We’ve been busy

This was mentioned a few weeks ago on the forum but was never brought up here: In a recent presentation to the Linux Foundation, XBMC was listed in the top 50 live projects (gleaned from Ohloh’s statistics). It is truly an honor to be among the others in that list!

Releases

We have struggled in the past to put out timely releases, because it’s hard to get everyone to quit adding new features long enough to freeze for testing and go through the release motions. To counter that we have borrowed a page from the Linux kernel’s development flow, and added our own touches. We consider this an experiment and we’re not sure if this will be what we settle on going forward, but it’s certainly a start in the right direction. Here’s how it works:

For each major release, we will have monthly merge windows. For roughly a week we will furiously merge in the approved features that have been queued up in the form of pull requests at Github. That leaves the rest of the month for testing and bug-fixing. Then we’re back to a fun new merge window. After a few of these cycles, we will do a hard freeze and enter the Beta/RC stage, followed by release. The hope is that we can move away from a model of constant code-churn to one broken into chunks of stable/unstable periods.

So there it is in its theoretical glory. There are still lots of details to work out, but so far it has been working well. Having features queued up gives us a more clear way to discuss what is going in, and for users to know what to expect. For now, we are using issues at github to manage milestones as it provides a nice interface for discussion (and even a shiny green ‘merge’ button). It will take a few of these merge windows for us to get a feel for things, and from there we’ll begin charting out the Frodo release schedule.

Nightlies

As the April merge window is closed and things have settled down, nightly builds have resumed. It remains to be seen if it will make sense to host nightly builds during the chaotic merge windows.

A few things are up in the air for the Ubuntu PPA, since we have now been accepted into the official repositories. We want to be sure that nightly users have seamless transitions to official releases if they choose, so unstable PPA builds are still on hold. Also, due to some issues with iOS5, ios/atv2 nightly builds are on hold as well.

GSOC

We have 4 students participating in GSOC this year! Congratulations (and thanks) to Tobias Arrskog, Sascha Montellese, Andres Mejia, and Alasdair Campbell. We’ll certainly dedicate a post in the next few days to their projects, for now their proposals can be seen on the clunky GSOC Page.

We have already been included in several major Linux distributions, but Debian is a big target because of the size of the community around it. As most Linux users are probably aware, other major distros such as Ubuntu and Mint derive (or derive indirectly) from Debian, and sync their packages regularly. Andres succeeded in requesting a sync to Ubuntu in time to hit Precise Pangolin, so users of this next LTS release will be able to install XBMC with just a few clicks (or an apt-get). We hope this will lower the barrier to entry for many users who are not familiar with PPAs.

There are a few notable differences between the packaged Debian/Ubuntu versions and the ones from our ppa or XBMCBuntu:

• decss support (encrypted dvd playback) is disabled unless libdvdcss2 has been installed from a third-party repo.
• libav is used rather than ffmpeg, as Debian unstable has gone this direction.
• AFP (Apple File Protocol) support is currently disabled due to packaging issues.
• rar support is disabled due to Debian policy, which we hope to resolve soon by switching to libarchive, which Andres is personally working on as well. The guy is a unstoppable!

Now there’s one less step to get to the XBMC goodness…

We’re confident that the recent buzz from the Raspberry Pi among other things will help this year, though it’s always a fierce competition. If you are interested in applying, please head to our project page and begin thinking of what you might like to hack on!

We are hoping for a seamless transition and we don’t foresee any difficulties, but don’t be alarmed by any unexpected results for the next day or so. We’ll update this space when the move is complete.

Update: Somehow, these things never go smoothly. The move is complete, but we did see some unreachable time. Most everyone should be back up by now, depending on your DNS servers. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

You may have noticed that for the past few weeks the Weather section of XBMC has become unable to provide updated information due to our default weather provider moving to a fully fee-based API. A brief scramble ensued, and the change provided the kick-in-the-pants we needed to move weather providers into our add-ons framework so that we can send out updates between releases, and allow users to choose between different sources much more easily.

