XBMC DevCon 2010 Summary
It has been a few weeks since the annual XBMC Developers Conference (DevCon) took place and we thought it was about time that we gave you some feedback about what took place. What follows is a rundown of what happened at DevCon, who the sponsors for the event were, a brief discussion about sponsors, and a list of ideas and thoughts that were discussed at length during the course of our time together.
This year we were fortunate enough to be hosted by at-visions at Hotel Fabrik in Vienna, Austria. at-visions where truly wonderful hosts and did everything they could to make this a great weekend for everyone that attended. I think I can safely say that everyone from XBMC thanks them for their hospitality and we wish them well with everything they are doing.
This year’s DevCon was possibly the largest to date with a total of 24 people attending over the weekend – a true reflection of how the project has grown over the years.
Team XBMC and our hosts
Hover over faces to see names
This year’s DevCon host: at-visions
For those of you who don’t know, at-visions is a sponsor of XBMC and have developed a bespoke hospitality environment that utilizes XBMC as the front-end in hotel rooms. I think everyone who saw the demo of it over the weekend was incredibly impressed and is looking forward to seeing it in action in more hotels in the future! (jmarshall even had it in his hotel room – presidential perks!)
Whilst on the subject of corporate sponsors, I know this is something that comes up occasionally in the forums and there is a great deal of misleading information being passed around.
We are often criticized for not being more open about the XBMC Foundation. We have nothing to hide; this project is run by all of us in our free time and, as such, things can take longer than planned to get out. However, we do plan on addressing this apparent lack of openness. Watch for a series of follow-up posts over the next week or two. A primary topic that will be covered in great detail is the XBMC Foundation: what it is, who the members are, and why we need it.
Communication
We want to try and improve our communication with the user base. With this website we have an ideal platform for conveying information more frequently. We intend to start putting up a “This week in XBMC” type post every week or so. This post should give an insight into what is happening among Team XBMC and will be the first place learned of new things to look out for.
This is a very big commitment for us; so if there are any users that would like to work with us on this, then please get in touch. Additionally, if there is a topic you would like to see covered in a future article, let us know. It can be easy for us to overlook topics, being so close to the coding process.
Dharma Release
The release of Dharma hasn’t quite gone to plan and has run on far longer than originally planned. It was decided during the DevCon that the current code was in a suitable state to be a release candidate. RC1/RC2 have been pushed out since. Providing there are no major issues as users work their way through RC2, the Dharma final should be imminent.
Usability
We want to make XBMC more user-friendly. We acknowledge at times there can be aspects of XBMC that aren’t completely user friendly and this needs to be improved. In all honesty, this will probably always need to be improved. Perfect usability is an ultimate goal that every team strives for. We only hope that our users remain impressed with the steps we take to push XBMC to be the most user friendly AND the prettiest Media Center available in the world today.
A major area we will be looking into is pushing the Home interface to be more easily customizable and standardizing this customizability across all skins. For example, we want a simple way for users to select add-ons, playlists or just about any item they want and have it placed on the Home screen. At present, favorites work this way to some small extent, but we’d like to ensure an even better integration with the main menu.
The Library and Scraping
Staying on the usability theme, it has been agreed (again!) that scraping and setting up the library is far too difficult for many users. We know we need to make this easier and are looking at how we can make what is arguably one of the most important features of XBMC easier to use for the average user.
One quick and simple improvement that should make it into Dharma (Ed: and has made it into RC1), is that, when adding a video source, the user is immediately prompted to set content on that source, rather than allowing the user to guess there is a second step.
Another idea that has been passed around was making scraper selection simpler. Rather than users specifying a specific scraper, we could perhaps just have them set their main language. From that selection we could then automatically select the best scraper. Ideally, we would like to be able to combine information from multiple sources. No promises any of this will be implemented, just some of the ideas that we have considered to make this process easier.
