XBMC 12.0 Frodo - Beta 1
Update: There was a packaging issue with the Beta1 Windows build that caused some scrapers to not install correctly. This has since been resolved, any Windows Beta1 users should grab the repack available at the download page.
It’s been a mere eight months since Team XBMC released XBMC 11. If you’ve been following along with us in that time, you already know about most of the new features, changes, and updates that our entire team has been working tirelessly to put into place. But you also know that all those features have only been available in monthly alpha builds.
Now we are excited to say that we are finally ready to roll out the very first beta of XBMC 12 Frodo.
The Name
In the past, we’ve traditionally named our releases after fantastical places like Camelot, Babylon, and Eden. This time around, on the release set to be titled with the letter ‘F’, we decided to take a slight break from that naming process to honor our roots. Ten years ago, an individual with the username Frodo joined the Xbox Media Player team, bringing along his open source software project called YAMP. With the addition of Frodo’s project the three founders, Frodo, d7o3g4q, and RUNTiME, released the first non-beta version of the Xbox Media Player – XBMP 2.0 – as open source software. Frodo then spearheaded the move from XBMP to the more feature rich XBMC, including acting as the primary author for the initial UI engine.
Today, thanks to the three founders’ decision to release open source, hundreds, if not thousands of people have contributed to XBMC in the form of core code, addons, skins, scripts, hosting, evangelizing, and more. Due in part to its open nature, XBMC has been ported to every major viable operating system and architecture. Skilled skinners have succeeded in making skins that resemble almost every major 10′ UI released in the past ten years, along with dozens of completely unique looks seen nowhere else. XBMC can be had on devices as inexpensive as $25 and can be the primary UI for PCs a dozen times more powerful than the original Xbox was. And for all that, it feels like we’ve only scraped the surface of XBMC’s potential, all because three people decided the project would be better off if it were released as free software.
For that reason – and for so many others – we choose to honor our founders and the past ten years by naming XBMC 12 after one of them. Thanks, Frodo. And thanks d7o3g4q and RUNTiME as well. It’s been a great ten years.
The Features
Thanks to an incredibly successful GSoC experience and numerous dedicated developers who have been working on many projects for years, XBMC 12 figures to be one of the most anticipated feature updates in a long time. Features include…
- HD audio support, including DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD, via the new XBMC AudioEngine
- Live TV and PVR support
- h.264 10bit (aka Hi10P) video software decoding for anime
- 64bit support in OSX to match the 64bit support in Linux
- Improved image support, allowing the database to accomodate numerous additional image types
- Support for the Raspberry PI
- Initial support for the Android platform
- Improved Airplay support across all platforms
- Advanced Filtering in the library
- Advanced UPnP sharing
- Translations now powered by Transifex
Of course, that is merely a small selection of the many changes from the past seven months. For a more in depth look, feel free to review the write-ups of the alphas for each month.
A Few Issues
Needless to say, this is beta software. You should absolutely expect problems to occasionally crop up. At present, we are anticipating a number of issues as we switch XBMC over from the Eden addon repository to a new Frodo repository, including partly broken skins and various scripting/scrapers errors. Please bear with us if these problems do crop up. Additionally, PVR users will not be able to switch channels via the channel up/down buttons using their remotes or CEC due to a slight change in the way PVR keymaps are being handled. We are aware of this issue and should have it fixed by Beta2.
Needless to say, there are several other issues still being worked on, and more will likely crop up during Beta testing. If you would like to report an issue, please search for the issue in our forums first and report any verified bugs in Trac.
As always, if your goal is stability, we recommend that you avoid updating until we have gone gold. If you do decide to install this beta, it is highly recommended that you back up your userdata folder.
Issue Update
Some of you Windows users may have noticed that the scrapers on XBMC 12 for Windows Beta1 were returning an error. This appears to have been an error introduced during the packaging phase that we managed to miss during testing. It appears only to affect users who are doing a clean install and not upgrading.
We are right now building a fix that should resolve this error within the next few hours. Check back on this page, as we will update here when the issue has been resolved.
The fix is now live. Happy downloading!
Conclusion
But enough of all that. Now is the time to get to downloading. Linux users, you in particular will be happy to discover that we’ve finally got our beta PPA up and running, thanks to a number of devs, including our newest team member, wsnipex, and we’ve got an XBMCbuntu iso thanks to the efforts of team member erhnam.
Let us know what you think of the changes in the comments below, or, if you like, via the donation button at the top of the page.
And if you have any problems, don’t hesitate to post about them in our forums and report verified bugs in Trac.
Congrats!
Hi,
How do i find pvr backend?
cause when i switch the live TV to enabled it ask for PVR backend…
10X
Awesome work, guys! Can’t wait to try it.
How long do you expect these beta phases to last? Is there an official proposed timeline release?
I’m not going to enter the beta testing, but I eagerly await it’s full release.
Good luck guys!
Nice to see the raspberry pi getting some love
Sweet!
Been waiting for this, thanks a lot!
@Yaniv
look here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=PVR/Backend
Source tar.gz package for Frodo? Anyone?
If “Support for the Raspberry PI” has been added – where is the Raspberry Pi build?
@ZepperDude
http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Installing_OpenELEC_on_Raspberry_Pi
http://www.raspbmc.com/
Congrats team!
great news but what exactly do you mean with “Support for the Raspberry PI” ?