We have now added the final piece of the puzzle: A default provider who has agreed to sponsor XBMC and its users with all the data we need. A special thanks to Weather Underground for working quickly with us to fill the void. It’s great to work with companies who see the value in donating their services to open-source communities like ours. We hope that they see some extra commercial interest as a result.

Thanks also to ronie for having the add-on ready before the ink was dry.

Users of recent nightly builds have already seen the change, and it will be fully baked in to the upcoming Beta1 release.

As always, the schedule will be dictated by our ability to get things polished up for release. So file those bug reports, clone our repo and send a pull request for fixes or translations… every little bit helps.

So much has changed since Dharma, we’ll use this space over the coming weeks to discuss in more detail what you can expect in 11.0. For now, Here are a few things you’re sure to notice:

• A new “Files” view in the video library in order to remove the notion of Library Mode vs. Files Mode that confused so many new users.
• The default skin changed to a horizontal layout allowing for more useful information to be displayed on the home screen (vertical version is still available in Add-ons)
• Efficiency improvements to reduce high cpu/gpu usage
• Much improved touchscreen support to go along with the first major versioned XBMC release for the iOS (iPad, iPhone, AppleTv2)
• Ability to customize the home screen by adding your favorite Add-ons
• The usual smattering of visual improvements, playback improvements, new ways to stream and discover media.. the list goes on.

The last few days have been hectic as the developers have been working hard to get their last changes in, but we’ll be slowing things down now to begin cleaning up for release!

The short of it is that a major chunk of dirty-region rendering has finally been merged into XBMC’s bleeding-edge code, though it is disabled by default while we continue polishing the rough edges. The change produces impressive performance gains on low-powered hardware, and is the groundwork for many changes to come that will further reduce CPU and GPU consumption for all XBMC users.

For those interested in a more detailed explanation, read on.

As you may remember, XBMC started as a project for the original XBOX where things were very different. After the move to desktops and embedded environments, many of the legacy procedures remained. One of these procedures, and a long-time thorn in XBMC’s side has long been its rendering model in which where every frame is rendered by the GPU in its entirety, typically at 60fps. As you can imagine, this is incredibly intensive and very unfriendly to low-power platforms. This is where dirty-region rendering comes in. Thanks to the work of Tobias and Jonathan (jmarshall), XBMC now has the ability to only render what has changed.

Marking the dirty regions

So how is this accomplished? Let’s use an example.

In this screen, the user has moved from the Browse button to Add. Previously, XBMC’s renderer would’ve happily uploaded the entire screen to the GPU for each frame (remember that almost every movement in XBMC comes with an animation, so there’s rarely a single-frame change). So in this example, assuming we’re running at 1080p, we have uploaded an entire 1920×1080 scene 30 times just to change the selection. In addition, each pixel is likely rendered more than once due to the layering of dialogs and blending of translucent textures – in the above case each pixel is rendered around 4 times. That’s roughly 1GB of data sent to the GPU for a half-second animation! But not only that, even after the animation is finished, data continues flowing at the same rate – even if nothing on screen is changing at all!

The obvious solution is to send only the data that have changed, and this is exactly how dirty-regions work. With each pass of the rendering loop, we now have the ability to mark controls as dirty. In the example above, the current and next buttons are marked dirty for the length of their animation. We then create a rectangle that contains all dirty controls and send it out for display. During this animation, the data transfer drops to just 16MB. When the animation is complete, nothing is dirty so nothing is uploaded at all.

Clearly the savings here are massive.

The impact

For those of you running XBMC on a desktop, other than knowing that your GPU is working much less, you also may notice a drop in CPU usage. For those on low-power x86 machines like IONs, it is quite possible that there will be some speed-ups along with the drop in CPU usage. The most impact, however, will be seen on low-power embedded devices; hardware like the beagle/panda boards is now much more interesting. Additionally, the atv2 and iPad ports should see a nice benefit from this, though there is currently a bug that prevents correct rendering when dirty-region rendering is enabled.