Next Release – Eden
Given that the Dharma release cycle hasn’t been what we wanted, we want to learn from this process and improve for future releases. Our release cycle is too long and rather than things improving over the long release cycle, things get committed that shouldn’t be, causing issues, which in turn lead to even longer release periods. This is not good for anyone and we need to improve upon this pattern.
We want to get stable releases out more often so users can see progress more often. Rather than “big” feature releases, we plan to start putting out stable releases every few months. These releases may only have one new feature or a collection of fixes, but as a whole we think this will give a greatly improved user experience.
For Eden, the main focus is binary add-ons. Once this is complete it will be released.
PVR Support
It was suggested at one point that PVR support would make it into Dharma. That is not happening. It was then suggested it would make it into Eden. In truth this is also very unlikely to happen. We are not ignoring PVR; there is a lot of work going on in the PVR branches but they are not ready for inclusion into core XBMC at this point. Rather than including a half-baked PVR implementation too quickly, we need to ensure the proper steps are taken, so PVR support is rock solid.
PVR support requires that binary addons are ready to go, so the first priority for Eden is to get that finalized. Of course, this is not ideal for those waiting for PVR, but we felt it necessary to be as open as we can on this matter.
XBMC Appliance
openelec.tv is an embedded Linux release that is entirely focused on XBMC and similar to XBMCLive. It is a very stripped down version of Linux that creates an XBMC appliance / set top box with minimal user input required. It is incredibly easy to install and removes a lot of the difficulties that new users experience with XBMCLive. openelec.tv has been developed by a forum user called sraue, who has now joined the XBMC team. To duly acknowledge the value of openelec.tv, we’ve decided to give it it’s own full release name. While we haven’t decided on that name, the working title is XBMC Appliance .
XBMC Appliance is seen to be a complementary product, rather than a replacement for XBMCLive. XBMCLive is great for those that would like to tweak things, add new software, have some flexibility, but the downside of this flexibility is that setup and maintenance is much more difficult. XBMC Appliance is for those that want to create a dedicated XBMC media player. It has releases for specific hardware platforms and can have users up and running in less than 15 minutes.
Exactly what we’ll call “XBMC Appliance” (and if we’ll call it that at all) is still being discussed.
DSPlayer
After somewhat lengthy discussions on the pros and cons of what the DSPlayer branch offers, it was decided that it isn’t a priority for inclusion in core XBMC at this time. Unfortunately this is unlikely to change, even more so given that XP’s usage is on the decline.
However all is not lost, there may be some hope of it becoming an add-on in the future. Development, without a doubt, is not halting on DSPlayer.
In Summary
I hope that this gives you all an insight into what took place at this year’s DevCon and some insight into what developments may take place in the future. If anyone has any questions or would like to know more, just ask and we will try and answer if we can.
To summarize, I think we can sum up our continued and future vision for XBMC as:
- XBMC will run on as many hardware and software platforms as it can.
- XBMC will continue to be completely free and open.
- XBMC will be easy to use and setup for the average user.
As always we appreciate our users feedback and welcome your comments on everything. The team will be monitoring this post for the next week or so and will try and answer all the questions we can.
I hope this has given you a bit of a insight into what took place at this year’s DevCon and watch out for my upcoming posts – we have lots more exciting news and information to share with you over the coming weeks!
Since i’ve loved XBMC since the XBOX days i can’t tell you how much i appreciate your commitment to this kickass software and the love you put into it. One thing i’ve missed thought is news, development progress and vision statement. It seems that all my wishes come true this christmas :D
Well, well, I contributed patches and bug reports on PVR-testing branch, VDR, VDR streamdev, tvheeadend, …
The real problem is that it was proposed for dhrama and someone worked on the pvr-testing2 brabnch which is now nearly dead but is the only one that allow me to watch HD TV in france.
Then there is the gitorious xbmc-dharma-pvr that breaks vdr-streamdev, HD on tvheadend, and that I can invest some time fixing bugs but only if I know it will serve any purpose. This way you discourage people to invest time.
