we have had this idea in mind for a while and were planning to kick of this campaign at a later date but after a recent post in mplayer-dev mailing-list we have decided to bring forward the announcement. the ‘donations for dvd-menu in xbmc campaign’ basic concept is to encourage xbmc end-users to make donations (via paypal) into a fund in order to motivate the xbmc developers to prioritize programming dvd-video menu/navigation support for xbmc. this concept has been brewing for a few month now as many people have either posted in the forum or e-mailed us directly offering to donate money to this specific cause, which has been the #1 requested feature for quite a while. so come on, be generous and help support the xbmc project. give donations for how much you feel xbmc is worth to you as a whole if this feature were added to xbmc’s already very long feature list. the xbmc developer(s) who code this huge feature will collect the fund-pot on completion as a reward - they have adready started coding.

update (9/11-2004): just thought we let everyone that the campaign is going very well which shows the demand for this feature, the fund have already received over 100 donations and so far the fund total is at just over $1,800(us), which includes one very generous donation today of $500(us) from team-xecuter (who said they will also donate 5 x x3-modchips to the fund). short progress-report on the actual code development; our xbmc devs working on this internally have got basic dvd playback working and menus are also partially working, all showing great promise.

make your donation towards dvd-menu support in xbmc via paypal: $25, $50, $100 or other.
if like to make a none-paypal (money or maybe a gift) donation please contact gamester17.

forum discussion: donations for dvd-menu in xbmc campaign (link)

xbmc 1.1.0 final point release source code has now been set in our cvs! once again we felt that we had been holding off doing any official release candidates for so long that we now consider the current xbmc cvs to be as stable as a point release should and could be, so we decided that we were ready to go final without a release candidate process. yes, there are still a few known bugs but none serious enough to stop you from fully using and enjoying xbmc. all xbmc users (and xbmp users if there still are any?) are highly encouraged to upgrade to this stable xbox media center 1.1.0 point release which is now officially the only supported version. for those of you who are new to xbmc (and/or xbmp) please understand and respect that team-xbmc do not release nor distribute xbox executables (xdk binaries) at all, so please do not ask us where to find/download a compiled versions of xbmc (which you do require to run xbmc on your xbox). please read through our faq and the online-manual carefully before posting/asking anything in our official xbmc community-forums. know that the official cvs feature/skin freeze has now been lifted, meaning our team-devs are again allowed to add new features/functions to the xbmc cvs, and independent programmers can too (link). we would also love if people would go ahead with updating/translating the 1.1.0 strings.xml to other languages and help updating our online-line (wikki) user-manual (link).

finally, we like to remind you all that the xbmc project relies on your donations for its survival!

xbmc-forum discussion: xboxmediacenter 1.1.0 (final) point release!
xbmc official web site: www.xboxmediacenter.com (with faq/q&a’s)
download: xbmc 1.1.0 source code (of faq: what is source code?)

news story from xbox-scene.com: received news from arddrive who has been working on xform (previously called xbmc-skinner), a win32 tool that will allow you to easily make skins for xboxmediacenter: “i know you have all been waiting a long time for xform but the beta release will be coming this monday! in this beta version some of the functionality will be missing but here at xform we hope to have a fortnightly update for you guys and girls out there who want it. however you will already be able to add most things to your skins – buttons, labels, images, thumbnails, spin controls, …you get the picture. the download will be made available on monday from xbmc-skinner.xbox-scene.com. thanks for your patience”.

update (14:45 18/10-2004)!: xform v0.1b is now available from xbmc-skinner.xbox-scene.com