The rumors are true.  As you may have noticed if you avidly watch XBMC development on Github, we have now entered Feature Freeze for the upcoming release of XBMC 12: Frodo.

For the average user, this means a couple things. First, you should begin to see XBMC Beta releases coming out very shortly. Second, given our fairly well documented open development cycle, there should be very few surprises from now until the release of Frodo. By definition, the features you see now are the same features you will see when Frodo is released with the possible exception of some smaller updates in the default skin Confluence.  So if you’d like to see what XBMC 12 is going to look like, feel free to install the October alpha at the bottom of this post. As always, it’s important to remember that the alphas are definitely alpha software that you use at your own risk.

Release Manager

Spaceman Spiff spares no one!

Much as development for Frodo was dramatically different than development for Eden, so too will the upcoming Beta process be different. This year we’ve created the new position of Release Manager, who is in complete control of the Frodo branch from the time we entered feature freeze until the time XBMC has been released. The Release Manager will determine when a new Beta is released, when XBMC is ready to switch to release candidates and Gold status, and whether code changes are fixes (OK) or features (not OK). Needless to say, it is a thankless job and a job that requires a person who is both extremely well versed in the code of XBMC and not afraid to make people angry to get the job done.

Which is why we are excited to say that we’ve selected grumpy developer extraordinaire Spiff to be our Release Manager for XBMC 12. We are convinced that Spiff will do a truly fantastic job in the role, even if he does get a few white hairs in the process!

October Cycle

The current goal is to release the first Beta of XBMC 12 at some time mid-November. At that time, we will review all the many features that have been added since the release of Eden. Likewise, during the Beta cycle, we’d like to continue to highlight the work done by our Google Summer of Code students in one or two posts.

For now, we will simply review the new features submitted during the last dev cycle before feature freeze.

UPnP Update

Just as we hit the feature freeze wire, a significant portion of one of the remaining most frequently requested features was added to XBMC. alcoheca’s GSOC project, a massive update of UPnP to make XBMC a truly capable UPnP server is now part of mainline. While transcoding is not part of the update, all metadata, images, and library functions including watched and unwatched status are now available depending on your client – naturally, an XBMC client is best, though efforts are ongoing to work with the numerous alternative clients that all use slightly different specs from one another.

Unfortunately, using XBMC as a UPnP server is still not the preferred method for an XBMC client. For one thing, Confluence and all current skins are designed to expect only a local database or a MySQL database masquerading as a local database, which means one would theoretically need to re-scrape the UPnP server into your local library for the TV shows link to show up in the home screen, which immediately cuts out much of the benefit of a dedicated UPnP server.*  For another, at present while the server can tell the client what has and has not been watched, a major bug exists in that the client cannot tell the server the same thing. This means, if you mark Big Buck Bunny as watched on your XBMC client, the watched status on the server won’t be updated. For that matter, since you are using the server library, Big Buck Bunny won’t be marked as watched on your client either.

*For early testers, we highly recommend that you NOT Set Content, if that is still an option for you, as it will likely cause problems in the system.

As such, for now continuing to use SMB or NFS shares on your XBMC clients is still the recommended route, but we will keep you updated on the progress of UPnP, including any bug fixes throughout the Beta process. Additionally, skilled skinners, we are excited to see if and how you incorporate UPnP nodes into your design. To see an ongoing discussion of how UPnP will be improved now and in the future, feel free to visit alcoheca’s GSoC forum thread.

Advanced Filtering

If you have been reading the monthly cycle updates, you know that Montellese has been working on major improvements to the underlying XBMC library. A significant culmination of that work has been added this month in the form of the newly updated Filter.

The New Media Filter

Now those of you with an extensive library will be able to filter your library by any number of new, simple methods, including title, rating, year, actor, whether the series is ongoing, etc., and you can of course combine as many of those methods as you like for laser focus. Additionally, this filtering will occur in realtime, so the moment you narrow the span of years, your library will immediately narrow to meet the specification without any need of hitting the “OK” button.

Many More

Needless to say, because October was feature freeze month, numerous additional features have been added, including…

• numerous JSON-RPC updates, including PVR support, optimizations, better conflict handling, and better webserver support by Montellese
• PVR timeshift support (if the backend supports timeshift) – hat tip to non-team member Margo for this one
• improvements to the OMXplayer, the media player of Raspberry Pi by gimli
• Additionally, OMXplayer can now play back DVD ISOs if users have gotten the MPEG2 codec license thanks to user epideme
• the CD ripper now works in the background thanks to Spiff
• panoramic photo panning support by Montellese
• Dirty Region support is now on by default by TheUni
• Further improved image handling in the database, allowing one to select fanart, poster, banner, and thumb, rather than forcing the choice between downloading posters and downloading banners – kudos to Jonathan Marshall and Montellese for this work.

