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.

There is only one week remaining to vote in this years SourceForge Community Choice Awards. See the original announcement here. If you have not voted yet, please consider taking a moment to show your appreciation for XBMC Media Center. While you are there, check out the other categories as well, there are some really cool applications on the list this year.

Here’s hoping for a post this time next week announcing XBMC as the winner of a category or two, possibly even a clean sweep. Otherwise, well, you wouldn’t want jmarshall to cry, would you? It’s in your hands…

This year, Team-XBMC held its annual XBMC Dev Con directly after LinuxTag in Berlin.  We like to come together every now and then to meet face to face and discuss the state of things, the future of XBMC, and socialize a bit too. In attendance this time around were pike, chadoe, spiff, elupus, jmarshall, WiSo, alcoheca, vdrfan, MaestroDD, and blittan. Attending from Boxee (who were nice enough to sponsor XBMC Dev Con 2009) were yuvalt, vulkanr, eli, and erez. Also mot2dk, Haggy, and Clumsy made it to LinuxTag but not to the XBMC Dev Con. Overall, it was a great success. Below is a brief outline of the topics discussed.

Video Library

jmarshall has posted before about his proposed video library makeover, and now he’s ready to put it into action. The goal is to combine the file and library views into one useful mechanism, while making it easier and more straightforward to add, organize, filter, and display content. Watch for a post on the dev blogs with much more detail from jmarshall in the near future.

Addons

We’ve received lots of complaints about the addons structure (or lack of it) in XBMC, such as finding and installing third-party plugins, scripts, scrapers, and skins. As a result, an in dept discussion has started about the possibility of adding an official addon manager inside of XBMC itself so that everything would be available directly from the interface. Also, there was much discussion about different ways of organizing the plugins and scripts to keep them up to date. Plans are far from finalized, but surely the results will be up to XBMC’s usual high standards.

WebBrowser and Flash Integration

This one is only a maybe, but they are still being evaluated. To be clear so that it is not misinterpeted, this has nothing to do with adding a full-blown embedded web browser in XBMC, only the ability to grab media content (such as flash) from the web for use in plugins.

Release Schedule

We believe that the current 6-month release schedule (based upon Ubuntu release cycle) is still viable, though it will be shifted by a month or so to give us time for testing with the new version. We will also probably start doing interim releases as new features are added. These will not go through the same testing schedule as the major releases, but should reduce the need for users to compile their own builds or look for third-party sources just to keep up with the latest bleeding-edge features.

Translations

The XBMC community has always been great about contributing to the translation effort, and blittan has stepped up to help ease this work. He will be coordinating a move to Launchpad so that the community will be able to become even more involved in translating XBMC languge files and keeping them up to date. Also, to help alleviate some of the redundant translations, some ‘common phrases’ will be added that all third-party addons can use as well.

Website Changes

It’s time to knock the dust off of xbmc.org and shake things up a bit. We realize that most of our loyal users just go straight to the XBMC Community Forums because that’s where all the good stuff is found, but we’ll be making a concerted effort in the near future to reorganize our site. We hope to make it easier to find the current news and developments all in one place.

From left to right: Erez, Pike, Yuvalt, WiSo, vulkanr, vdrfan, elupus, blittan, chadoe, MaestroDD

Watch for these and many other changes in the future. We’ll be sure to let you know as plans unfold. And If you haven’t already, don’t forget to Vote for XBMC Media Center in the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards!

Remember a few weeks ago when you flocked in droves to cast your vote for XBMC Media Center to be eligible for SourceForge’s annual Community Choice Awards? You were at that time just voting to NOMINATE us as finalist candidate, and you did a great job at that so our thanks goes out to all of you.

However now comes the really important part! The actual voting to select SourceForge CCA winners has begun today, and and XBMC is a finalist in no less than four categories this year. So now please head over to SourceForge.net again and VOTE for “XBMC Media Center”. You will find us under the following headings:

• Best Project
• Best Visual Design
• Best Project for Multimedia
• Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything

Note that if you are not logged in then you will have to give your email address, click “Send My Vote Now!” after you made your choices and then simply go to the link that is mailed to you for identity confirmation. So be sure to follow the instructions in the confirmation message that follows or your vote will not be counted.

After you have voted, please help us spread the word. If you know someone who loves using XBMC Media Center as much as you do, pass this message along. Help us tell the world that XBMC is the best open source media center there is!