As we have already announced, XBMC is going to have a booth at LinuxTag in Berlin in 3 weeks time.
We know we have the best looking media center, and with your help, we can have the best looking booth at the show as well!
Our current thinking is to first plaster the entire booth in black to differentiate from all the other boring white/grey booths, and then have white on black posters, (with a bit of color thrown in for good measure), extolling the virtues of XBMC – perhaps with some giant blown up screenshots from your favorite skins.
We need some poster designs from you guys, by the end of this week. The prize is the glory of thousands of people seeing your designs at the show, plus we will send you copies of a couple of full size posters for your own walls. Some ideas to get you started:
- Incorporate the plain text version of the XBMC logo or the web URL of the project.
- Some short, sharp slogans with what XBMC is all about, parts of the project vision, or maybe mention a few key features, and community driven addons.
- A ‘cloud’ with the names of the third-party open source (library) projects we depend on, with “XBMC” in the middle, (perhaps with bigger text for bigger projects?)
- Incorporate screenshots from your favorite skins.
We also need some other stuff for the booth, so if you are not in the mood for poster design, how about a T-shirt design or some pamphlets that we can hand out at the show?
Pop over to the forums and post your designs!
A few bugs managed to slip into the XBMC Media Center 9.04 (Babylon) final release, so we decided to do a quick update. This maintenance release addresses those glaring Babylon issues as well as some other things that we have fixed since. No new features are present here, this is strictly a bug fix release. As always, you can grab the latest version here or from the PPAs. Note: We had a bit of a problem upon initial this release, so some builds have been repacked as a result.
For those interested, here is a brief changelog:
- Updated the web scrapers
- Fixed segfault when clicking on either a Video or Music source which contains a malformed .pls file
- Shoutcast had two “..” paths
- Typo caused VobSub subtitles to render at incorrect timestamps (and possibly crash XBMC)
- Diffuse texture used the wrong coordinates for orientation when scalediffuse=”false” was specified
- Reset LCD dim after resuming from suspend
- HDHomeRun was crashing when browsing tuners
- Main title DVD/ISO rips did not return to GUI when playback finished
- XBMC would suspend directly after resume when suspend time > shutdown time
- Speed up RAW image loading and handle more file extensions
- Better WAV handling on 64-bit operating-systems
- Metadata from NFO files not used unless default scraper is the same as the URL in the NFO
- H.264 video and AAC audio streamed over RTMP memory leak and video FPS problem
- [OSX] EventServer could be started multiple times on Mac and Apple TV
- [LINUX] RAW image loading was broken
- [LINUX] Startup.xml was not loaded
- [LINUX] Some plugins were crashing on 64bit
- [WIN32] Updated: ImageLib.dll
- [WIN32] Fixed raw image loading
- [WIN32] XBMC crashed on playing media or no sound with MP3 and video files
- [WIN32] XBMC would crash before the OpenGL warning pop-up message was shown
While you are brimming with XBMC Media Center love and excitement, show your appreciation by nominating us for the SourceForge 2009 Community Choice Awards, it only takes a minute, and we really appriciate everyone who participates.
XBMC Media Center 9.04 (codename: Babylon) final is now released. Versions for Apple TV, Mac OS X (Tiger, Leopard. Intel-x86, PowerPC), Windows (XP, Vista), Linux (Ubuntu PPA), Xbox, and a bootable Live CD/USB distribution (XBMC Live) of this free cross-platform media center software are available and are ready for download, (as usual the full source code is also available in our SVN repository under the GPL open source license).
Among the many new features in XBMC 9.04 is PPC (PowerPC) support for Mac OS X, VDPAU (NVIDIA GPU Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding for Linux), updated Codecs, new Karaoke features, more Media Info Scrapers, improved FanArt support, and of course enhancements to the XBMC Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful. For the full list of what is new in this version of XBMC please see the 9.04 milestone on trac.
Team-XBMC would like to especially thank everyone who submitted patches and helped hunt bugs.
