Here’s a quick teaser for those of you who dream of using XBMC on a low-powered ARM platform some day. Our very own McGeagh briefly demonstrates XBMC running on the BeagleBoard using OpenGL ES 2.0 and even manages the obligatory playback of everyone’s favorite: Big Buck Bunny. This is still in early development and is nowhere near ready for public consumption, but it’s certainly a great step in the right direction. Kudos to McGeagh, keep up the good work.
Our friends at themoviedb.org have experienced a major hard drive failure (the database is fine) and they are hard at work rebuilding. This obviously means that XBMC will not be able to scrape movie information from TMDB at this time. There is no need to report the issue, please be patient as they recover. You can watch the status on their twitter page. Good luck guys, and thanks for all you do!
Update: Looks like the site is back up and scraping is functional.
A while ago ASRock Europe kindly lent me an ION 330 to try out as my new HTPC equipment. Got it delivered and started unpacking. It was packed in a neat box along with a hdmi to dvi adapter, a support cd and an anti-slip pad. The case looks just as good as it does on the pictures. Installed it with hdmi to my 37″ LCD TV and optical toslink to my surroundsystem. Booted it up and because it was a sample it came with Windows Vista preinstalled.
Installed XBMC quickly to it and took it for a testspin using AEON as a skin, since it’s pretty demanding on the hardware. Navigation inside the skin seemed fine, noticed that it was a lot smoother than the NVIDIA ION box I had tested before. So surely there is a benefit from having a dual core Atom 330 instead of a single core Atom 230. Did not see any real sluggishness in the skin. Music playback and picture browsing was fine and the little I tested plugins it worked fine as well. Read more…
XBMC has long been criticized and at the same time hailed for its multitude of settings. Depending on your point of view, it is either highly configurable or overwhelmingly confusing. In a sense, both are true.
Like many other open-source programs, we suffer occasionally from the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem. Many developers are often adding cool new features and tacking on options for them, but it’s less frequent that we step back and evaluate those options and how they are presented to the user. We are taking this time (while we’re overhauling the rest of the codebase and preparing for feature-freeze) to do exactly that.
Today marked the first round of the big cleanup. It started with simply setting some Good Defaults ™ and throwing out some rarely used or even non-functional settings. The more difficult part comes next, when we reorganize, regroup, and rename things in an effort to make configuration of XBMC a breeze.
Stay tuned for more. This is going to be an eventful week…
I’ve been getting a tremendous amount of downloads daily and it hasn’t slowed down one bit. This has encouraged me to continue providing updates, so thank you everyone for the support. This update focuses on refining the interface. Some elements of the GUI have been given a second treatment. I’ve also completely remade all the media flag icons to bring them up to standards. Along with this, there are a whole bunch of bug fixes and improvements to look forward to.
This update tries to address all the known problems that have been reported as well as add some new features that have been requested. Some of the things users wanted were:
- Integration with OpenSubtitles_OSD script
- Option to hide the top option menu bar when not focused
- Option to have separate custom backgrounds for videos/movies/tvshows
- Ability to show the current weather on all windows
Our friends at 
A while ago 
XBMC has long been criticized and at the same time hailed for its multitude of settings. Depending on your point of view, it is either highly configurable or overwhelmingly confusing. In a sense, both are true.
