For this week’s Feature Friday, we decided to go a bit different in our theme. Rather than focusing on one setup, we decided to pull together as many setups as we could under a common theme, where the winning entries would receive a Pulse Eight USB CEC Adapter or a TotalMount. (Once again, thanks to Pulse Eight for sponsoring the contest.) With more than three dozen submissions, I believe we fairly successfully accomplished our goal. And with hardly any repeated methods for hiding htpcs and otherwise displaying them in an elegant manner, it has been incredibly difficult to choose a winner. Next time we do something like this, we may need to come up with a better way to narrow entries.

Nevertheless, rules are rules, and a winner must be selected. First, I’d like to toss up some honorable mentions, who almost certainly would win on any other given day.

First up: The XBMC Table by Oscar. Here we have a table that totally folds up so that you might assume it was nothing more than your traditional living room coffee table. But then, when it unfolds, BOOM: XBMC. Inside the table are a projector, a subwoofer, and a screen. An additional screen pulls down from across the room.  (Note: This table was absolutely awesome, but somewhat unqualified for either award. The ATV2 can’t accept the HDMI-CEC Adapter, and the ATV2 is built into the table (and no TV exists), so there’s be no real use for a TotalMount. Nevertheless, we wanted to highlight the amount of craftmanship and ingenuity involved in designing so awesome a table.)

Next, the XBMC Subwoofer. One of these subwoofers doesn’t put out any sound, but it does have a tiny HTPC surprise for those willing to check it out! Read more…

Quick update: That does it folks! Thanks for your several dozen submissions. Just a quick glance tells me this is going to be a difficult one to judge. Looks like the non-busy members of the Team have some work to do.

As many of you know, we’ve set a challenge for this week’s Feature Friday for you to submit your best hidden HTPC. At present, we’ve already gotten quite a few entries. Keep those coming!

We’d just like to update with the announcement that now we can confirm the addition of a prize for the winner of the challenge!

The nice folks at Pulse Eight have agreed to to give a USB-CEC Adapter to our Challenge winner. To refresh your memories, here’s the review we did of that Adapter. Safe to say, we think the Adapter is pretty awesome, and, as we keep inching closer to Eden being released, this adapter should just continue to be more and more amazing.

Unfortunately, the single easiest device to hide that also runs XBMC is the Apple TV 2, which can’t use the USB-CEC Adapter, so Pulse Eight suggested their ATV2 TotalMount as a second award for the best hidden ATV2. Since it wasn’t costing us anything, we said that sounded fantastic!

Now, for a refresh of the rule:

• Email a link to a picture of your elegantly hidden HTPC. (Alternatively, a link to a picture of your elegantly displayed HTPC, if you are displaying it in an unusual way.)
• Feel free to upload the pic to the site of your choice, so long as it’s possible to download that picture. (For example, we recommend tinypic.com.)
• If you have a good story to go with the picture, include that in the email.
• Send your link to natethomas AT xbmc DOT org with the subject: Hidden XBMC.
• Submissions will not be accepted after 1AM, Eastern Standard Time, Friday morning. (the 25th of November)

The person with the best, most creative method of hiding/displaying his or her HTPC (based on our subjective opinions) will win the Pulse Eight USB-CEC Adapter. The person with the best, most creative method of hiding his or her Apple TV 2 will win a Pulse Eight TotalMount. We’ll announce the winners and display the best pictures Friday night.

If you want to thank Pulse Eight for helping us give away stuff (or want to find out about how things like the USB CEC Adapter are progressing), feel free to give them the thumbs up on their Facebook page. And keep sending in your awesome pics; we’re really enjoying them!

Thanks to some unexpected freeing up of time (and more news unrelated to Feature Friday), we are happy to announce that Feature Fridays are back on the menu. As always, if you have a setup you’d like featured, feel free to send it in to natethomas AT xbmc DOT org (also, see the end of this article for a new contest).

This week, we turn to Matt, who successfully managed to buy his massive collection of harddrives before hard drive prices went crazy. Like all good enthusiasts should, he’s hidden his server running Ubuntu in a back closet, where his 12 TB of harddrive space can spin quietly, away from earshot.

