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…

Team XBMC would happily like to congratulate Team OpenELEC on their release of v1.0.

OpenELEC, for those who don’t know, is somewhat similar to XBMC Live. The basic concept is that the user interacts with XBMC without once having to visit a non-XBMC screen. The similarities between XBMC Live and OpenELEC end there though. Live is based on a modified and stripped down release of Ubuntu. OpenELEC has been built from scratch specifically to act as a media center. Live is based on minimal Ubuntu, thus you can easily install all services and applications that are available on Ubuntu repositories, and as a pre-requisite, Live includes all the system files necessary for the Ubuntu ecosystem.  Essentially, the user who is looking for an XBMC-optimized customization of the standard Ubuntu OS would likely prefer XBMC Live. The user who would like XBMC stripped down to the very most basic essentials for ultimate boot time would likely prefer OpenELEC.

In the streamlining process, OpenELEC cuts out any and all unnecessary drivers and optimizes those drivers that are present. In furtherance of this, specific NVIDIA ION and AMD Fusion-based systems have been developed, in addition to the generic build.

Beyond enhanced boot time, perhaps the most interesting features of OpenELEC are the network of additional addons that are separate from XBMC-proper, which allow for LiveTV functionality, GUI configuration, self-updating, and media downloading, among other things.

With release 1.0, OpenELEC becomes fully compatible with XBMC 10.1 Dharma. Now that most of the underlying architecture is in place, OpenELEC should be able to update to XBMC Eden relatively quickly, once Eden has been released.

For a relatively easy to follow guide on installing OpenELEC, feel free to check out the Lifehacker article on OpenELEC. And, of course, go to OpenELEC to download the goodness. For those of you who have already tried out OpenELEC in the past or are going to in the near future, head to the comments to let us know how the experience went.

Today we’d like to feature a much less visible component of the upcoming Eden that is, nevertheless, something the team deems extremely important.

As a rule, we believe that a user’s install of XBMC is his or her own install of XBMC. That’s why you won’t be clicking through any terms of service or other contractual agreements when you install XBMC onto your system. That’s why XBMC is licensed under the GPL. That’s why virtually all development is done entirely in the open and source is invariably available well before an official release. The software is the community’s to do with as they please (so long as anything they do to the software and subsequently release is also made freely available, of course).

Perhaps more than anybody else, XBMC’s resident police officer of keeping things free is a dev who some call Arne, but most (around these parts) call Spiff. Spiff is one of the reasons why, back when the addon system was in development, revision data for each addon was mandatory, so that by the time Eden was rolled out, the Team would be able to announce Addon Rollbacks.

Put simply, just as we believe XBMC is yours, we believe addons are yours as well. Most people leave addon auto-updating enabled, to get the latest and greatest code. But auto-updating can be a double edged sword. What happens when an addon is updated and the user doesn’t like the update? With the program XBMC itself, the user could simply uninstall the most recent version and install an older copy.  With addons, users were out of luck. Until now. Read more…

That's smooth skin!

Confluence has been XBMC’s default skin for approximately 2 years now. In software dev terms, that makes it practically ancient. Fortunately, XBMC’s Jezz_X has been on the case to update Confluence so that it might better take advantage of a bushel bag of new tricks.

Some Background

On August 8th, 2008, an XBMC skinning group that came to be known as Team Razorfish presented a skin called MediaStream to the world. While most XBMC users would typically point to Aeon or an Aeon derivative as their favorite skin, it is undeniably true that MediaStream and its derivatives are the most downloaded skins among all the XBMC and XBMC derivative projects, because they’re the defaults.

When Plex broke off, that team made MediaStream_Redux their default. Similarly, when Team XBMC decided to move on from Project Mayhem 3 HD, we tasked our in-house skinner Jezz_X to make something awesome, and Jezz_X started with the MediaStream base.

On Oct 10, 2009, Team XBMC’s in-house skinner Jezz_X presented the Team with a first look at his, as yet unnamed, new skin. Obviously, we liked it a lot. Over the next month, we threw dozens of requests, bugs, and suggestions his way, and he handled them all brilliantly.

When it came time to name this new creation, the team agreed that we wanted something that was completely the opposite of Mayhem, like Serenity or Elegance or Fluidity. Many wanted to push the smooth, fluid way in which the skin seemed to breeze around.  Additionally, XBMC 9.11 Camelot, the skin’s new home, marked the first time all of the many amazing qualities of XBMC were truly going to combine without a drop of Xbox input. And so “Confluence,” the flowing together of many streams, was adopted. XBMC Camelot was released with Confluence on December 24, 2009, just in time for Christmas, and the devs were already hard at work on Dharma. Read more…