Feature Freeze: Looking Forward to Eden
Today marks the first step in the long-awaited release cycle for Eden: soft-freeze. Other than what is already slated for entry, no new features may be added unless they’re deemed critical for release. After that comes a hard freeze, when all APIs are frozen and we prepare to release the first Beta.
As always, the schedule will be dictated by our ability to get things polished up for release. So file those bug reports, clone our repo and send a pull request for fixes or translations… every little bit helps.
So much has changed since Dharma, we’ll use this space over the coming weeks to discuss in more detail what you can expect in 11.0. For now, Here are a few things you’re sure to notice:
- A new “Files” view in the video library in order to remove the notion of Library Mode vs. Files Mode that confused so many new users.
- The default skin changed to a horizontal layout allowing for more useful information to be displayed on the home screen (vertical version is still available in Add-ons)
- Efficiency improvements to reduce high cpu/gpu usage
- Much improved touchscreen support to go along with the first major versioned XBMC release for the iOS (iPad, iPhone, AppleTv2)
- Ability to customize the home screen by adding your favorite Add-ons
- The usual smattering of visual improvements, playback improvements, new ways to stream and discover media.. the list goes on.
The last few days have been hectic as the developers have been working hard to get their last changes in, but we’ll be slowing things down now to begin cleaning up for release!
First!
Brilliant news, looking forward to this release. Keep up the good work guys :D
I have created a video about how to add short cuts on home screen on AppleTV 2 just look for my name on Youtube and you’ll find it :)
@Anthony
second come at me.
so excited for this release
@Anthony
Stupid!
Will the new Audio Branch make Eden?
Keep up the great work.!
If i upgrade, will my add ons or plug ins work? or will it read “SCRIPT ERROR”
Good job, all my XBMC boxed are due for a re-install. :)
Awesome work guys!! Ive been running the git last few weeks and its looking awesome. Thanks!
Will the final LIVE version of Eden include Nvidia drivers newer than 195.XX? Just curious why 10.1 is still so far behind on those “out of the box”. Regardless… looking forward to Eden! Thanks for all the hard work!
Yes – having only just read about it now, a Files section makes a lot of sense. Well done.
Add-ons to the Home Screen is also a fantastic idea. My parents love the TED addon, but find the menus too complicated atm.
Some other thoughts (3-year user, 3 current XBMC boxes):
- Library Mode: If a dir is scanned, but no results are returned, could there be a mode to display the filename, rather than just have it not appear (In italics or something, to indicate this)
- Library Categories: Say that I want to split “TV” into “Documentaries”,”TV” and “Anime”, I would like to have
– Separate entries in the Home Screen.
– The choice to pick a different scraper.
– Not to have to rely on metadata / filter-by.
– The ability to fully customise these category names. (eg. create Library category “Dokumentaren” which scans dirs foo and bar, and uses theDocumentaryDB as a scraper)
I realise that short of a hard-freeze, that this is a pretty inappropriate time to mention new features (in a blog comment, of all places!)
How do you add those 3 shortcuts to addons on the main screen
Hey Guy’s greattttt job!! i’m so excited!! when will the new version xbmc 11 will be out?
@MrOnionSkins
+1
Im not sure what new features they offer, but I dont like being behind ha
I can only agree with Jim – Library Categories is IMHO the most needed feature in XBMC.
Can I ask if someone already translating XBMC to Slovene language? Because I’d like to. In 10.1 Slovene translation sucks.
Anyway, great job!
Customizable library categories would be amazing!
a killerfeature would be a more detailed audio delay saving option.
Instead of saving for one file or “for all videos” i really would like a few more options like “setfor this folder” or “set for this file extension” or “set for this source”.
For someone with programming skills this should be only a few lines of code, for a coding noob like me it’s like climbing a mountain :-)
Thanx in advance
Great job!! XBMC is an incredible app and you all are amazing developers!!
Thank you very much for all your work!!
Great news !
Something about 3D inside ?
Cannee wait. Especially interested in CPU usage improvements as with so many media files my box takes a while when entering the movie and tv show menus. Hope the karaoke delay bug is fixed otherwise the wife won’t be happy! Cheers Guys.
This can allready be done in most skins where you put smart playlists on the home screen ( based on genre for example) instead of the default movies button. This works the way you describe it.
Good luck to team XBMC in getting the Eden final ready, and thank you for all your amazing work!
