In another bit of late news, here’s a cool new app from EqUiNoX. This handy (and skinnable) program lets you control XBMC from anywhere on your network. Sadly, it’s Windows only so I can’t test it myself, though I’m sure it’s up to EqUiNoX’s usual high standards.
Head over to the Team Blackbolt site to get the app and the source. Keep in mind that this is not an official tool so please don’t report any bugs that may result from its use; use his bug tracker instead.
As many of our forum users have pointed out, thetvdb.com is currently down. This notice is a bit late, it seems that they’ve been having trouble all weekend.
Obviously, as thetvdb is the default TV scraper for XBMC, many of you will not be able to scrape your shows. Not to worry though, they know about the problem and are moving their server to a new datacenter. You can watch for a status update over at their forum. Until they’re back up, please be patient and don’t file tickets about the issue.
Site and scraper are back up. Thanks to everyone over at TheTVDB.com for the hard work and quick response.
As our readers probably know by now, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released today with many new features. For those who are considering making the move, here’s what you need to know as the update relates to XBMC:
Rather than wasting the time and effort required to update the current stable release of XBMC (Babylon) to work with Karmic, we’ve decided to focus on getting a new version out the door. This means that until the next XBMC release, it is recommended that most users stick with Jaunty. But there’s no need to panic; despite the fact that it’s taking a bit longer than we had hoped, development is shaping up nicely and the first 9.11 alphas should be rolling out very soon.
If you’re absolutely dying to live on the bleeding edge you could try the svn ppa, though you should NOT expect it to be stable (translation: don’t complain if something’s broken).
Here’s a quick teaser for those of you who dream of using XBMC on a low-powered ARM platform some day. Our very own McGeagh briefly demonstrates XBMC running on the BeagleBoard using OpenGL ES 2.0 and even manages the obligatory playback of everyone’s favorite: Big Buck Bunny. This is still in early development and is nowhere near ready for public consumption, but it’s certainly a great step in the right direction. Kudos to McGeagh, keep up the good work.
Our friends at themoviedb.org have experienced a major hard drive failure (the database is fine) and they are hard at work rebuilding. This obviously means that XBMC will not be able to scrape movie information from TMDB at this time. There is no need to report the issue, please be patient as they recover. You can watch the status on their twitter page. Good luck guys, and thanks for all you do!
Update: Looks like the site is back up and scraping is functional.
XBMC has long been criticized and at the same time hailed for its multitude of settings. Depending on your point of view, it is either highly configurable or overwhelmingly confusing. In a sense, both are true.
Like many other open-source programs, we suffer occasionally from the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem. Many developers are often adding cool new features and tacking on options for them, but it’s less frequent that we step back and evaluate those options and how they are presented to the user. We are taking this time (while we’re overhauling the rest of the codebase and preparing for feature-freeze) to do exactly that.
Today marked the first round of the big cleanup. It started with simply setting some Good Defaults ™ and throwing out some rarely used or even non-functional settings. The more difficult part comes next, when we reorganize, regroup, and rename things in an effort to make configuration of XBMC a breeze.
Stay tuned for more. This is going to be an eventful week…
As our readers probably know by now, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released today with many new features. For those who are considering making the move, here’s what you need to know as the update relates to XBMC:
Our friends at 
XBMC has long been criticized and at the same time hailed for its multitude of settings. Depending on your point of view, it is either highly configurable or overwhelmingly confusing. In a sense, both are true.
