For those of you interested in using XBMC purely as an appliance, which is to say, for those of you who don’t want to deal with a full operating system like Windows or OSX, and would rather boot directly into a super fast, super efficient version of XBMC, we are happy to congratulate our friends over at OpenELEC for releasing version 2.0.

OpenELEC 2.0 is a speedy Linux-based version of XBMC 11.0 Eden designed to be installed on most Intel and AMD 32-bit and 64-bit hardware with support for Intel, NVIDIA ION, and AMD Fusion-based systems. OpenELEC supports most wireless and wired network cards along with extensive support for legacy and bleeding edge GPUs.

Because OpenELEC is hyper-efficient without an underlying base like Ubuntu, all system configurations are performed from within the XBMC interface.

In addition to advancing to XBMC 11 Eden, version 2.0 includes PVR support within the XBMC GUI and includes DVB firmware and drivers, TVHeadend, VDR, Njoy N7, MythTV, Mediaportal, HDHomerun and VU+ support in the OS.

VDPAU support has been available in OpenELEC since v1.0 for users of NVIDIA GPUs, but now OpenELEC 2.0 is the first stable distribution of XBMC to include XVBA support designed to replace VAAPI and improve stability and performance on AMD devices. The advantages of XVBA support are enormous. Now modern AMD systems are capable of performing GPU decoding of h.264 and VC-1 content directly, greatly reducing CPU usage and enabling the use of lightweight and inexpensive AMD CPUs.

OpenELEC 2.0 also now comes with CEC Adapter support built in, as well as Airtunes and Airplay support.

To learn more and download your own copy, you can visit the OpenELEC website and read the full announcement here.

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 September Changelog.

Before we do though, we should note that this month will be slightly different than previous months. As we are beginning to gear up for Frodo, a significant number of new, big features that touch numerous portions of the whole program are being added. With all of these new features added, there is a very good chance that this month’s snapshot will be even less stable than normal.

Personal Video Recorder (PVR) support

It is, without a doubt, one of the single most requested features for XBMC, and we are happy to announce that PVR support has been added to mainline XBMC, which will allow users with a TV tuner to watch live TV, listen to radio, view an EPG, schedule recordings, and more.

XBMC’s approach to PVR support is somewhat unlike its approach to other features. Rather than supplying our own PVR software, a task that likely would have taken much, much more time, particularly if we had wanted any hope of making it work across all platforms, we have determined that there are already numerous PVR software platforms available and ready to serve up TV to XBMC. So we made it possible for XBMC to speak with these other applications through PVR addons. For those familiar with the terminology, XBMC acts as the frontend and the software that tunes and records television acts as the backend.

At present, PVR support remains very much a work in progress. The PVR addons required to get XBMC speaking with your chosen backend still need to be compiled by hand. There is no combination of hardware and backend software that is more highly recommended than any other combination.

The Team does not recommend that you attempt running PVR now, unless you are pretty comfortable working with the guts of XBMC and don’t mind getting your hands dirty. In the coming months, documentation and PVR addon support should become much more user friendly.

For more on PVR, feel free to visit our Wiki section and our PVR Help forum. And check out our list of frequently asked questions. For more images of PVR in action, scroll to the end of this post.  Thanks to Lars Op Den Kamp for being the primary dev of the project for the past few years and alcoheca for starting it up, all the way back at XBMC’s last GSOC.

Raspberry Pi Support

As many of you are aware, XBMC has already been available on the Raspberry Pi for quite some time. However, until now, that support has not been a part of mainline XBMC. With this change, OMXPlayer (the player used to playback 1080p video on the ARM powered Pi) enters mainline XBMC as do many under the hood features for ARM and RaspberryPi support. Thanks to Edgar Hucek for heading up this project.

So Many Others

Additional features this month include:

• The Test Suite developed by amejia for Google Summer of Code, designed to make testing various parts of XBMC easier and faster
• A code generated scripting engine that comes from Jim Carroll that performs two separate tasks. First, it makes it much easier for XBMC developers to open up the XBMC API to addon writers. Second, it opens up the possibility of more easily writing addons in the future in code other than python.
• Improved picture zooming and rotating on touchscreen devices
• Tagging support for tv shows and music videos so that they match the tagging support already available in movies
• Improvements in slideshow movement.
• Additional GUI speedups for low power devices

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the September changes, feel free to take a look at our list of September milestones. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading.

• Windows and OSX
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Given the additional complexities of distribution, builds for Linux are not currently available at XBMC.org.

Finally, a note 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.

Also, as we move closer to Frodo, we would like to remind all of our dedicated translators that we’ve now moved to Transifex, which should make the entire process much easier. For a step by step walk through of Transifex, feel free to visit our wiki page on the subject.