In addition, I think if you look from a strategic perspective, not having TV support (cable, Sat, DVB-T), will push XBMC out of the HTPC playground. But This will be in another thread.
The replay TV feature quality in france is so poor, that appart looking at in on a small screen Its unwatchable. VoD is quite expensive and you rent it only for 48 hours. Or do uopu belong to peple that only wtach tv on a 7inch screen?
People like me that have tried various multimedia NAS, and have been disappointed by codec, container support and the poor UI, have decided to go the HTPC way. But I do not want to have n boxes connected to TV. I can play blue-ray, DVD, stream from my NAS, recorded numeric PVR stuff but also do want to watch TV with box, and being able to record it. Why should I use another program for this when after tuning a DVB adapter I can receive plain mpeg2ts stream reading from a device instead of a file?
There are already XBMC forks (plex, mediaportal) that have realized it. For me its just a waster of precious resources. I start seeing plex in TV, DLNA + PVR via USB faeture also. If this trend continues and XBMC is still not able to offer more than the online part a connected TV can do, there will be soon no need for HTPC, except for people that want to be able to control their software,GUI, …
And again as already explained catch up TV, is visually not satisfying on a 46+ inch screen and VoD can only be ranted for 48 hours… Plus we have the chance in france to have quality on free TV (BBC life has been producted in HD and many BBC documentary are brodcasted).
couple of quick comments on EricV’s posts:
- pvr-testing2 might be dead, but that doesn’t mean the pvr integration won’t arrive. it just takes some time to do it properly.
- streamdev is obsolete. use vnsi.
- xbmc uses a backend of choice and there will be no integrated backends. if you only use one frontend, then you can still install both a pvr backend and xbmc on the same machine.
VNSi does not support french HD TV (AVC/EAC3 audio). So far the only working solution I have is streamdev (tvheadend via Live plugin is broken also but network via HTSP protocols works. And I added manually EAC3 in tvheadend PVR audio codec parsing already without success).
Well we only have one which is development, which is pvr-testing2. anything else is either deprecated or a fork.
And PVR support is very very likely to come at some point, it just was NOT able to happen in dharma due to addons being very immature when we merged (and we learned from that mistake). PVR will be at earliest in one year is my prediction (might be wrong though, depends on the devs doing it), and we want eden out faster than that, simple as that.
Pvr-testing is dead and has not evolved for months. It does no even compile with recent version of microhttpd, lack most of the Nvidia VDPAU and DVDplayer improvements (I have at list of patches that I manually apply if it helps) and so on. The consequence is that the XBMC part of the plugins are also starting to die except when there are other clients that need similar code (VNSi XBMC is dead as far as I now and even the VDR part is dead). Alive with commit on the linux PVR backends are tvheaedend and streamdev (and I do not know for myth but for me that just too heavy).
Note that until the RTP://IP:port rendering bug bug is fixed, IPTV is also broken when some PVR backend do aggregate multiple TV sources.
@topfs2:
Thanks for your answer. I can understand, why PVR didn’t make it into Dharma and I’m also able to comprehend your argument, why PVR shouldn’t be the next step, but i don’t agree with it.
As EricV just posted (in keeping with what i observed), the pvr-testing2 branch dead and broken. With bug reports for branches not welcome in the trac system there are not many ways to contribute. I’ve been helping with bug reports in a (german) board, where the “owner” of pvr-testing2 used to be active. But there is nothing happening any more. I can only assume, that maybe his live priorities have shifted or he is also sick of being kept waiting for the merge (which would make developement a lot easier).
Considering this, i do not appreciate your comment on not helping. If i knew what to do, i would.
I’m also seeing different stories on the current status of PVR:
- “there is a lot of work going on in the PVR branches” vs “which is pvr-testing2. anything else is either deprecated or a fork.” (with pvr-testing2 almost dead)
- “And PVR support is very very likely to come at some point…” that could be in 5 years.
