just a reminder to all other (xbox) developers out there; please pay respect the gnu general public license (gpl). you can freely use any of the sources of xbmc and/or xbmp in your own project but remember that both xbmc and xbmp are open source under the gpl license. this means you must follow this license and provide the sources of your application on request. an example of this is dvd2xbox, they are using xbmp’s sources but dvd2xbox was closed source itself. i’m very happy the authors of dvd2xbox discovered this themselves and decided to opensource dvd2xbox but there probably many other (xbox) homebrew applications which are using xbmp/xbmc sources. to all those other software authors i would like to say; please respect the gpl license!!!

thanx / frodo

microsoft has now announced the holiday bundles for this year. the us version comes with xbox console, star wars: the clone wars and tetris worlds online edition for $179.99 rrp, while the uk/europe version comes with xbox console, halo and midtown madness 3 for £139.99/€199 rrp, both packages also includes one controller-s gamepad and two-month trial subscription to xbox live. amazon us and uk has already started selling these bundles for almost $10/£10 less than the recommended retail price above.

news source: xbox.com (us/uk/de)

after a looooong search monkeyh0 and i finally discovered how we can output encoded ac3.51 directly to the digital output of the xbox. this means great audio quality for ac3 5.1 encoded movies. currently ac3 5.1 streams get decoded by xbmc/xbmp and the 6 raw lpcm streams are given to the xbox hardware. the xbox hardware encodes this back to ac3 5.1 and outputs them on the digital output. the decoding/encoding process means quality is lost. with our new way we can transmit the encoded ac3 5.1 stream directly to the xbox digital output. no decoding/encoding is needed resulting in much better audio quality

although things are highly experimental right (and thus buggy) right now, we wanted to share this information. you can try it yourself using the latest xbmc. make sure to enable ac3 passthru in settings->music and to enable dts/dd in the msdashboard, then select a movie with ac3 5.1 sound and …. voila

frodo

xbmsx v0.8 is now available, (xbmsx by -rx- is a xbmp/xbmc xstream server for mac os x). from the readme: “i recompiled the binary with frodo’s xbmc-compatibility-patch, and this seems to have gotten rid of some directory browsing problems i was having with xbmc and xbmsx v0.7.  it also seems (on initial tests) to be compatible with xbmp and panther.”

official website: osx_code
download here: xbmsx v0.8

from doom9.net: i was visiting “itu telecom world fair this weekend and found something interesting at the microsoft booth: in their windows ce section, they had a couple of windows ce.net based devices capable of playing wmv9 video. besides the samsung dvd player with integrated wmv support, they had 7 settop boxes for vod services. most devices used a standard 733 mhz celeron processor which limits their playback capabilities somewhat. in fact, those devices are designed for streams of 1.5 mbit/s or lower, and resolutions up to d1 (720×480/576). prices are as of yet unknown, but the devices should be ready for field trials in q4 2003. they also had a €35′000 hardware real-time wmv9 encoder by tandberg on display, which could be used by vod providers to encode content on the fly. the settop boxes also supported tv playback and interactive services via microsoft tv, which seems to indicate in which direction microsoft is going to conquer the living room.”

news source: doom9.net  - the definitive dvd backup resource
xbmc forum discussion: xbox 2/next, what can we expect…?