The second testing release in the Camelot series has been tagged and is now available for general consumption. The first Alpha was a great success; all of the known issues listed in the previous announcement have been fixed, along with a slew of others. All of those who are currently using Alpha1 are strongly encouraged to update. Though the same warnings still apply: this should be treated as pre-release software and is only for those who don’t mind running into a few bugs.

Thank you to all of you who reported quality bug reports, we closed a whopping 103 tickets between the version tags!

Today we are pleased to announce the first official testing release of 9.11, Codename: Camelot. It’s been quite a while since Babylon, so we’re very excited to begin the release cycle and work towards a new release.

Please keep in mind that this is an early alpha build, and it should be treated as such. While it’s not likely to burn your house down or eat your pets, it’s likely that testers will run into a few bugs. If this happens, please search TRAC to see if someone else has already reported it. If not, you may submit a QUALITY bug report. Keep in mind that the reason for releasing alphas/betas is so that we can get a better feel for what bugs are out there. If you don’t report them, we can’t fix them.

We are also still working hard to clean up the settings. Many useless ones have been removed, but there’s still quite a bit of rearranging to do.

There are a host of new features in this release, far too many to list here. The highlights are:

• DirectX has replaced OpenGL for Windows
• Numerous skinning engine updates which allow for use of some fancy new skins
• Many improvements to the video player which allow for much smoother playback
• Switch to Core Audio on OSX
• Many VDPAU improvements under linux
• Many platform-specific customizations
• Much Much more. We will be showcasing the new features here on xbmc.org as the final release approaches.

Known Issues

• Windows: DirectX runtime and Visual C++ 2008 runtime(x86/x64) are required. The installer will be updated to check for these.
• Windows: ‘Windowed’ shortcut opens in full screen
• Windows: Non-functional brightness/contrast
• Windows: Discs inserted before XBMC is launched may not appear correctly
• Windows: Some videos may not play back as smoothly as on other platforms
• Linux: VDPAU de-interlacing is known to be broken

Note: Many of these problems have already been fixed since the alpha1 tag and should be resolved in the next testing release.

Download

If you like living on the edge and would like to try the alpha, head over to our download page. You will always find the most current official builds there. AppleTV users may update via launcher’s downloads.

Update: The Ubuntu PPA and XBMC Live are now up.

If you’ve been watching svn lately, you might have noticed that lots of cleaning, pruning, and reorganizing has been taking place. While everything else was churned up, it seemed like a good time to move the main development code to trunk. The linuxport branch has been removed. She was a good ship!

Builders, packagers, maintainers take note

The main development path has changed to:  https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk/

If you already have xbmc checked out it’s easy to switch.

Using the svn cli:  ’svn switch https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk’

Using TortoiseSVN:  TortoiseSVN -> Switch -> update the url

If you manage to wreck your repo, just do a fresh checkout and you’ll be building again in no time.

XBOX development will now take place in its own branch. To grab it, checkout: https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/branches/xbox

It’s been a long time coming, but today xbmc.org gets a new look: the stale useless site has been replaced with one that should be far more active.

It’s still a work in progress, but we’re hoping to make this a portal for all things XBMC. In the past it’s been difficult for our users to keep up with the fast-paced development of XBMC as well as the skins, plugins, and everything else that goes with it. As a result we’ve added some new features to help mitigate some of those problems. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Blog-style layout. We’ve been working hard lately to deliver news on the website, but with the old layout it was hard to see. Now the latest news will be staring you in the face, and there should be lots more of it.
• Skin Galleries.  With any luck this will be a radical change for anyone looking for the latest skins. Find out more below.
• Hall Of Fame. This is a place to show off your HTPC. Some people have a hard time imagining a computer in their living room or media room, help us prove to them how great it can be.
• News Submissions. Because we can’t see everything that goes on, if something slips through the cracks you can let us know.
• Skin Blog. Now the skinners have a platform to deliver their latest updates and ramblings. We will make this more integrated and easier to find very soon.

So what’s going to keep these pages from getting just as stale as the old site? The answer is: the community. The best part about the Skin Galleries and the Skin Blog is that the skinners can maintain them themselves. In the past a skin release, for example, has been a chaotic mess of forum posts, sticky announcements, redundant questions and answers, on and on. Our hope is that now a similar release will work something like this: the skinner updates his gallery (pictures, changelog, faq, etc), posts an announcement on the blog about the new release, then heads to the forum for discussion. Because all relevant information is in one place, there’s no need to ask “where’s the download link?” or “what’s changed?”. Now, if you want to see the latest and greatest, just head to http://xbmc.org and take a look. If you’re looking for a discussion, jump over to the forums. So far most of the skinners are on board with the change, and welcome the organization.

Please enjoy the new site and take advantage of the new features (that goes for the skinners as well) but be aware that a few issues are bound to crop up. Everything should have transfered from the old site with the exception of comments made after the final export. Sorry about those, but they’re gone forever.

Please don’t hammer us with requests for changes or fixes, we’ll take care of any issues as quickly as possible.

To keep with the spirit of breaking things, xbmc.org may be down a bit in the next few days. Not exactly sure when, but it should be within a week. We’re making some changes that should render the site more useful. If you see anything out of the ordinary, don’t fret, if all goes well it should just take an hour or two. Since they’re all tied together this could mean downtime for the forum and wiki too. Obviously we’ll try to keep it minimal, but unforeseen things can (and usually do) happen.

Please bear with us and our growing pains. The changes should be worth it…

Update: Done!

All of our loyal self-compilers and nightly-build users please take note:

Yuvalt and elisemory (from boxee) have been hard at work abstracting a few of XBMC’s subsystems (rendering, windowing, input) in order to improve performance on all platforms and make the code easier to work with.

So far work has taken place in a separate branch but in the coming days/weeks the changes will be merged into the main branch. This may mean significant breakage for a little while both in compiling and in running, so don’t be alarmed, and please PLEASE be patient. There’s no need to report build or runtime errors due to this merge. Keep in mind, if it doesn’t build, or if the core functionality is broken, we already know. For those of you who do nightly builds, please take a break for a few days after the merge.

It may take a few days or weeks to settle down, but when the dust settles we’ll have a much simplified codebase that opens the door to fun things in the future.

The results are in and unfortunately we didn’t take home any awards from the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. That’s a shame, because we really had our eyes on that Best Multimedia title… but there’s always next year. Congratulations to all projects that were nominated, and doubly to the winners. We consider it a great honor to have even been nominated in as many categories as we were, so thanks again to all who voted.

As always, the XBMC team and our great community are hard at work making the best Media Center app on the planet. Keep checking back for the latest features and updates; it gets better every day.