Where can i get the raspberry pi version?
thanks and keep up the great work!
@Yaniv
PVR Backends are a completely seperate install for the most part. You need to install something else and XBMC will interface with it if it is supported. Check out the forums for more detail and ask questions there.
http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=136
Just a quick question about the Raspberry,, will a release be offered directly from this website or do you only support releases through any or all of the other projects (Openelec/Raspbmc/etc.)
Just started to try out the Raspbmc this week and liking it so far,, just not working well with the webserver controls at the moment which is a bit of a bummer as I prefer to control it with my iphone instead of a IR remote or keyboard.. (TV it’s hooked up to doesn’t have CEC support)
For Raspberry Pi see: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ#Installing_XBMC_on_the_Raspberry_Pi
Those distros will be pushing out Beta 1 shortly.
For Raspberry Pi, please see http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ#Installing_XBMC_on_the_Raspberry_Pi
@monkeysweat
Any XBMC/OS distro that builds XBMC using our build instructions should be considered an official build (unless they made some crazy modifications).
Well the continuation of a great project is great! I just wish we could stop seeing distant mountains to climb, and solve a few painful problems that aren’t as much fun as adopting new codecs and hardware.
Specifically, improving the query language. JUST TRY picking two TV shows that haven’t been played for 10 days.
You’ll wind up having to negate *all* television shows in the repo to do it. And every time a video is added for a new TV Show, it’ll pop up on every playlist you’ve created. It’s maddening.
All we need there is a means of parenthetical processing.
@Yaniv
I guess you need to read up on the backend stuff http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=PVR
@Anonymous
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tags
Well done.
then get coding and submit the change then.
How about other Linux distribution ?
Where can we get source for this beta ?
@Phacog
The download page has a big ‘ol “Source Code” section with a link to https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc
For Beta 1 specifically, https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/archive/Frodo_beta1.zip
@Brian Fahrlander
1, if the solution was easy then it would most likely have been done by now. 2, XBMC developers work on things when they have time and only on what they want to work on. There might be 40+ developers, but of them only a few work on smart playlist related code. Others work on other areas, which is why new features will come in while something else hasn’t been improved/fixed. We can’t (nor do we want to) force developers to work on specific things. If we did then no one would want to work on XBMC.
I’m not exactly sure I understand your example, but if you want, post to the forum and we can likely figure out if what you need is being worked on or not, and if not, what can be done as a work around.
What about iTunes library support ? good job guys!
Thanks, we appreciate all the work everyone puts into this! The best media player around and it’s open source
I currently have XBMCbuntu 11 “Eden” installed. Is it possible for me to upgrade to this and future beta releases and leave my stable Eden version, for example with apt-get upgrade or similar?
Is this compatible with AppleTV 1?
wsnipex – I’ve used your repo with great success for all the alpha builds…. congrats on becoming a team member!
Great Job by everyone getting this release in Beta…. with both AudioEngine and PVR introduced in a single release!
Question about Openelec and the Pi… I know that XBMC members are actively working on the Openelec release… does this mean it will follow XBMC’s release cycle? Or will the Pi version(s) be released during the Openelec cycles?
@Raj
If you install a linux-based OS, yes. I think OpenELEC has ATV1 builds with Frodo.
Full XBMC v12 (Frodo) changelog and releases condensed changelogs are available in the XBMC Wiki now
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_v12_%28Frodo%29_changelog
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Releases
Hey!
Working Great on ATV2. Sadly the known and “library caused” crash when using AFP shares isn’t solved. :( Any News there?
Fantastic Work :) I love it!
Well guess I was wrong guessing v13 would be Gollum :(
anyone for Gallifrey then?
Great news with official audio engine soon. Though I must say I am mostly excited that Linux builds are starting to become officially supported with PPAs and updated iso installers.
Yes! thx a lot guys ^^
Thanx alot.
locking forward for the 10bit support
This is tremendous news! Love the XBMC team so much for everything they do for us lowly end users! Thank you guys so much! After many happy, albeit buggy, months on the alphas, I’m really looking forward to a more stable experience in the months to come! :D
This is great news! Buy some beers with the money I sent you!
Thanks again and again for this amazing software.
seems like the movie scrapers not working and no imdb option
The logic for complex smartplaylist rules (nested “and” and “or” conditions) is actually there, I added it as part of my advanced library filtering GSoC project and it’s accessible through JSON-RPC (e.g. in VideoLibrary.GetMovies) but it’s not available to the XML format which xbmc uses to store smartplaylists created in the GUI (*.xsp). There’s one reason for this: There’s absolutely no way (I can think of) that you can present such complex combinations of rules in a 10-foot user interface.
THX for an awsom system…
Love the new sound support
Nice to finally see HD Audio in a stable release! Roll on uPnP…
yay. thanks. firing up frodo…
When do we get a seemless integration with steam games?
Great to se a new build :), how do i make a static Ip adresse on this version?
Regards Benjamin Simonsen
Have noticed IP control of XBMC doesnt seem to work in the windows frodo beta 1 at least, anyone eslse seen he issue before I submit as an issue have not seen anyone else reporting the issue, worked fine on the october nightlies.
Made my day. Can’t wait to test it on my Rasp.
You just ruined my wife’s weekend!
I won’t be able to do anything besides testing XBMC.