Thanks for your help! Read more…

We really don’t spend enough time pointing out and thanking those individuals and websites who make the entire XBMC experience possible by agreeing to be included as default XBMC addons and scrapers. Every time you turn on XBMC, browse your library, and navigate your media, you are almost certainly benefiting from the hard work and expense of not only Team XBMC, but also numerous others. The value of these services is truly immeasurable to the user experience. For this reason, we’d like to take this time to talk about the hard work of others.

The TVDB.com

The TVDB covers a lot of ground

One of XBMC’s earliest online content providers was TheTVDB. Back in 2006 and early 2007, the leading media center software for the PC was actually not XBMC (since XBMC had not yet been ported to the PC). Instead, in those days the major PC software was Meedios and Media Portal. Given XBMC’s memory limitations and the fact that we were all still several years away from the efficiency improvements that would make XBMC the beast it is now on embedded devices, Meedios and Media Portal were the primary platforms on which users could install fanart and really go crazy with the early artwork heavy skins of the time, like the original Aeon. TVDB helped to shape many of the rules we take for granted these days. For example, on the XBMC wiki, we have a number of examples of “good” and “bad” fanart, where “good” fanart has no vignetting and is left entirely clean, so that the skinner can do with the art as the skin dictates, rather than as the artist dictates. Such rules were originally created and enforced by the TVDB and revolutionized the way we interact with skins today. The TVDB was also the site behind thumbnails, banners, and other multi-format image work.

Since those days, media center software has only gotten bigger and more popular, with millions of new users every year. Meanwhile, TVDB remains a wholly crowd-sourced website with artwork licensed under the Creative Commons whose server costs and budget are based almost entirely on donations by users like you and me. Every time you scan your TV shows, you are almost certainly looking at artwork and show information that came from The TVDB’s servers. If you are as grateful as we all are, feel free to donate to the server fund.

Fanart.tv

Various examples of fanart.tv-style art

As time went on, more and more forms of artwork arrived on the scene, until eventually TVDB was simply unable to accomodate all the different types of artwork people wanted included. Users wanted png-style artwork that could incorporate transparencies. In particular, they wanted what came to be known as “clearlogos” which are simply the logos of the show without a rectangular background or any other art. They wanted art for individual seasons. They wanted “clearart” which was typically the cast of a show without a background. Seeing a need, XBMC user Kode began adding clearlogos to his site “Lockstockmods.” As more and more art was submitted, it became clear that all this artwork was going to need its own website. And thus was fanart.tv born.

These days, fanart.tv hosts clearlogos, clearArt, characterArt, TV thumbs, Season thumbs, and show backgrounds. It covers TV shows, Movies, and Music. Indeed, fanart.tv’s most active section today is Music, with more and more album covers and artist thumbs being added every day. It does a little bit of something for almost everyone on the artwork front. And quite likely at some time or another, if you have browsed the artwork of XBMC, you’ve seen something that was originally hosted on fanart.tv. Much like TVDB, fanart.tv’s budget is based almost entirely on user donation, so feel free to donate here.

TheMovieDb.org (TMDb)

The MovieDb was created in 2008 with the limited goal of provided better high resolution posters and fanart for XBMC. Since then, it’s become a one-stop shop for posters, art, cast and crew info, trailer links, and more. Much like Fanart.tv and TVDB, TMDb is entirely crowd-sourced.

Weather Underground

The Weather Underground (or Wunderground) is somewhat unique among our content providers, in that they are a for-profit organization who typically charges quite a bit to provide weather services to software like XBMC. As some of you may recall, midway through the Eden beta last year, we lost access to our previous weather service provider. Fortunately, the Weather Underground agreed to step in, wave the typical API fee, and act as a weather service sponsor for XBMC.

Many more…

That is a mere sprinkling of the many websites that contribute to the incredible user experience that XBMC brings together. Other providers include TheAudioDB and MusicBrainz (for music), TheGamesDB (for games), and so many more, thanks to the remarkable work of an army of addon developers and coders.

One Last Group to Thank

There is one other group that we really need to thank: All of you users. Without  your tireless efforts filling in all the missing data on all these crowdsourced sites, XBMC would be nowhere near as fantastic as it is today. Even if you can’t donate to various server funds, you can always contribute art, information, or reviews. In XBMC development, we are fond of the phrase “code welcome” to remind our users that XBMC is a open source, user-created project. While not everybody can code, almost everyone can provide a summary or a picture or a review. And already, countless thousands of you have already done so. Thanks so much for your efforts!

Link Roundup

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, 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 August Changelog.

Touchscreen Keyboard Optimization

With the push into tablets and the continued support of iOS devices, it’s becoming increasingly critical that XBMC provide a better user experience for touchscreen input. As such, the first feature of this month’s Cycle is a refactor of our GUI Keyboard to allow for native onscreen keyboards. This means the keyboard that you see while using other software on iOS will be the same keyboard you see while using XBMC.