When Matt designed his entertainment center, he decided that visible wires were for crazy folk. The problem was, he didn’t have an entirely new room to work with when building, and he didn’t want ugly speakers hanging out of the walls. So, he did this: Read more…

As a quick followup to the previous article, we are happy to say that XBMC Eden-Pre now has working weather once again, using an addon created by Amet that connects with World Weather Online. To turn weather on, one must install a nightly build of XBMC Eden-Pre no older than 2011, Nov 15, go to addons>Weather, and download the World Weather Online addon. Then go to System>Weather and select World Weather Online as the default. After that, just set your location in Weather Addon settings.

The way weather has been set to work now is by creating a space in XBMC core to interact with weather addons. This space then pushes out weather data to skins in exactly the same way it did prior to the weather breakdown. This method creates a convenient way for backend weather addons to do their work, while keeping weather display methods the same for our skilled skinners.

An immediate benefit to this method appears to be that a number of additional weather addons are already in development. None are officially released yet though, so we’ll hold off on mentioning them until they’ve been deployed.

It’s amazing what a few skilled programmers and some ingenuity can do in a very short period of time.

P.S. Good job, all of you who correctly caught the Game of Thrones reference. 10 points shall be awarded to your houses. Or something.

Keeping Social

In unrelated news, we’ve now created a Google Plus page, for those of you allergic to our Twitter and Facebook accounts, but somehow not allergic to the idea of social networks generally. Feel free to circle us in Google, and we will continue to try to occasionally remember to sign back into Google Plus.

As many of you are aware, recent API changes have forced XBMC and most XBMC-based software offshoots to change the way they handle their weather app. We have refrained from commenting until now, because the Team wanted to internally discuss what the best step forward would be.

We were debating between a few different options, ranging from simply updating the current app with a new provider to totally nuking the weather app from XBMC-core and making it all addon-based.

Well, as you can probably guess, we here at XBMC don’t like doing things halfway. If there is a “right” way to code something, we will do everything in our power to code it that way. And so we’ve chosen to acknowledge our mistake in making weather part of XBMC core, and, as we speak, Spiff and Amet are busily pulling weather out and creating an easily replaceable and updateable Weather Addon.

This by itself shouldn’t add very much time to the Eden dev cycle, but it likely will cause current skins to break, which means we’ll need to allow enough time for our brilliant Skilled Skinners to make their changes.

Update: I’ve since been informed by Skilled Skinner Ronie that Spiff’s magical unicorn powers and coding skillz should actually prevent current skins from breaking. Chalk another one up for the brilliance of Team XBMC.

Thanks much for everyone’s patience. Feel free in the comments to let us know if you’d rather we fixed the problem a different way, or if you’d rather we just got rid of weather entirely, in favor of sticking our heads out the window.

Finally, for your weather forecast: Winter is coming.

Sometime around 2006 or 2007, I modded my first Xbox. I admit it, I’m practically a n00b in the realm of XBMC hacking. I didn’t even know what YAMP or Xbox Media Player were until I researched them! I bring this up because since that amazing day I haven’t felt the complete astonishment of a perfect merge of hardware and software until this past weekend, when I connected my TV to my pc via the Pulse Eight USB-CEC Adapter.

Here we can see the tiny adapter connected on both sides to HDMI cables and a mini-USB cable attached on the end. Those aren't over-sized HDMI cables either. The adapter is REALLY tiny.

First, a bit of back story: Often, people don’t understand why the Team so excitedly awaits the coming of Binary Addons. To put it simply (and probably factually inaccurately), binary addons mark the step in which much of XBMC becomes self-updating.

Since XBMC Atlantis and Babylon, the team has slowly been trying make XBMC more and more modular, so that pieces of XBMC could be updated without the need for a complete reinstall of the system. A highly successful example is our scrapers, which were once built into the system, and are now easily and often updated.

Unfortunately, many pieces of XBMC are simply too integrated to ever fully get pulled out or added onto without the use of an independent program. Likewise, a great deal of functionality can never be added using the simple python addons we rely on today. Thus, the necessity for independent, binary addon programs becomes clear. Read more…