What's Going On: Solstice Edition
As it’s been a little while since the Team’s taken a look around the community, it seems high time to do just that.
TV Logos (extra credit if you can name all 5 shows on the screen in the comments)
First off, chances are, if you’ve used a modern skin that isn’t Confluence, you’ve had the opportunity to check out some really interesting alternative methods for presenting your tv shows and music. An incredible number of skins* make it possible to view TV show logos, clearart, cdart, and several other features not present in the version of Confluence found in stock XBMC 10.1.
*The linked comparison page in the wiki is both incomplete and out of date. Still, it gives a fair indication of the breadth to which skinners are willing to move beyond the stock install to beautify the XBMC experience.
These additional features would be dramatically less useful if not for fanart.tv. Fanart.tv is a crowd-sourced website, much like thetvdb and TMDb, designed to provide all the additional little features that we each would have to spend hours amassing on our own. Kode, the fanart.tv developer, is always appreciative of additional art or art requests, and asks only that you follow the rules that may be found here.
Next, from now until the release of XBMC Eden (no, we don’t have any definite release plans), we are likely to talk about a number of new features that are only available in nightly builds. This means they should ONLY be installed by the brave and the willing, and the expectation after installing these builds should always be that something or other is going to break. The Team only officially supports XBMC 10.1 (aka Dharma), so you may be out of luck, though we always appreciate testers who do a good job reporting problems.
With that said, one of the more interesting community contributions to the XBMC code base comes from HarryMuscle, who has provided code to add Slingbox support to XBMC. This code has been merged since the beginning of June and supports all Slingboxes up to, but not including, the Slingbox Pro-HD (which still has encryption problems that have not been overcome). For those brave and eager enough to give it a whirl, the instructions may be found here. A word of warning to the brave: the Sling protocol has not been added to the Network Location dialog box yet, so you’ll have to enter the entire thing manually. If you don’t know how to do that, I suggest waiting a while until Sling support is a little more refined.
Of major interest to non-Windows users (and particularly iOS users), NFS is now baked in to XBMC, meaning XBMC can access folders shared through the NFS protocol without the need of mounting the shares from the underlying OS (iOS, for example, can’t mount NFS files natively). Put simply, now users can use NFS rather than SMB or uPnP for network sharing.* This addition is the first commit of Memphiz, the newest XBMC dev. It’s “an excellent first commit,” according to Davilla, Memphiz’s sponsor. All of you iOS users are more than welcome to thank Memphiz in the comments.
*At the moment, NFS is not an option for Windows users. You are still stuck with SMB.
Finally, this week we’d like to feature Aeon Nox.
Aeon Nox
Aeon Nox has the distinction of being the first modification of Aeon to be based on Confluence, rather than the underlying Aeon code. It supports all those goodies mentioned above, plus TV Tunes, Cinema Experience, Weather+, the TV Schedule, and many other skin enhancements, and it can be downloaded right now from our skins repository, so get it while it’s hot.
That’s it for this edition of What’s Going On. If you’ve got tips, don’t be afraid to send them on to natethomas at xbmc dot org, or just natethomas in the forum. And please continue sending along your Feature Friday setups. We’re always eager to see the nifty new workings of all our incredible users.
What skin is that in the TV Logo screenshot? I like that view a lot!
Glee
How I met Your Mother
Always sunny in Philadelphia
The IT Crowd
Kim Possible
What do I win?
Glee and Kim Possible. The other three hopefully don’t need said. :)
I think it’s Transparency. @hegemon13
It’s Aeon Nox. Also, the winner of the extra credit gets a hearty pat on the back, if ever I see you at a convention or other setting. :)
Good update. It’s great to here what’s going on!
It’s been a while since I donated. NFS/AFP support probably deserves another $20.
You have no idea how happy I am that my house is SMB free and I don’t have to deal with autofs anymore.
Oops…
The link to fanart.tv is broken in the article!
I thought i’d also participated to clearart, logo and other stuffs integration in xbmc with scripts and plugins :-(
as imaginos when he created http://www.xbmcstuff.org or giftie that has followed me for music stuffs scripts
@ppic
It’s hard to try to remember and comment about everyone who helps out in these post. Everyone’s hard work and contributions are appreciated by many!
Links should be fixed now. Had a minor mishap during the writing phase.
ppic, much of what I write about is interesting things that the community or team brings to my attention. If I miss things, I assure you, no slight was intended. It’s merely a case of bad reporting combined with limited time resources. If you are interested, shoot me a message over in the forum and we can talk a bit about the origins of all those things. I’m not really very versed in their history, and that history would probably make for a really interesting story.
@joebrady
ho yes, and i miss some too, there’s been so much people to make those beautiful arts !