Artist-based Smartplaylists

For those who are not aware, XBMC Smartplaylists are a sort of filter that should not be confused with something like an iTunes Auto Playlist, as they behave differently. An iTunes playlist is typically a list of songs meant to be played in order or randomly, one right after another. An XBMC Smartplaylist is merely a filtered list from which one can pick an individual song or video, and once the song or video has ended, the user will be returned to the list to select another item.

The vast majority of dev Montellese’s GSoC work this summer has been dedicated to speeding up and refining Smartplaylists so that searching and filtering your content is faster and easier than ever before, and all done in real time. This month, he added Artist-based Smartplaylists, so that users can sort and filter their music by topics such as artist, genre, moods, styles, born, bandformed, disbanded, died, biography, and instruments, with the potential of adding even greater filtering support in the future.

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the August changes, feel free to take a look at our list of August milestones. Also, keep an eye out for both the September Cycle and regular stories on the blog, as we’ve quite a bit of upcoming news. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading.

• Windows and OSX (64bit OSX will be available in the morning US time)
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions (also available in the morning US time).
• Given the additional complexities of distribution, builds for Linux are not currently available at XBMC.org.

Finally, a note 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!

Our apologies to Vienna users. The lack of consistent internet plus the incredible amount of discussion and work that we’ve managed over the past two days has made it next to impossible to put together and adequately advertise a Meetup in time. Even as this post is being written, we’re STILL discussing potential UI upgrades!

Thanks to all those users who expressed interest in the comments! More interest has been expressed this year than ever before. We’ll do our best to make it happen next time.

We should have a full recap of all the many topics we covered at this DevCon within the week. For a VERY informal recap, feel free to check out the LiveBlog posted over at xbmc.us.

It’s been nearly two years since Team XBMC has gotten together in person to discuss the past, present, and future of the XBMC project. The cost and complexity of getting 30+ people from nearly every corner of the world to one place is truly staggering. As such, we are pleased to announce that this year’s conference is being sponsored, once again, by at-visions. If you don’t recall, at-visions are the company who provide the XBMC experience through their ONEvision system to hotels across Europe. It’s entirely possible that they’ve put XBMC in front of more eyes than any other company worldwide! Our thanks to them, both for sponsoring this event and for spreading the XBMC word far and wide.

On the 1st and 2nd of September, we will be meeting in Vienna for a weekend of conferences, hacking sessions, and, as always, beer. A bit over 30 developers and support will be in attendance during the long weekend. A few topics proposed for the weekend include a recap of GSoC, a discussion of the upcoming Frodo release, PVR, documentation, and increased user-friendliness. We can’t guarantee that anything will come out of these talks, but we will do our best to seriously cover as many topics as possible. Feel free to suggest any additional topics you’d like us to consider in the comments below. When DevCon is over and we’ve had a chance to digest all that occurred, we will be certain to give you all a full recap of XBMC-related discussions.

In addition to internal discussion, we have invited a few of our sponsors along for the conference on Saturday. If you have any sort of corporate or business interest in XBMC and would like to come chat with the team, feel free contact us for more details.

Meet-Up

In addition to developer sessions, we’d like to invite any XBMC users in the area to come have a drink with us Sunday night, the 2nd. While Vienna isn’t Stockholm, London, or Madrid (in terms of XBMC user density), we’d still love to see as many of you out as can make it. Feel free to say in the comments if you think you can be there, and we’ll be sure to post when we get more specifics for the Meet-Up nailed down.

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 July Changelog.

Embedded Fixes

As is to be expected, now that AudioEngine has been rolled into XBMC proper, other developers are beginning to wrap their heads around how AE affects various components of the XBMC experience and are providing fixes to streamline the process. One of the first major fixes is Dirty Audio, which works quite a lot like Dirty Video. In the past, AE was “always on,” which resulted in the loss of many CPU cycles on embedded devices like the Apple TV and Android. Now, AE is a little smarter and stops doing its conversion work when no sound is output.

Additionally, up to now, XBMC has been running a huge number of SQL queries at startup. These queries haven’t been a big problem for powerful x86 processors, because the queries have not be overly intensive on CPU cycles. The same is not necessarily true on embedded systems. After an extensive round of SQL query optimization, the amount of queries at startup have been cut by 70%, which could have a powerful effect on iOS and Android boot times.

Google Summer of… Database Improvement – Tags

The work being done by devs JMarshall and Montellese as sponsored by GSoC has resulted in a stream of new updates and features this month. In particular, because scraped moviesets are intentionally limited to one per movie for clarity by TheMovieDb, movies (and potentially other media in the future) can now be tagged with additional info by the user with Tags. Think of Tags as personal moviesets that the user can create in the XBMC interface. At the moment, tags are limited to movies, but can be extended to tv shows and music videos in the future. Below is a quick video of how Tags work. Read more…