Because we now know which controls are dirty, in the future there are several changes that will come in that reduce CPU usage further. We hope that we can finally reduce XBMC’s idle CPU and GPU utilization to where they should be, especially when it is minimized or has lost focus.

Try it out

Obviously you will need a bleeding-edge build to see the new functionality, and the same caveats apply that always do when running unstable builds. Currently there are a few bugs that are blocking dirty-region being enabled by default, so for now you’ll need to explicitly enable it in advancedsettings.xml. See here for the settings.

If you are interested in seeing what is going on behind the scenes, you can enable the visualizer (used in the example above) that paints a rectangle over marked regions. Use the <visualizedirtyregions> setting from the wiki link to enable.

With each new version of XBMC, there are sure to be changes that require add-on authors to make changes in order to remain compatible. We have made improvements to python, JSON, the skinning engine, etc. So much like Firefox, we will be asking all add-on authors to test their creations against each version of XBMC and mark them as compatible in each before they’re available in that version. For more detailed information on API changes for Eden, check out the wiki.

Browsing the repository list with the new Xeebo skin

So what does this mean for you?

If you are a stable user happily using Dharma, it means nothing. Only that bleeding-edge add-ons are getting good testing before you’ll see them in the next stable version

If you are an unstable/nightly user, it means that from now on you will only see add-ons that have been accepted into the Eden repository. Much like Firefox, they will likely be few in the beginning and really begin to pile in when we enter the beta stage for Eden.

So remember: if you open your add-ons list and your favorite one is not listed, poke the author in the forum and ask him/her to make the necessary changes and submit to the Eden repository, or better yet, help with it!

And before anyone asks, the new Feature Friday has been a big hit. Nate is out of town this week, but he’ll be back next Friday with another installment.

In early May 2010, a representative at Sony Japan’s Home Theater and Console division expressed interest in using XBMC as a delivery platform for its newest content. After nearly a year of development, we have delivered a product that is suitable for deployment into millions of living-rooms, backed by Sony’s reputation for delivering high-quality standards-compliant hardware and software. We believe that within 3 months, we will have a new appliance on store shelves that will revolutionize the industry. The XBMC team is also excited to be a part of Sony’s Home Theater and Consoles division, where free-thinking developers are regarded highly.

What does this mean for XBMC? The sky is the limit. Combined with Sony’s impeccable reputation in tech crowds, we anticipate that the platform will be a quick success in the retail market. Sadly, the XBMC source will be closed in the future (all developers unanimously agreed to assigning a proprietary license), but we believe this is the right move going forward. As Jonathan Marshall, XBMC Foundation President put it, “While the free and open-source model worked well when we were all still in our parents’ basements, now that we’ve been showered with gifts from our new friends at Sony, we understand that it is not sustainable in the long-term; DRM is the way of the future.”

We realize that some may see this as abandoning our principles, so we have used our new partner’s influence to secure a special treat for XBMC’s existing users. For the next year, we are able to bring you the latest box-office top-10 movies in 1080p quality, some before the Blu-Rays even hit the store shelves. The best part is, they are free of charge! Just check out the ‘Blu-Ray Movie Streamer’ plugin, available now in the XBMC add-on browser.

We understand that not everyone will agree with our decision here, but we assure you, it’s for the best. Stay tuned for more as the details unfold!

Now that a few weeks have gone by we are comfortable sending out skin updates. For those of you who still have not updated to 10.1 (especially Windows users who don’t use the default skin!), please be sure to update now.

Enjoy the newly updated skins. In addition, be sure to check out some of the new ones that have gone in recently like Simplicity and Neon, plus two more from our very own Jezz_X that are slated for inclusion in the next few days.