I guess, what i want say is: It’s kind of a merge now or never. With the pvr-testing2 branch 4 months apart from trunk it will be hard to merge it, but if you don’t do it now, you won’t do it in half a year. If you have to start from scratch, because the pvr frontend and the backend-plugins are outdated to the point, where it will be easier to throw them away, it will be very unlikely that a merge will ever happen, particularly looking at the poor interest among the devs.
What would it take, to get them more interested? A dvb-t-s-c card each?
@EricV
Its a branch, a branch is not meant to be used, its not necessarily meant to have all features from trunk. A branch is meant to have alterations in one specific area. So just because its missing stuff from trunk does not mean its dead, and its by no means dead we are currently focusing on dharma and add ons since they needed attention. I can assure you, I am one of those that really want it also but sometimes you need to step back and look at the big picture, its not ready for main use, and even with team effort it will take time before it is.
A branch that:
1) does not compile with a reasonably up-to-date linux system
2) does contains code that cannot work and be merged upstream because off multiple internal API change (read GetChunkSize here)
3) get bugs reported on its deleted because it does not exist mainstream (bug I created on CDateTime) (BTW if its still the only official branch, why/who can delete existing bugs?)
For me such a branch is dead. I can conceive it for exploratory work but then another should be officially created once POC is done to do it for real.
Never mind, I will manage my own PVR backend stuff as I do not want to be forced to have 3 threads just for reading MPEG2TS from /dev/dvb/adapter0/xxx
@EricV
I give up…. you can believe what you want but I’m saying as a team member that it is NOT dead…. but you can interpret that however you wish.
All in all, if PVR is done before eden is done, it will be in, if it is not done before eden, it will not be in. It is as simple as that, we cannot maintain unfinished code in trunk, nor should we. If you want it in finish up or localize patches that can go into trunk.
1) sounds like a bad merge, which again shouldn’t be needed but has been done because users keep asking for it. And few devs focus on it atm since we are focusing on dharma.
2) its a branch, IMO it should not get bug tickets, I know some have randomly said they accept them but I don’t think its valid and just causes confusion. (same with 3)
If you want to continue this discussion (which I find pointless) please start a thread in the forum…
Great to hear that there will be more frequent releases.
I’ve been using XBMC since it’s inception on the Xbox, and have been using it the last year on a HTPC via XBMC Live. It’s nothing short of amazing the progress this media center has made.
One thing I would like to see is perhaps adding an info page for what some of the settings features do (i.e. VDPAU studio level conversion). This could one via a settings manual/info menu/page. I guess this info would needed to be added to the manual wiki page first.
I’m not really the type of user that really needs the interfaced made more user friendly, but in regards to the home page, maybe adding an add-on wizard feature would make sense.
I agree with this I am really happy with XBMC as it is now. Anything from now on is just a bonus.
I am using the dushmaniac’s PPA which is Dharma+PVR+TVheadend and it works like a charm. The only problem for me is that EAC3 is not suported in some HD channels (with AAC there is no problem). I think it is because EAC3 has only been added in trunk and not in Dharma.
Because of this it is rare for me that oficial XBMC+PVR release is so problematic.
Anyway, thanks xbmc-team for great work. XBMC is awesome.
I was wrong. EAC3 has already been added to Dharma so it is also available at Dushmaniac’s PPA. Just I have tried it and works fine.
http://trac.xbmc.org/changeset/35346
Thanks for the great post!
I want to thank everyone who helped to change and fix the approach to plugins. That alone has made this build worth the wait and is a great milestone for xbmc.
While PVR is on my wishlist and I am a little disappointed with it not being added I can see all of your reasons in a practical light. Don’t add it until it’s ready! Not much beats showing off my xbmc rig to friends and family and watching their draw drop when they see my library in all its glory, “… oh you watch all your tv shows and movies in vlc on your pc, at your desk? … how drab” :-)
Won’t have the same effect as, “oh and it can do PVR… if it works and doesn’t crash this time…”
As Buz Lightyear would say, “XBMC to infinity and Beyond!”