XBMC Community Forum discussion: XBMC 9.04 ‘Babylon’ released, ready for download
Team-XBMC is proud to announce that we have gained a sponsored booth at LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin. This is a great opportunity for the XBMC project to spread the word about XBMC Media Center throughout the open source community as a whole, and a great opportunity for our users in and around Germany to meet up with developers.
We have some work to do to prepare for LinuxTag – we need to design up some posters to decorate the booth, produce some leaflets or cards to give out to attendees and organize some equipment so as to showcase XBMC in the best way that we can.
If you think you can help out with LinuxTag preparations, whether it may be helping with ideas as to what we can do in and around our booth, helping with designs for posters, cards or leaflets, or to assist with equipment or volunteer in manning the booth, then please let us know in the forums.
LinuxTag 2009 takes place from June 24-27 at the Fairground in Berlin, Germany. See www.linuxtag.org for more information.
Hot on the heals of the Alpha 1 release, and some 350 code fixes later, the first (and only?) Beta release of XBMC Media Center 9.04 (codename: Babylon) is now available. New in this Beta 1 release is support for PPC (PowerPC) processors in XBMC for Mac under Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger), thanks to Team-XBMC’s new developer Beenje. The feature freeze still applies, and we have also branched a SVN source code tree for release, which means that from here to the end of the month or so we will be only taking well-reviewed fixes in to the final Babylon release. Please give it a run through its paces and let us know if you have any problems. The more testing that is done, the more stable XBMC 9.04 will be!
XBMC Media Center 9.04 releases for Windows and all Mac OS X platforms may be found here.
The XBMC for Linux (on Ubuntu) release are available via the PPA on Launchpad as usual.
Note! If updating from an older version of XBMC you will have to scan in your library again.
Just a quick note to let you all know that Alpha 1 builds of XBMC 9.04 are now available. New in this release, among many things, is experimental hardware acceleration on Linux via VDPAU for recent NVIDIA graphics chipsets care of motd2k, reworked internal path system to remove dependency on legacy drive letters (meaning all python scripts and plugins need to be updated to work properly), as well as a major bug-fixes for DVD-Video playback care of davilla and phi – so finally those of you on Mac OS X should have working DVD playback too! As usual, many, many bug-fixes for other issues have made their way in, and many more are on the way. Please give it a good going over and let us know if you have any problems. The more testing that’s done, the more stable XBMC 9.04 will be!
The Mac OS X and Apple TV release may be found here .
The Windows release may be found here .
The Linux release will be available via the PPA shortly.
Giuliano Maciocci has posted an interview with our own Jonathan Marshall over at brave little meme.
Q: Let’s talk a little about XBMC itself. What would you say separates it from other media centre and HTPC software?
JM: The biggest thing for me are that it’s completely opensource – both in terms of code release and the development model. This has led to a large, active and enthusiastic community being built up around the project, which pushes the development further than could be achieved with a closed model. The obvious difference with XBMC is it does not attempt to restrict you in any way, whilst still attempting to be as user friendly as possible. The commercial media centre offerings cannot compete with this, and we think we’ve done a better job than the many opensource projects out there on the user friendly side of things – though obviously there’s still a great room for improvement in this respect!
Q: As a project, XBMC never seems to sit still. It has evolved from an Xbox hack into one of the most full-featured and customisable media experiences available. What influenced the decision to go multi platform?
JM: As with most major new things that affect the project, the decision to go multi-platform came from a developer fronting up and putting in the work. Yuval was responsible for the port to linux which was the main departure point from the xbox. I’d done some initial work earlier on porting to win32, and once the linux port was working nicely, Elan Feingold did the initial porting work to OS X. This is the great thing about open source – developers from outside the main team can come along, grab the code, and make changes as they see fit.
Q: Despite the long release cycle, XBMC’s feature set continues to evolve at a rapid pace. How do you keep the project from stagnating?
JM: We don’t have to do anything as a team really – the community as a whole is so enthusiastic that it keeps things running along far faster than we could if we were doing all the pushing. I personally find I don’t have enough time to implement even 20% of what I’d like to, and I’m sure other developers feel the same way.
Pop over to brave little meme and check out the rest of the interview.
