of you excited to get to downloading, as always, visit our Download page at any time.

Lastly, we’re still a few days away from being ready for the next round of XBMCbuntu, but, as always, we’ll update you as soon as possible. Thanks for bearing with us! With your reports, we’re getting closer every day!

XBMC 11 Eden: RC1, ready for take off.

Today we are excited to announce Eden Release Candidate 1. It has been a productive few weeks since Beta 3, as we’ve ironed out numerous minor (and one or two major) bugs.

In particular, we’ve:

• Given preference to external subtitles over internal subtitles
• Updated a number of XBMC translations for final release
• Resolved a number of outstanding Airplay issues
• Allowed specified movie sets to be sorted by title, rather than year, without changing the default sort order on other sets.

We’ve also added the useful feature of IP weather look up. Now, on a clean install of XBMC, users will no longer need to manually enter their weather location. Instead, XBMC will simply check the IP location of your box and auto-set the weather.

For a complete rundown on changes made since February 9th, feel free to visit here.

Now you all know what to do. Head on over to our download page, pick your favorite version of XBMC, and let us know how the experience goes in the comments.

One additional note: The new release of XBMCbuntu is currently delayed due to packaging issues. We will update this post with new info when it is ready.

Update

Unfortunately, it appears a major bug has snuck into RC1 resulting in video lag across all platforms under certain situations. To resolve this, users are encouraged to add an advancedsettings.xml to their userdata folder with code from this thread. The provided links should give you all the necessary instructions to add the xml. In the meantime, we are rebuilding a quick RC2 to resolve the issue, so you are alternatively welcome to wait a brief while until RC2 has been built.

Feel free to disregard this message if you are not experiencing this issue.

This is just a quick note. Over the next few weeks, the team plans on finally updating the forums to more modern, open source software that will play nice with current browsers and will connect with plugins that will allow for better mobile browsing. Right now, the software of choice appears to be MyBB, though we’ve also experimented with PhpBB. At the moment, the plan is for internal testing to take place on the weekend of March 3rd and full conversion to take place on the weekend of March 10th.

We’ll attempt to keep everyone updated with our progress in this thread (until we no longer can). When the forums go down, keep an eye on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter for further updates.

With luck, the downtime during the switch will be brief, and the forum after the switch will be much more powerful. Thanks to all of you who have been pushing for this update. It’s been a long time coming.