@bajdec You don’t have to ask. If you have contributions to make it better, you just can :)
So amped sounds great! My Xbmc box has been running extremely well for so long (Minimal linux build is my main xbmc machine). There has been no need to reinstall or troubleshoot much at all (I had a screen issue where it wouldn’t start first boot but would once restarted but that fixed itself lol).
The new features sound awesome thanks for all your ongoing efforts
I’m continually impressed by Xbmc and xbmc4xbox projects so awesome!
you just go into skin settings then “add-on shorcuts” and select them you get 5 for each media type
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/7276/screenshot022d.png
The current UPnP support is quite broken and has been for month (photo via UPnP does not work, and DMR feature is no more detected by CP. Bug reported). Hope the bug triage will fix it soon because all of this was working with dharma.
@Jim most of the stuff you asked for is allready doable. I recommend for you to read the forums…
Will GStreamer branch be supported (interesting at least for OMAP4 hardware video decoding) ?
Same goes for connman configuration branch actually.
Hopefully 10bit encodes as well!
Awesome! Just Awesome.
Hope the DVD player is fixed so it can handle 1 channel sound sent thru digital – I can play mono using Paplayer but not the DVDplayer.
Can somebody clarify this files section?
I’m extremely happy with the setup that there is currently.
I have all my files off of my NAS added to the library, but my father streams videos off of his laptop that he has on the same xbmc box too. I don’t want his videos sullying up my immaculate library, so I exclude the source pointing to his laptop from library scans, and he just uses the videos menu to watch his stuff while I watch my stuff through the Movies and TV Shows menu. Will such a set-up still be possible under xbmc 11?
The involvement of “Movie Sets” would be great. A description of the sets and the list of films which are in the folder would be great. Integration of music DVDs in the field of music.
Fantastic!
@TouchMyBox yes, you can just keep the sources separate
Cool! I’m going to take care of the pt_PT translation.
Great work you guys are doing!
I have just one question: Will there be Airplay-Support on all platforms?
So that I just have to stream something from my iOS-Device and XBMC will play it?
Sounds good guys. Hopefully you will get 10bit h.264 working in the new version without having to resort to using external players!
How’s about dealing with that orphaned content?
Been an issue for ages & not really addressed
@TouchMyBox
User profiles. XBMC has supported this for a long time. Each person can actually be greeted with a “log-in” screen and have their own separate library, settings, etc, all on the same XBMC installation with the same sources.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Profiles (slightly out of date, but still mostly accurate for setting it up)
@Renton
Devs say no 10bit for Eden 11.0.0 because updating ffmpeg stuff would be a major undertaking at this point. But that doesn’t mean support for it is far off. I wouldn’t worry about it anyways, since there’s still no hardware decoding support for it and most videos won’t get a quality increase. Most HD sources, Blurays, are in 8bit. However, they will result in somewhat smaller sizes by using 10bit even if the source is 8bit. Don’t believe the hype about 10bit right now. It’s great, and it is a fantastic improvement, but it’s not the night and day change some people are making it out to be. 10bit is a professional profile that is non standard on consumer hardware that is mainly used for editing and studio use. It’s not even new, so I’m not sure why people are making a big deal about it now.
@Eichi
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Movie_Sets
I think it’s time for changing sourceforge to github for add-on development.
Time to update the XBMC roadmap for Eden on trac since a lot of new features for Eden are not listed, and a few other features did not make so have to be pushed to the roadmap for Frodo?
Audio engine branch NEEDS to be in this release.
And you can tag your movies with a movie set (using the XML tag). In that case you can create some kind of subfolders.
Still wonder whats up to PVR, will there sometimes be something official or will i still have to use one of dushmaniac´s pvr versions?
RE: Audio Engine… everyone is clamoring for Bitstreaming. But I for one would prefer the ability to decode Master Audio and TrueHD (truehd may already be possible) with the new Audio Engine and send LPCM to the receivers.
Especially in light of the bitstream bomb wreaking havoc for all owners of the Star Wars blurays.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=21002731
My speakers almost blew out by simply bitstreaming the blurays to my receiver. When I decode on my PC and send LPCM of the Master Audio track…. no issue. So… how about support for decoding all HD audio formats?
Yes, we need the audio engne branch to be implemented!!
Building latest from source now. Can’t wait to see the updates. Much love to the devs!