As always, this is a mere selection of numerous changes from this month. For a full list, feel free to check out the GitHub changelog. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading.

• Windows and OSX
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Given the additional complexities of distribution, builds for Linux are not currently available at XBMC.org. A number of developers are currently hard at work on the problem however. With luck, we should finally have a Linux PPA available by the time the Betas begin rolling out.

As you might already know, XBMC has moved translations handling to a great web based translation system called Transifex lately for the Frodo release. This turned out to work really awesome with the help of our regular and a lot of new translators.

Translators would love to translate the addons and skins as well. Team XBMC would like to help the developement with providing and maintaining the same translation infrastructure, what we use for XBMC core, to YOUR addons and skins.

With this system, handling of language files for your addon becomes much more simple, because you won’t have to deal with pulling translations to your upstream addon repository language-by-language, monitoring the mailing list anymore.

All you have to do is provide some basic data of your upstream repository (where the fresh English language file resides) and you can easily pull in fresh translations from time to time, (or before bumping release) from XBMC’s official translations github repositories for addons and skins.

These repositories are always kept in sync with the translation work going on transifex.net. This work is done by Team-XBMC, just like we do it with XBMC-core and internal addon language files.

Along with user friendliness, one really awesome thing about Transifex is that translators will be able to use the translation memory created with the core language file and the internal addons. So they can check how a special term was already translated.

Read more…

For those of you interested in using XBMC purely as an appliance, which is to say, for those of you who don’t want to deal with a full operating system like Windows or OSX, and would rather boot directly into a super fast, super efficient version of XBMC, we are happy to congratulate our friends over at OpenELEC for releasing version 2.0.

OpenELEC 2.0 is a speedy Linux-based version of XBMC 11.0 Eden designed to be installed on most Intel and AMD 32-bit and 64-bit hardware with support for Intel, NVIDIA ION, and AMD Fusion-based systems. OpenELEC supports most wireless and wired network cards along with extensive support for legacy and bleeding edge GPUs.

Because OpenELEC is hyper-efficient without an underlying base like Ubuntu, all system configurations are performed from within the XBMC interface.

In addition to advancing to XBMC 11 Eden, version 2.0 includes PVR support within the XBMC GUI and includes DVB firmware and drivers, TVHeadend, VDR, Njoy N7, MythTV, Mediaportal, HDHomerun and VU+ support in the OS.

VDPAU support has been available in OpenELEC since v1.0 for users of NVIDIA GPUs, but now OpenELEC 2.0 is the first stable distribution of XBMC to include XVBA support designed to replace VAAPI and improve stability and performance on AMD devices. The advantages of XVBA support are enormous. Now modern AMD systems are capable of performing GPU decoding of h.264 and VC-1 content directly, greatly reducing CPU usage and enabling the use of lightweight and inexpensive AMD CPUs.

OpenELEC 2.0 also now comes with CEC Adapter support built in, as well as Airtunes and Airplay support.

To learn more and download your own copy, you can visit the OpenELEC website and read the full announcement here.

As mentioned previously, we have now moved into a monthly development cycle, in which we merge new features at the beginning of the month and then perform bug fixes through the rest of the month. 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 11.0), 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 in the September Changelog.

Before we do though, we should note that this month will be slightly different than previous months. As we are beginning to gear up for Frodo, a significant number of new, big features that touch numerous portions of the whole program are being added. With all of these new features added, there is a very good chance that this month’s snapshot will be even less stable than normal.

Personal Video Recorder (PVR) support

It is, without a doubt, one of the single most requested features for XBMC, and we are happy to announce that PVR support has been added to mainline XBMC, which will allow users with a TV tuner to watch live TV, listen to radio, view an EPG, schedule recordings, and more.

XBMC’s approach to PVR support is somewhat unlike its approach to other features. Rather than supplying our own PVR software, a task that likely would have taken much, much more time, particularly if we had wanted any hope of making it work across all platforms, we have determined that there are already numerous PVR software platforms available and ready to serve up TV to XBMC. So we made it possible for XBMC to speak with these other applications through PVR addons. For those familiar with the terminology, XBMC acts as the frontend and the software that tunes and records television acts as the backend.

At present, PVR support remains very much a work in progress. The PVR addons required to get XBMC speaking with your chosen backend still need to be compiled by hand. There is no combination of hardware and backend software that is more highly recommended than any other combination.

The Team does not recommend that you attempt running PVR now, unless you are pretty comfortable working with the guts of XBMC and don’t mind getting your hands dirty. In the coming months, documentation and PVR addon support should become much more user friendly.

