We are now finished with month #2 of our monthly development cycle for XBMC 13 – Gotham. This month we see new features for iOS, Android, and PVR, as well as a new notification system, a new method for sorting images, and much more.

iOS

Dev ulion has added a boatload of new items to XBMC for iOS this month, including speed and stability fixes, along with a few major new features.  XBMC is now able to continue playing audio in the background on iOS, with support for the native media controller bar as well as headphone controls on the lock screen and multi-task bar. In order to continue playing music, the user will need to press play again in the multi-task bar or lock screen or with the headphone controls.

Music will also resume after an interruption such as a phone call. Additionally, thumbnail art and other info about the audio currently playing will be available on the lock screen, though this feature requires iOS 5+. Keeping video running in the background is not yet supported.

This provides for yet another means of controlling media around the house. Now, you can send the media from XBMC on your iOS device to other uPnP devices with Play Using and actually control that media from your iOS device while XBMC is running in the background. While video running in the background is not controllable on your iOS device, video IS controllable in the background if it has been sent to other devices using Play Using.

Android

While very few features visible to the user have been included this cycle, a number of major under-the-hood features have been included by TheUni which will allow XBMC to better communicate with Android and other Android applications in the future. The specific future actions this will allow remain to be seen. Additionally, starting XBMC as the launcher should no longer result in a crashes and black screens.

PVR

In PVR news, there an Electronic Program Guide (or EPG) button has been added to the Home Screen as a submenu item for Live TV, so that users can now have easy access to a list of all upcoming content. Additionally, when tuning a channel that isn’t currently working, XBMC will now be able to show what channel you’ve landed on.

System-wide

Many users turn off their RSS feed in XBMC and rarely visit the front page of XBMC.org, which means they may find themselves unaware that a major release has just occurred. With this cycle a pop-up has now been incorporated by Martijn that will occasionally check to see if a new version of XBMC is available. If it is, the user will be prompted to visit XBMC.org and download. The pop-up can be easily dismissed. Upon the release of XBMC 13, the pop-up will only show for final releases and bug fixes.

This pop-up is especially noteworthy at it is one of the first issues posted in our public Team Member discussion area in the forum that’s been resolved. With luck, that will become more and more useful as an area for open, public discussion.

The bug that was causing all the crashing early last month, due to two conflicting addons, has been resolve. The issue at the time was that both addons depended on each other, creating an ugly infinite loop. That particular infinite loop is no longer possible.

User rubpa has added a new sort method for images. Now, users can sort by the date the pictures were taken, data that is stored in the EXIF timestamps of every image.

Finally, theuni and Montellese are working on two projects that seek to unify things.

Theuni has unified dependencies. This massive project has provided the Team and other developers a much cleaner, simpler, faster, and easier building process. From this point forward, there should be significantly fewer problems as we release each monthly development cycle alpha.

Montellese, meanwhile, is unifying the touch input system. Theoretically, this should make a single change to the touch input system result in correct solutions across all the touch platforms, as well as making it much easier to add touch input to additional platforms as they arrise.  At present, Android and iOS have been included with this cycle. Soon, Windows and Linux touch input systems should also be included.

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the March changes, feel free to take a look at our list of March milestones. It’s quite a long list this month. Also, keep an eye out for both the April Cycle and other stories on the blog. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading. Be aware though, that this is very alpha software with potentially numerous bugs. There is a very good chance that this alpha will break on you.

• Windows
• OSX and OSX-x86-64
• Android
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Ubuntu users, please point to the unstable ppa as described in the Linux instructions

How to Contribute

If you use this cycle’s build, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac, provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like.

For those of you who are tracking and submitting bugs: You may notice that Github has an “Issues” section. The Team would very much appreciate it if you did not submit bug reports through that section, but rather continued to use the forums and Trac. At the moment, the Team is using Issues as a concise means of grouping and identifying particular bugs that they gather from the forum and Trac sources. Thanks for your help!

Sranshaft's Immersive skin is a leading candidate for new default XBMC skin

After extensive contract talks and negotiations, we at XBMC are excited to announce an early agreement to work with Microsoft to replace the now defunct Windows Media Center with XBMC for Modern UI (formerly “Metro”) using a new skin, such as Sranshaft’s Immersive.

This agreement is quite an opportunity for the Team. While we cannot yet go into full details, Microsoft is essentially performing what is called an “acqui-hire.” As the codebase is licensed under the GPL, it’s impossible to put the figurative genie back into the bottle. So instead, rather than acquiring the company that owns the code, they are electing to acquire the people who spend the most time working on the code.

