Top Secret XBMC Developments
If you are curious about what sexy new features XBMC developers are (not sooo secretly) working on, you might find the following links to our forum enlightening:
Please note that most of these threads are development discussions and should therefore be kept at a technical level!
- Webkit integration (motd2k)
- DirectX port (elisemory from Boxee)
- ARM port (mcgeagh)
- PVR integration (alcoheca and alwinus)
- Video library redesign (jmarshall)
Some of these (sub)projects have their own branch on the XBMC subversion repository (check out trac) while being in development.
Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that there is a new XBMC forum dedicated to ‘supplemental tools‘ i.e. tools developed by our users which interact in some shape or form with XBMC.
Note: Team XBMC does not officially support (and in some cases endorse) these tools!
If you can contribute in any way to these or developments or other parts of the XBMC code base, I’d encourage you to do so. What’s more rewarding than improving the life of thousands of Media addicts?
DonJ
Thanks Donj. All 5 of these feature developments look quite promising. Being on linux, I have been watching both the pvr-branch and the video library redesign with a keen eye.
As well as the supplemental tools:
Ember Media Manager – http://www.embermm.com and
HTS Tvheadend – http://lonelycoder.com/hts/
xbmc’s future looks extremely promising
XBMC still really need more Windows developers in either case, if you know Win32 C++ programming (and DirectX in particular) and want to help out, drop us a line!
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=53881
The DirectX (and later DXVA) is going to take a lot of work to get it going well.
Pvr Integration will be so awesome. The biggest missing piece of xbmc in it’s evolution.
How about fixing the Audio Playlist interface before working on a new Video one?
Nice certainly the webkit development but… what about the security of the thing… The last thing I would like to see is some little less internet savy user in my household clicking on a “wrong” link that ends up installing a trojan or something like that.
Sure it is a cool thing to have inside a media center and pretty much needed in the near future but the security aspect of this does make me worried that XBMC development teams will end up spending a lot of time in the future trying to secure the browser part of the system from exploits and loop holes.
It certainly does point to the need for an auto update feature that installs new patches and fixes as and when they become available without the users having to go to the website or svn and build them selfs every time a fix is released.
I’m very excited to see what is being improved and the discussion with future improvements. My family now uses XBMC exclusively for tv and we love it. We have 3 xbmc machines (2 original xbox, 1 ubuntu) so my biggest hot button is a centralized database (being discussed here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=37449). Keep up the great work!