For more on PVR, feel free to visit our Wiki section and our PVR Help forum. And check out our list of frequently asked questions. For more images of PVR in action, scroll to the end of this post.  Thanks to Lars Op Den Kamp for being the primary dev of the project for the past few years and alcoheca for starting it up, all the way back at XBMC’s last GSOC.

Raspberry Pi Support

As many of you are aware, XBMC has already been available on the Raspberry Pi for quite some time. However, until now, that support has not been a part of mainline XBMC. With this change, OMXPlayer (the player used to playback 1080p video on the ARM powered Pi) enters mainline XBMC as do many under the hood features for ARM and RaspberryPi support. Thanks to Edgar Hucek for heading up this project.

So Many Others

Additional features this month include:

• The Test Suite developed by amejia for Google Summer of Code, designed to make testing various parts of XBMC easier and faster
• A code generated scripting engine that comes from Jim Carroll that performs two separate tasks. First, it makes it much easier for XBMC developers to open up the XBMC API to addon writers. Second, it opens up the possibility of more easily writing addons in the future in code other than python.
• Improved picture zooming and rotating on touchscreen devices
• Tagging support for tv shows and music videos so that they match the tagging support already available in movies
• Improvements in slideshow movement.
• Additional GUI speedups for low power devices

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the September changes, feel free to take a look at our list of September milestones. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading.

• Windows and OSX
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Given the additional complexities of distribution, builds for Linux are not currently available at XBMC.org.

Finally, a note 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.

Also, as we move closer to Frodo, we would like to remind all of our dedicated translators that we’ve now moved to Transifex, which should make the entire process much easier. For a step by step walk through of Transifex, feel free to visit our wiki page on the subject.

Thanks for your help! Read more…

Happy Birthday To Us!

Today marks a very important and proud milestone in our history. On 5th October 2002, one of the first ever betas of the XBMC source code got uploaded, as the result of a merge between two different home theatre applications. Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joined the Xbox Media Player team and the two projects were merged. The first release of the combined projects was called “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released, 10 years ago to the day!

We have had many releases since then, reaching the first stable of the newly named “Xbox Media Center” v1.0.0 in 2004, another name change to “XBMC” v2.0.0 in 2006 and Linux support in 2007. As we developed and grew, there were even more stable releases all the way up to the multi-platform “Eden”, and the soon to be released “Frodo”.

The project has continued to evolve, with many changes such as the move from CVS to SVN and now ultimately GITHUB, support for various new platforms and a huge amount of new features, add-ons and beautiful skins.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and commitment to XBMC over the last 10 years, from the creators, developers, testers, skinners, add-on writers and especially to the users – you are the reason the project was started and without your constant support, we wouldn’t still be here!

Every one of you has made XBMC what it is today and helps us go from strength to strength. We hope you are as excited as we are to see what the next 10 years will bring!

Here’s to the next 10 years!!

We really don’t spend enough time pointing out and thanking those individuals and websites who make the entire XBMC experience possible by agreeing to be included as default XBMC addons and scrapers. Every time you turn on XBMC, browse your library, and navigate your media, you are almost certainly benefiting from the hard work and expense of not only Team XBMC, but also numerous others. The value of these services is truly immeasurable to the user experience. For this reason, we’d like to take this time to talk about the hard work of others.

The TVDB.com

The TVDB covers a lot of ground

One of XBMC’s earliest online content providers was TheTVDB. Back in 2006 and early 2007, the leading media center software for the PC was actually not XBMC (since XBMC had not yet been ported to the PC). Instead, in those days the major PC software was Meedios and Media Portal. Given XBMC’s memory limitations and the fact that we were all still several years away from the efficiency improvements that would make XBMC the beast it is now on embedded devices, Meedios and Media Portal were the primary platforms on which users could install fanart and really go crazy with the early artwork heavy skins of the time, like the original Aeon. TVDB helped to shape many of the rules we take for granted these days. For example, on the XBMC wiki, we have a number of examples of “good” and “bad” fanart, where “good” fanart has no vignetting and is left entirely clean, so that the skinner can do with the art as the skin dictates, rather than as the artist dictates. Such rules were originally created and enforced by the TVDB and revolutionized the way we interact with skins today. The TVDB was also the site behind thumbnails, banners, and other multi-format image work.

Since those days, media center software has only gotten bigger and more popular, with millions of new users every year. Meanwhile, TVDB remains a wholly crowd-sourced website with artwork licensed under the Creative Commons whose server costs and budget are based almost entirely on donations by users like you and me. Every time you scan your TV shows, you are almost certainly looking at artwork and show information that came from The TVDB’s servers. If you are as grateful as we all are, feel free to donate to the server fund.