It works when using network protocol in video (the changeset you mention) not with the PVR addon for me (if you check AC3 in the demux, you don’t find EAC3).
@EricV
I am using Tvheadend PVR addon and eac3 works fine for me. Several weeks ago it didn’t work but now it does. I have tested it yesterday. Tonight I will try it again and check the demux anyway, to be sure that the channel has not changed the audio codec recently, but I think this is unlikely. I have checked it one month ago and the codec was EAC3 without doubt.
@xbmcuser2000
Thanks for the head up: just seen it being added also in xbmc/pvrclients/tvheadend/HTSPDemux.cpp the 15 November. I had it in my own tree for longer tna that but it was not sufficient. Maybe other things have changed including also the tvheadend side (I use 2.12)
NB: it must be real HD program as non HD may well be classical mpeg audio.
All men! Not surprising, but interesting :)
@EricV
I confirm that EAC3 is properly supported in tvheadend addon.
I am using this PPA.
https://launchpad.net/~lars-opdenkamp/+archive/xbmc-pvr
In this thread you can find more info.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=51945&page=140
@xbmcuser2000
Thanks. I use the git source use for the PPA build and my own build on 64 bit debian unstable. version SD works/HD with ECA3 still not. XBMC hangs. Will try the 64 bynaries fromthe PPA and see the config option to try to find a difference.
Again thanks for the support.
what’s with the hidden link at the bottom right of the photo?
“XBMC will be easy to use and setup for the average user.”
You might want to define the average user. From what I have seen, the average user uses a media player integrated with a NAS that can stream content. Offline stored content is often the secondary usage. The average user rarely cares about support for multiple media formats. Or for 24p sync.
I think the “average XBMC user” :
* wants the highest quality playback
* will go to the trouble of setting up a HTPC, even if they are not computer savvy
* knows what 24p sync/1080i/96KHz/etc. mean
* wants some reference hardware platform. (Doesn’t have to be a particular brand… but is looking for some kind of specs that match up with requirements.)
At least that is what I understand from reading the forums.
XBMC remains the highest quality and most flexible playback system I’ve seen. However, to remain in the lead…. there are some items for the “average XBMC user” that really need to be addressed.
@folecr
Fist of the expression “average user” is the worst used expression in computer design ever (not anything to you just an random outburst from me :) ).
More ontopic, you should not be looking on the forum for what is normal behaviour because, sadly to say, anyone who registers and is active on the forum is _not_ a normal user, they are a power user and this is what you are listing for. While you can make an app for power users this is not what we are trying to do.
I do agree that the user wants the highest quality playback but they do not want any configuration regarding it, it should just work, and even more important they care more that the content is played than it being played good.
And as you say, most setup a HTPC which do indeed makes the overall intelligence of our users far higher than what we aim at with our designs, we are aiming at a click and play media simplicity. When there exist hardware which is more accessible for non-tech savvy this will show even more and the design becomes even more important. As it is now we are forgiven quite a bit thanks to our community being quite tech savvy in general.
I’ve hackintoshed 3 PCs, have set-up and re-formated/tweaked countless Windows partitions but having to discover Linux to get my nettop to work wirelessly in XBMC is rather challenging and my success rate thus far makes me too “average” for the task. This label is misleading: as soon as you make something too easy to use for the average user it becomes limited because it’s hard to move it off its predefined rails to suit some peculiar preferences. At least I find that the default setup does just about everything right after install; I could almost set-up an XBMC machine for my parents’ living room and feel safe enough that they wouldn’t need constant debugging from me, and that’s quite an accomplishment…
So when can we expect the final Dharma release? I’m waiting on it to improve thing and try again from scratch on my setup.
What we aim for is not the most features (anymore) but rather make features used by more users so in the end more features gets used.