The good news is that this means the entirety of Team XBMC will be working, in the very near future, full time on all that XBMC goodness you’ve grown to love. The even better news is that we will, officially, be porting XBMC to Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows phones, along with the future Windows Blue. As a very substantial portion of our user base is Windows users, this will be awesome news indeed. Likewise, I think it can be said without fear of doubt that Windows RT has been and will continue to be a resounding success as an embedded platform, and we are excited to join in that success!

The only big downside is that, unfortunately, we must make some tough decisions about where to put our resources. To that end, all current XBMC Team members will, from this point forward, be wrapping up any current work on non-Windows platforms. With the release of XBMC 13, the official version of XBMC will revert to a single, exciting platform.

One major feature of this change will be a big upgrade in how we perform releases. From this point forward, major releases (such as XBMC 13) will continue to be free. Likewise, the codebase remains open source, so users will always be able to build their own. But we’ve determined to incorporate something very much like the Microsoft MSDN program for our monthly alpha build cycles and beta releases. Users will be charged a small monthly recurring fee and will have complete access to all our freshest and most recent builds, along with all older builds!

We are extremely excited about these developments and would love to hear your opinion in the comments below. In retrospect, given Microsoft’s history of city code-names, such as Chicago and Memphis, we think it very fitting that we selected Gotham as the code-name for XBMC 13!

For more news on these exciting developments as they occur, visit www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/.

We’d like to inform our users again that we have applied to be a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code. As many of you know, we were accepted last year as well as in 2008.

As last year was such a success for the program, we have very high hopes that we might be accepted again this year, particularly given all the excitement surrounding XBMC for Android and other embedded devices, though we recognize that GSoC is always a fierce competition. If you are a student interested in applying, please head over to our project Ideas page and begin thinking about what you might like to hack on.

Congratulations to our friends over at OpenELEC for their release of OpenELEC 3.0.0! OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built around XBMC designed to be as lightweight as possible.

OpenELEC 3.0.0 incorporates XBMC 12.1 with support for NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel solutions, along with a dedicated Raspberry Pi build. In addition to XBMC 12.1 and the Raspberry Pi port, 3.0.0 brings stable AMD XVBA video decoding, along with many other stability improvements and other improvements across the entire platform.

For more information or to update your copy, feel free to visit the OpenELEC 3.0.0 announcement page.

About a month and a half after the release of XBMC 12.0, we are happy to announce XBMC 12.1 with substantial fixes  for 12.0 across all platforms. Fixes include:

• XBMC now supports using OSX’s default output device for audio as well as hardware decoding with Intel GPUs in OSX
• XBMC no longer hogs audio for Linux and on resume audio will continue to work in Linux
• Full iPhone 5 resolution is now enabled
• Volume buttons on Android devices now control Android volume, rather than XBMC volume
• Volume buttons on OSX devices once again control OSX volume, rather than XBMC volume
• Player optimization on the Raspberry Pi, including more efficient playback, better subtitle support, and many crash fixes
• iOS 6 support on the AppleTV 2.
• XBMC does not crash when listed on the AppleTV top shelf
• Added support for additional Xbox 360 controller types
• Broader and more intelligent support for CEC devices
• Fixed problems with several addons due to broken binary read/write in our python interface
• Language fixes, including 7 new languages: Albanian, Burmese, Malay, Persian (Iran), Tamil (India), Uzbek, Vietnamese
• AirPlay fixes, including making discovery of XBMC more reliable on OSX
• Numerous crashing and stability fixes across all platforms

For all users interested in maximum stability, we highly recommend that you update from 12.0 to 12.1. This is the XBMC you were looking for.

Updating

To update to XBMC 12.1, please visit our download page, which includes downloads for Windows, OSX, and Android, and instructions for Linux, iOS, the Apple TV, and the Raspberry Pi. XBMCbuntu users can see these instructions for upgrading to 12.1 using ppa:team-xbmc/ppa. A clean build of XBMCbuntu with 12.1 will be available in the near future.

If you have any problems read the Frodo FAQ, the Raspberry Pi FAQ, or the Android FAQ, depending on your version.

How To Help

If you would like to help with XBMC, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac, provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like.

For those of you who are tracking and submitting bugs: You may notice that Github has an “Issues” section. The Team would very much appreciate it if you did not submit bug reports through that section, but rather continued to use the forums and Trac. At the moment, the Team is using Issues as a concise means of grouping and identifying particular bugs that they gather from the forum and Trac sources. Thanks for your help!

XBMC relies on many 3rd party sites like www.thetvdb.com and www.fanart.tv to provide metadata transparently into your living rooms. The vast majority of these sites are run by fans of home theatre software who simply wanted a better resource for their metadata.