Fanart.tv

Various examples of fanart.tv-style art

As time went on, more and more forms of artwork arrived on the scene, until eventually TVDB was simply unable to accomodate all the different types of artwork people wanted included. Users wanted png-style artwork that could incorporate transparencies. In particular, they wanted what came to be known as “clearlogos” which are simply the logos of the show without a rectangular background or any other art. They wanted art for individual seasons. They wanted “clearart” which was typically the cast of a show without a background. Seeing a need, XBMC user Kode began adding clearlogos to his site “Lockstockmods.” As more and more art was submitted, it became clear that all this artwork was going to need its own website. And thus was fanart.tv born.

These days, fanart.tv hosts clearlogos, clearArt, characterArt, TV thumbs, Season thumbs, and show backgrounds. It covers TV shows, Movies, and Music. Indeed, fanart.tv’s most active section today is Music, with more and more album covers and artist thumbs being added every day. It does a little bit of something for almost everyone on the artwork front. And quite likely at some time or another, if you have browsed the artwork of XBMC, you’ve seen something that was originally hosted on fanart.tv. Much like TVDB, fanart.tv’s budget is based almost entirely on user donation, so feel free to donate here.

TheMovieDb.org (TMDb)

The MovieDb was created in 2008 with the limited goal of provided better high resolution posters and fanart for XBMC. Since then, it’s become a one-stop shop for posters, art, cast and crew info, trailer links, and more. Much like Fanart.tv and TVDB, TMDb is entirely crowd-sourced.

Weather Underground

The Weather Underground (or Wunderground) is somewhat unique among our content providers, in that they are a for-profit organization who typically charges quite a bit to provide weather services to software like XBMC. As some of you may recall, midway through the Eden beta last year, we lost access to our previous weather service provider. Fortunately, the Weather Underground agreed to step in, wave the typical API fee, and act as a weather service sponsor for XBMC.

Many more…

That is a mere sprinkling of the many websites that contribute to the incredible user experience that XBMC brings together. Other providers include TheAudioDB and MusicBrainz (for music), TheGamesDB (for games), and so many more, thanks to the remarkable work of an army of addon developers and coders.

One Last Group to Thank

There is one other group that we really need to thank: All of you users. Without  your tireless efforts filling in all the missing data on all these crowdsourced sites, XBMC would be nowhere near as fantastic as it is today. Even if you can’t donate to various server funds, you can always contribute art, information, or reviews. In XBMC development, we are fond of the phrase “code welcome” to remind our users that XBMC is a open source, user-created project. While not everybody can code, almost everyone can provide a summary or a picture or a review. And already, countless thousands of you have already done so. Thanks so much for your efforts!

Link Roundup

Read more…

As mentioned previously, we have now moved into a monthly development cycle, in which we merge new features at the beginning of the month and then perform bug fixes through the rest of the month. 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 11.0), 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 in the August Changelog.

Touchscreen Keyboard Optimization

With the push into tablets and the continued support of iOS devices, it’s becoming increasingly critical that XBMC provide a better user experience for touchscreen input. As such, the first feature of this month’s Cycle is a refactor of our GUI Keyboard to allow for native onscreen keyboards. This means the keyboard that you see while using other software on iOS will be the same keyboard you see while using XBMC.

Artist-based Smartplaylists

For those who are not aware, XBMC Smartplaylists are a sort of filter that should not be confused with something like an iTunes Auto Playlist, as they behave differently. An iTunes playlist is typically a list of songs meant to be played in order or randomly, one right after another. An XBMC Smartplaylist is merely a filtered list from which one can pick an individual song or video, and once the song or video has ended, the user will be returned to the list to select another item.

The vast majority of dev Montellese’s GSoC work this summer has been dedicated to speeding up and refining Smartplaylists so that searching and filtering your content is faster and easier than ever before, and all done in real time. This month, he added Artist-based Smartplaylists, so that users can sort and filter their music by topics such as artist, genre, moods, styles, born, bandformed, disbanded, died, biography, and instruments, with the potential of adding even greater filtering support in the future.

Conclusion

As always, this is merely a sample of the many changes this cycle. For a full list of all the August changes, feel free to take a look at our list of August milestones. Also, keep an eye out for both the September Cycle and regular stories on the blog, as we’ve quite a bit of upcoming news. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading.

• Windows and OSX (64bit OSX will be available in the morning US time)
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions (also available in the morning US time).
• Given the additional complexities of distribution, builds for Linux are not currently available at XBMC.org.

Finally, a note 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!