DevCon 2012 & User Meetup
It’s been nearly two years since Team XBMC has gotten together in person to discuss the past, present, and future of the XBMC project. The cost and complexity of getting 30+ people from nearly every corner of the world to one place is truly staggering. As such, we are pleased to announce that this year’s conference is being sponsored, once again, by at-visions. If you don’t recall, at-visions are the company who provide the XBMC experience through their ONEvision system to hotels across Europe. It’s entirely possible that they’ve put XBMC in front of more eyes than any other company worldwide! Our thanks to them, both for sponsoring this event and for spreading the XBMC word far and wide.
On the 1st and 2nd of September, we will be meeting in Vienna for a weekend of conferences, hacking sessions, and, as always, beer. A bit over 30 developers and support will be in attendance during the long weekend. A few topics proposed for the weekend include a recap of GSoC, a discussion of the upcoming Frodo release, PVR, documentation, and increased user-friendliness. We can’t guarantee that anything will come out of these talks, but we will do our best to seriously cover as many topics as possible. Feel free to suggest any additional topics you’d like us to consider in the comments below. When DevCon is over and we’ve had a chance to digest all that occurred, we will be certain to give you all a full recap of XBMC-related discussions.
In addition to internal discussion, we have invited a few of our sponsors along for the conference on Saturday. If you have any sort of corporate or business interest in XBMC and would like to come chat with the team, feel free contact us for more details.
Meet-Up
In addition to developer sessions, we’d like to invite any XBMC users in the area to come have a drink with us Sunday night, the 2nd. While Vienna isn’t Stockholm, London, or Madrid (in terms of XBMC user density), we’d still love to see as many of you out as can make it. Feel free to say in the comments if you think you can be there, and we’ll be sure to post when we get more specifics for the Meet-Up nailed down.
Can anyone attend the Vienna meet-ups? Have you already decided on a place?
I would suggest the additional topics of inclusion of a HTML rendering engine (Webkit) in XBMC. It would be really cool if XBMC had web base apps like Boxee.
I was wondering if there is any talk or discussion on if it possible to add Microsoft kinect to the xbmc user interface may be creating a basic api and then letting individual developers come up with cool apps for example control interface skin or a Skype app the possibilitys are endless
Thanks and have a great time .
K
I hope that PVR branch merger into mainline will be #1 in priority for topics of discussions at this years XBMC DevCon.
PVR development for XBMC will not pick up progress and more developes until the code is in your master repository.
@manu
If you are an XBMC user, you are welcome to attend the meetup! We haven’t set a place yet. To some extent, we’re going to wait to see how many people are interested in attending.
Hello!
I am from Vienna. Where is the DevCon? Is it possible to attend as normal user?
Would like to see the people behind XBMC in person but was not able to find some information of the place … Vienna is not that small! ;-)
Thanks
“I hope that PVR branch merger into mainline will be #1 in priority for topics of discussions at this years XBMC DevCon.”
+ 100,000,000,000,000,000,000
@Hans
If you read @natethomas his post you would read that there hasn’t been decided where you could meet.
I hope that there will be finally a split up between the frontend and the backend like plex has done.
Backend should do the scrapping and maybe has a webfront.
Frontend should do the playing and should be able to command the backend to scrape if needed.
@The Dave
+1 and thanks for all your great work!
OOO-yah! a second chance, thats great. i already wanted to attend last year but i had to change plans. tho i’m about 1,5 hours away by car i will try to attend and say hi to you guys.
cheers in advance :)
@Martijn: ah! you’re right. I missed that sorry …
so @natethomas: if its only the question how many people are interested in attending you can definitely count +1.
if I know where it is I will come! :)
Would it be possible to create a playlist for playing video after video for TV shows, Music, Videos and keeping them there at all times? I would like to start TV shows up for my kids and just hit one preset so it will pay more than one 15 minute episode.
@Scott
There are a couple ways to do this right now. My personal favorite is using PseudoTV, which lets you create “channels” of your content that will play for as long as you have the app running.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=90738
@Scott
Look into the PseudoTV add-on.
It creates all kinds of ‘TV’ channels from your library. Really great stuff
When comparing my XBMC setup to my friends’ SONOS system there is really just one thing that I am missing… Spotify. I would love to see this as an add-on in a near future.
Another vote for PVR in main channel
I find it absolutely amazing that this media center is kept going by 30 part-time developers. I guess 30 is a lot of developers for something that isn’t the Mozilla foundation, but it’s still really something great. Thanks for all you do.
+1 for embedding a WebKit HTML Layout Engine into XBMC GUI library so that XBMC can have HTML5 addons.
HTML5 markup language based apps looks to be the future across different Smart TV platforms and more.
If you embedded WebKit then it would be much easier to port HTML5 apps from Android, iOS, and Boxee, etc.