@natethomas
don’t worry, i wasn’t angry ;-)
just I things that these kind of script that make all those art available in xbmc are essentials for people adoption.
this lack is what make me fall in python, and why i wrote my first plugin: xbmcstuff downloader
i’ve always been motivated by communities that born with all those things.
now you make me think about it, it’s been a long time since the start, revisiting the history could be interresting !
Thanks for the mention natethomas ;)
I would also like to mention ppic’s script has been pretty instumental in fanart.tv’s success, having the TV Logo downloader script has made it much easier for people to get the images and has helped drive adoption in different skins.
If I haven’t mentioned it before ppic, thanks for all your help, it has been most appreciated.
Thanks v. much to Memphiz – on lower quality connections (like wireless and ethernet over power), NFS is way better than SMB at delivering HD content reliably (sans buffering issues), so this is a big win for all those who don’t have the luxury of ethernet everywhere…most appreciated!
Thx for mentioning Aeon Nox!
Do not forget http://htbackdrops.com which hosts home theater backdrops and thumbnails for XBMC.
Thanks for the baked in NFS support! Can we also look forward to baked in AFP support too?
Do you not mean http://www.xbmcstuff.com as the first host of cdArt, clearArt, and season thumbnails?
Hail Memphiz. Does this please you?
I look forward to the added support and improvements, but it would be nice if you could fix up the FTP-protocol as well as codec support for larger files, so it works better.
Even though I primarily use XBMC at home, I still connect my ATV/MAC/PC to my NAS via the FTP-protocol in XBMC. This way it will still work, even if I go to a friends house or abroad.
These are the issues I tend to deal with:
The library cannot show filesizes above 2 GB. A simple annoyance, but still!
Some movies will not play because they are too large, but other times because it cannot buffer fast enough for the specific codec used in the video.
– Examples: an MKV of 4,5 GB plays fine via internet. At the same time a 2,5 GB AVI will not play via internet and sometimes not even on LAN. Not an FTP issue, but a decoder or buffer issue.
Redesigning the buffer may help here.
– Increment buffer size every time it needs to buffer, reducing the need to repeatedly buffer. We use XBMC to avoid “commercial” breaks!
Buffer issues seems to be a general problem with all players. Is there like a 10 MB absolute max limit for how much buffer memory you can assign? Why not use whatever available memory there is to buffer at MINIMUM enough to ensure the movie can be played fully while the rest is buffered. Make buffering smarter!
Another issue is that you cannot make changes to the library while it is updating the library. I sometimes want to mark series or movies as watched, while it is spending time updating the library. Also find a way to update the library faster via FTP.
– Is it possible to request and download a directory and file list from the FTP server (in a single stream) and then parse it afterwards, rather than going into every single folder “manually”?
Beyond those issues, I find XBMC to be the best media platform out there :)
@Harley
ho yes you’re right ! http://www.xbmcstuff.com
We have had a few new people contributing images which is great, but PLEASE, if you want to help out, read the help section first, it has the rules and some tips, there is also a section showing a sample of images that have been denied in the past, and why.
The biggest reason new contributors images get denied is because they aren’t correctly aligned, ClearLOGOs MUST be bottom aligned, this isn’t optional.
The second biggest reason is poor image quality, the goal of fanart.tv is to have top quality images which means we have a policy of no image is better than a poor image (though we aren’t perfect and some do slip through the net), so again, please look through the denied images section it will give you an idea of what we expect.
Please don’t be discouraged if your image is denied, try to take on board the comments made, fix the issues and resubmit, your hard work is very much appreciated, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes.
Last but not least, the mods and I don’t know everything and we are all busy people, sometimes we get frustrated and our denial comments aren’t exactly constructive, or we just don’t know how to improve an image so that it will be accepted, don’t take it to heart.
@Memphiz, Great job on the NFS support!
Thanks.
Thanks for all the hard work, guys.
XBMC just keeps getting better and better.
I’m not complaining but I though you guys were moving to a shorter release cycle?
h.udo
Hi folks, thanks for your great work.
I am wondering though, I can not upgrade from 10.0-7 to 10.0-9 because I am using a XBMS stream and this is removed in newer versions…
Something about licensing or so? How to solve this? What are the options here?
Thanks!
Gr,
Mark
Helo… I’ve install the solstice XBMC edition in my ATV2 and it not work fine… the frames fall down and it’s impossible to see any video. Any idea?
Thanks
My wish has come true — thank you Memphiz for the NFS support. 1080p over WiFi! :)
@natethomas
Thanks! I don’t remember seeing that view in Aeon Nox. I’ll have to give it another look. As much as I love Neon, Aeon Nox runs much smoother on my system.
Finally… I’ve to restore the ATV2, actuallise to 4.3 with seas0npass and it works fine…
Thanks!
@natethomas
me too.
Yay! When Eden releases ill be setting up NFS then. Although, I dont have a problem with Samba speeds at all.