XBMC 11.0 - April Cycle
As mentioned previously, we have now moved into a monthly development cycle, in which we merge new features at the beginning of the month and then perform bug fixes through the rest of the month. This means, at the end of every month, developers, bug-reporters, and those willing to deal with potentially highly unstable builds can try a snapshot from the current development cycle, and the organization will have a more stable and predictable development cycle. For those of you who would prefer a stable version of XBMC, we will always recommend the most recent stable release (XBMC 11.0), but for the brave, you are welcome to try the end of the month build. To give an idea of just how unstable/alpha these builds can be, there will almost certainly be months in which some platforms won’t actually have usable builds. For example, the iOS build will not be available this round. As always, we recommend you backup your userdata folder before upgrading.
With that said, let’s review some of the more notable changes in the April Changelog.
First on the list is a major reshuffle of XBMC settings. In the past, many of the controls for allowing XBMC to interact with your network were found on the Network page. Because the Network group was primarily being used for interacting with various external services, the Network page has been entirely replaced with a Services page. The “Internet Access” setting, which was the only other purpose of the Network page, has been moved to the System page.
XBMC has quite a lot of services to deal with these days!
Next, extending XBMC’s default ability to scrape sets, we’ve now added a new “Sets” submenu item.
For all you iOS users out there, we have an even more exciting announcement. Those of you with iPads, recent iPod Touches, and recent iPhones that are running XBMC will now be able to switch your screen from the local screen to your TV using one of the available TV Out cords provided by Apple. Then, you can use your local screen as a remote control. Or, to put it more succinctly, mirroring for XBMC is now enabled. For a video on how this works, see below. (Note: as already mentioned, the lack of an iOS build for April means this feature will not actually be available until iOS nightly builds start back up again. Keep an eye on our social network pages, as those will likely be the first places with news on the builds.)
On the library front, in addition to Names, Year, Runtime, and many others, a new Date Added sort field has been enabled. This field works slightly differently than the old “Recently Added” sorting. Rather than sorting the files by how recently they’ve been added to XBMC, the files are now sorted by when they were added to your local computer or server. This way, when refreshing an old show, that show won’t suddenly take up all the spaces in your Recently Added field. Instead, Recently Added really will only show items that you have recently added to your collection.
Finally, Addon, Remote Control, and Skin Developers will be happy to hear that yet more json-rpc controls and websocket support have been added, along with PictureInfo tags.
Conclusion
For a full list of all the April changes, feel free to take a look at our list of closed April milestones. Also, keep an eye out for the May Cycle. Our developers are working extra hard to hopefully include one of the most requested feature additions of the past two years. Feel free to make some guesses as to which feature that is in the comments. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading now!
Great to see AudioEngine in the next may build ! Can’t wait!
The most “stable” is the Frodo_alpha1 posted, as that was built based on the codebase that ended with the tag to begin adding new May code. The nightly build was completed by our buildbot the night before the tag and left some intervening fixes off the table.
Thanks! I will start using the alphas from now on then since they will be more stable than the nightlies but will still get the newest features as they come. I guess I will just check back here at the beginning of every month then as that is when they will always be posted? Great idea guys!
I hope is Audio Engine. This way I could, for good, stop using Media Player Classic to play DTS-HDMA movies.
@kibje, is this confirmed?
We all know Audio Engine is coming in the next month or 2. I think the devs were hinting at another feature in their post.
@jgslima
They stated in the development thread that they are testing and “hopefully” will make it into the May window. So it’s not confirmed as in “it will be there”, but as in “they think it will”. :)
I tried out the Beta and Stable released of Eden. It’s a great system and I’m happy about the collection introduction as well as the built in support for Geforce cards. It fails on the HDMI sound output though. This issue doesn’t occur whilst running on top of windows, but as a live build, I have the ‘Failed to initialize audio device error’. This is a common fault and found throughout the latest forum posts. I’ve resorted to going back to the Dharma release, which doesn’t suffer from this error. Please place some focus on this so that I and many others can move up to Eden.
Just to confirm, yes, AudioEngine was merged in yesterday! it is now in the nightlies.
Brilliant news gnif! Fantastic work!
I have been following the AudioEngine build for sometime and now that it has merged with master I have switched across…
Well one of the new features I discovered (and completely unrelated to the AudioEngine) is that the thumbnails for Movies and TV Shows are now integrated into the MySQL database. This fixes a major issue of no longer needing to sync (or network share) the thumbnails folder between XBMC machines (instances).
AudioEngine and thumbnails integration = FANTASTIC
Just discovered that thumbnails for Movies and TV Shows appear to be integrated into the MySQL DB… Happy days for anyone running a multi XBMC setup!
The features in XBMC just keep getting better… AudioEngine and thumbnail integration are superb!
Many thanks
AE works. One thing that just works though I cant test its finer points cause of lack of equipment.
Unfortunately the thumbnails in file mode along with fanart are a goner (inspite the 1 patch to cure it which did ziltch) – Seems that even nuking your db and re-scraping only makes it work for library… Must re-scrape 1 by 1 in filemode, post library db has been rebuilt, what a pain in the backside. when you have a few K files to do it manually. Why cant it work like library does???
I get it xbmc is definitely a must delve under the hood irrespective of which point of release it is… It would be nice for something to just work as it says on the tin…
Also seems that adding custom bg to each part of UI is also gone/lost again a under the hood change if you cant stomach the invariably bubbly blue and only bg. Oh well.
How does the thumbnail integration into mysql work? I now use path substitution for thumbs and a bunch of other functions (rss etc). Should i drop the current database and readd everything?
Yeah, I’m interested in this thumbnail business, too. What thumbnails does it store? Will it store all the ones used by a fancy skin like e.g. Aeon Nox, or will it just cache “folder.jpg”s?