Interview with Jonathan at brave little meme
Giuliano Maciocci has posted an interview with our own Jonathan Marshall over at brave little meme.
Q: Let’s talk a little about XBMC itself. What would you say separates it from other media centre and HTPC software?
JM: The biggest thing for me are that it’s completely opensource – both in terms of code release and the development model. This has led to a large, active and enthusiastic community being built up around the project, which pushes the development further than could be achieved with a closed model. The obvious difference with XBMC is it does not attempt to restrict you in any way, whilst still attempting to be as user friendly as possible. The commercial media centre offerings cannot compete with this, and we think we’ve done a better job than the many opensource projects out there on the user friendly side of things – though obviously there’s still a great room for improvement in this respect!
Q: As a project, XBMC never seems to sit still. It has evolved from an Xbox hack into one of the most full-featured and customisable media experiences available. What influenced the decision to go multi platform?
JM: As with most major new things that affect the project, the decision to go multi-platform came from a developer fronting up and putting in the work. Yuval was responsible for the port to linux which was the main departure point from the xbox. I’d done some initial work earlier on porting to win32, and once the linux port was working nicely, Elan Feingold did the initial porting work to OS X. This is the great thing about open source – developers from outside the main team can come along, grab the code, and make changes as they see fit.
Q: Despite the long release cycle, XBMC’s feature set continues to evolve at a rapid pace. How do you keep the project from stagnating?
JM: We don’t have to do anything as a team really – the community as a whole is so enthusiastic that it keeps things running along far faster than we could if we were doing all the pushing. I personally find I don’t have enough time to implement even 20% of what I’d like to, and I’m sure other developers feel the same way.
Pop over to brave little meme and check out the rest of the interview.
“JM: I think our next release will have well over a million downloads. I think that with the release of nVidia’s ION platform, XBMC on linux (either live or under ubuntu) with hardware acceleration of video decoding will be the platform of choice for many – a small, lower power box that will play all HD material.”
The nVidia ION part definitely struck a cord with me.. excellent interview and very informative, nice to hear that things are evolving at such a rapid pace :)
Great work
nice interview, im looking forward to april!
GREAT INTERVIEW! XBMC certainly has a bright future! Personally I think one aspect of XBMC’s future will be in embedded applications based on low-power hardware in a small form factor (one example of such a platform would be ION). Personally I feel that once boxes that resemble nVidia’s ION reference designs become available in retail channels XBMC will see a huge influx in popularity as the platform will be about the same size as Network media players currently available on the market (such as the popcorn hour) but will have an immense advantage when it comes to user experience (UI, media Library, etc.) and technological superiority.
Slice
Good informative interview, looking forward to next stable release.
Look I am ADISIABLED VET!I Deleted what I had to downlown Load yours((XBMC’s).Then as I read your Terms and Conditions,It sends me to another Site.Telling me I have to pay a
Donation.Now to me Donations are up to the person making the Order!Now being told you
have to give your Credit Card/Check is not a Donation.Kown when it says it is Free!So
what do you do?It would be nice to have,But If am going to make a Donation then I will
do it on my own.
KINNIE B. BURGESS
@Kinnie: See http://xbmc.org/download – it is indeed free, and no donation is required or requested to make use of XBMC. There are no “terms and conditions” at all, other than following the license, which applies only if you are redistributing the software, which clearly you are not doing. Feel free to pop over to the forums if you wish to discuss this further.
Thanks for the info. With all the bad information we get online with crazy credit websites, it is good to read something from someone who knows what they are talking about.