Also having an integrated Web Browser in XBMC that could be controlled with a remote would be a bonus!
@Svenkan
There are already an Spotify add-on (Spotimc) availible, actually there are two but one of them(SpotyXBMC2) reguires you to compile a modified source of XBMC.
Spotimc: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=125147
SpotyXBMC2: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=67012
@Svenkan
There is already a quite good addon for spotify: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=125147
Looks really good! Only disadvantage is that you cannot exit the addon without stopping the music.
+1 for PVR… Having proper PVR would be a great advantage to the home media centre.
And is something that should be done, as you cannot call it complete until it has PVR.
Also once PVR is in, more skin devs will take to and make nice TV show looking skins for it.
+1 for HTML5 web apps and PVR addons in XBMC’s master git repository
+1 Once more for the missing PVR feature being merged into the master
Now when xbmc are starting to become available for mobile devices (ios and android) some new types of media could be up for discussion. I’m thinking of audiobooks, ebooks and probably a lot more, that would be nice to integrate in xbmc.
Also there should be some easy way of make the transition from a mobile device to a stationary one. When coming home I would like to be able to keep listening on my audiobook, music or whatever through my other xbmc devices. Or the other way around keep watching a movie on the tablet when leaving the house.
I know these requests are quite big. But I think xbmc will have to expand for the mobile device era and the time to discuss it is now.
+1 for a proper separate backend.
and as well fpr the PVR integration.
Separate backend is not going to happen. Better sharing than/to-replace MySQL? sure, but for the foreseeable future, XBMC is an all-in-one package. Considering how lightweight XBMC is, there really isn’t much of a reason to separate it into two.
PVR is on the scheduled for discussion. There’s no way we’re going to forget that. Feel free to suggest OTHER topics ;)
+1 for an integrated web engine that would make it easier to port HbbTV and CE-HTML apps into XBMC addons
What I was actually talking about is watching TV Show that were converted to Mp4 and have broken down into Shows/Episode. It would be nice to put together a video set to play like SpongeBob. @natethomas
@nedscott
seconded. requiring a seperate ’server’ installation when standard protocols work just fine is a step backwards in my mind.
Thanks you AT-Visions for being such a long term and dedicated sponsor!
+1 merge PVR in mainline this year, or it will become XBMC’s Duke Nukem Forever, taking forever to be released
Unstable PVR in mainline would get more eyes on it, so be better than PVR as the seperate branch it is today
+1 for official PVR integration and
+1 for an integrated web engine.
PVR merge would be nice plus EPG python API.
@Jaken
I agree that the increased mobility of iOS and Android present some new hurdles. When devices move between networks it becomes essential for XBMC to know what in the library is available and what is on another network. Another key feature for slate/phone XBMC installs is the ability to automatically remove watched media from the library, delete it from the mobile device, add new unwatched media to your device, and scan it to the library. Obviously this would have to be network aware so that it only happens when you are on the network that contains your full collection. This is probably more of an add-on, but due to the mobile nature of slates/phones along with their small storage it would greatly enhance users ability to grab the device and go.
+1 for PVR integration, love to use the Hauppauge HVR 1600 (I have two) inside of XBMC
Hey,
I’m from vienna and if you need any local help, just write me a mail :) . If you want to eat and drink i would recommend the “schweitzer haus” which is typical for vienna and they have enough space for you guys. It’s would be interesting where you meetings are and probably there is something closer to you.
greets
+1 PVR ;)
Well I dont use PVR but I recognize it’s a pretty important feature so +1.
Atm what matters to me is a step towards going custom categories, beyond the classic tv show / movie / music video trinity of the video library.
A lot of excitement about PVR, I hope we’re talking about real TV tuning capabilities that’s my number 1 missing feature. Please if you implement it don’t make it like Kaffeine or MythTV they’re just poorly implemented. More like WMC would be nice.
It would also be interesting with a status follow-up report on Sigma Designs XBMC port to MIPS CPU arch?
XBMC on future Sigma Designs based media players and later others MIPS SoC set-top boxes would rock!
I would love to see a PVR built into XBMC. I would also like to see Pandora add-in.
Thank you for all your hard work. XBMC is awesome.
Enjoy the beers, you have all earned it.
it is better to have a few stable features than a lot of features that only half works!,
until now I think the XBMC team has done a good job to persevere this, despite all feature requests :-),
what I like to see in a future version of XBMC:
- A better global search function (seamless integration that with a press of a button accessible is for all databases)
- Better integration of concert recordings / videos, and other genres we can display in different libraries or lists
no sense to repeat what has already been said by others! (pvr….)
THX
Hello Guys,
I am from Vienna, and would be interested in the meet up. did not catch it last year..
please tell me when and where.
cheers, and keep up all the great work!