XBMC media center was nominated as a finalist in this years SourceForge Community Choice Awards (CCA) in no less than seven categories, including “Most Likely to Change the World” (awarded to Linux) and “Best Project for Multimedia” (awarded to VLC). The winners were announced at a party held as part of OSCON and XBMC won the award for “Best Project for Gamers“. The “Best Project” award went to OpenOffice (which was overall winner taking home three awards in total).

XBMC started life out as the central piece of media center software for the old Xbox games console, and it is great to receive this recognition as the media center that gamers enjoy and use.

Over the last 12 months or so we have been branching out to all platforms, so that XBMC now also runs natively on Linux, Mac and Windows. We hope with a couple of stable releases under our belt (expect some news about this shortly) that more and more people will be using XBMC on their platform of choice.

Team-XBMC would like to thank SourceForge.net and everyone who took the time to vote for XBMC in this year’s SourceForge Community Choice Awards.

Discussion: XBMC Community Forum

With our recent move to host the xbmc.org website on our own webserver, Team-XBMC have now also taken steps to setup our own tracker-system for XBMC using Trac. Consequently, our previous trackers, which were hosted on SourceForge, has been closed and all bugs, patches and feature request tickets have been migrated to the new tracker-system under trac.

Integrating this tracker-system into our site allowed us to implement a unified login, so from now on, only a single registration is required. Register on the forums, if you have not already, to be able to post both in the forums and to new or existing tickets on trac.

This is the first step towards making it easier for all XBMC users to report bugs, request features, submit language translations and code patches. Team-XBMC now accept bug-reports and feature-requests for XBMC for Linux, XBMC for Mac, XBMC for Windows, as well as XBMC for Xbox. Note though that for bugs please try post in the respective platform bug discussion forum first to get it replicated and confirmed by someone else too.

Team-XBMC would also like to take this opportunity to thank XanTium of Xbox-Scene for hosting the XBMC website on his webserver up until now.

The Telematics Freedom Foundation is currently sponsoring a study about state of the art Media Center projects in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community; “We picked the 10 most prominent FOSS Media Center projects out there and we’re now collecting information about their features, functionality and support. The 10 selected projects are: XBMC, MythTV, Boxee, Elisa, Neuros OSD, Freevo, My Media System, Entertainer, CenterStage+Plex and MediaPortal.

Because of our limited resources, we can’t afford creating a Lab to run and test all 10 media centers. So we are relying on the community collective intelligence to gather all data necessary to provide you with a panoramic view on state of the art work in FOSS Media Center projects.

There is one webform available for each project. The forms are very easy to compile and we invite Project Leaders, Developers, and Power Users to actively participate, because you are capable to provide the most accurate information we need. You can participate anonymously, but if you decide to leave your name and email address you’ll be given credit for your participation and will receive an email notification of when the paper is available for download”.

You can participate by:
* Filling the XBMC profile webform: link
and/or
* E-mail screenshots from your media center, links to demo videos, or web reviews to <info (at) telematicsfreedom (dot) org>

The incentives to collaborate are:
* You’ll get for free a panoramic view on state of the art in all prominent media center FOSS projects out there.
* You’ll be promoting your favorite Media Center and showing how strong your community is.
* If you contribute, you will have credits at the end of the paper, in your project section.
* The best screenshots may be selected to appear in the paper to illustrate the software GUI.

Telematics Freedom Foundation full announcement: link
XBMC Community Forum discussion: link

Team-XBMC have received news that the XBMC media center project has been nominated as finalist in the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards (CCA) in no less than seven categories. This is the third annual SourceForge CCA - in the first year XBMC won two of the categories (”best multimedia project” and “best game project”), and last year we were nominated in six categories however not enough XBMC fans voted so we did not win any category. So this year we like to request this to all XBMC users; please registered a user on SourceForge.net (registration is free) and then vote for the XBMC project in one or more categories.

The winning projects will be announced at the SourceForge CCA party on July 24th (2008) during OSCON at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon. The prize if we win: ‘bragging rights’ and the honour to display SourceForge.net CCA logo on the XBMC website.

Signed / Team-XBMC