A while ago Last.fm made a change to their API which cut off full music artist biographies from being scraped properly by XBMC. We had a discussion with them and it was clear we were causing their API a massive load. Luckily a new site www.theaudiodb.com stepped up as a free to use, open music metadata source. The site has been running for over a year now and has had over 100,000 edits from 600+ active members. Currently the API has an average of 1.5 million API hits from 9,000 unique users each night. On Sundays the load can reach nearly 2 million requests in a 24hr period. That’s some pretty big numbers for a hobby site.

If you would like to help out theaudiodb, you can contribute to the site in 2 ways:

The first is to sign up and enter data or upload images. Each time someone contributes in this way, the information is instantly available to millions of users all over the world. You can see some stats on this page or add new artists to the growing database as soon as you sign up. If you speak another language it would be great to get some more translations complete for common artists and albums.

The other way to support this site (as well as others that XBMC relies on) is to make a small donation to cover their costs. The site has a target of 500 pounds in order to cover the bandwidth of scraping for the year. You can donate by clicking the paypal link on the front page.

As always we encourage users to contribute to any of the 3rd party sites XBMC relies on for metadata. Keeping these sites healthy, up-to-date and funded will improve XBMC in the future for all. Future developments could include scraped music banners, artist logos, concert listings or music recommendations based on your listening habits.

Before we get started with the Cycle release notes, we are going to let the cat out of the bag. Team XBMC has voted and determined that the development code name for XBMC 13 will be Gotham. Those of you with art skills are welcome to start putting together awesome XBMC 13 Gotham images now, if you like.

With XBMC 12 – Frodo released, we are now returning to our monthly development cycle, where the first portion of the month is dedicated to feature additions and the second portion is devoted to bug fixes for those and other features. 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, in turn, will have a more stable and predictable development process. For those of you who would prefer a stable version of XBMC, we will always recommend the most recent stable release (XBMC 12.0), 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. As always, we recommend you backup your userdata folder before upgrading.

With that said, let’s review some of the more notable changes from the February Changelog.

Play Using…

As many of you know, one of the bigger pushes for the XBMC project over the past year has been a dramatic improvement in UPnP support. In continuing that trend, developer elupus has implemented a new UPnP Play Using… feature, which allows the current XBMC machine you are interacting with to push video or audio to any UPnP compatible device that supports the file-type.

For those familiar with AirPlay for video and audio, this is quite similar, except now you don’t need to be using an iOS device to push your content. You just need to check the box to turn on your UPnP server in XBMC under System->Services->UPnP and you can send your media anywhere that supports it.

Once UPnP is enabled, simply highlight some piece of media, open the context menu, and select “Play using.” A list of your UPnP compatible devices will pop up, including any other instances of XBMC that you’ve allowed to be controlled by UPnP (also a setting in System->Services).

At the moment, Play Using cannot be used mid-playback, though that is slated to be introduced. Also, as you can see in the above image, the controls on the device that is serving up the media are limited in the default skin Confluence, but are the full playback controls in the mobile skin Touched. Playback itself is already nearly flawless. Also, at present Play Using only works for local media and does not yet support video and audio streaming addons.

Android Improvements

This first cycle includes a slew of Android improvements. For starters, XBMC now controls native Android audio, so users don’t have to close XBMC, turn the volume up, re-open XBMC, and finally listen to whatever they were listening to. Instead, the audio is controlled like any other Android app (thanks to mcrosson). Second, XBMC for Android is no longer stuck facing one direction. If you flip your Android device 180 degrees, XBMC will flip with it (thanks to montellese).

iOS Improvements

The local iOS keyboard is already the default keyboard for XBMC, but now it has even more utility. It can accept any text from any iOS language, and it also supports the iOS clipboard copy and paste feature (thanks to ulion).

Other Improvements

Dev Montellese continues his breakneck work of improving the XBMC library. With this cycle, he has added tags for tv shows and musicvideos, and he has also made it possible for those individuals who like to pick and choose each piece of media art individually to add alternative artwork (landscape, banner, etc.) without needing to use an addon like the automated Artwork Downloader. To use this feature, click “Choose art” on a piece of media’s info screen, and then select “Add art” at the bottom.

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the February changes, feel free to take a look at our list of February milestones. It’s quite a long list this month. Also, keep an eye out for both the March Cycle and other stories on the blog. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading.

• Windows
• OSX and OSX-x86-64
• Android
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Ubuntu users, please point to the unstable ppa as described in the Linux instructions

How to Contribute

If you use this cycle’s build, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac, provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like.

For those of you who are tracking and submitting bugs: You may notice that Github has an “Issues” section. The Team would very much appreciate it if you did not submit bug reports through that section, but rather continued to use the forums and Trac. At the moment, the Team is using Issues as a concise means of grouping and identifying particular bugs that they gather from the forum and Trac sources. Thanks for your help!