It’s been a while since we’ve posted about the work currently going into XBMC, so here’s a quick taste of what’s been added lately, what’s in the works, and what we’re dreaming of:

• DXVA2: Elupus has already added the initial code for gpu offloading in Windows (Vista/7 only). Not to be confused with DSPlayer below.
• DSPlayer: A new DirectShow based internal player from tiben (Windows only) that also provides GPU acceleration. See the forum thread for more info.
• CrystalHD: Davilla is still hard at work on the Broadcom hardware decoder.  Watch the current status here. For those who haven’t yet taken the plunge, Logic Supply is now offering $10 off to XBMC users, just use the code: “XBMC10″.
• AC3 Encoding: An often requested feature. Thanks to gnif, realtime transcoding will soon be available.
• HTTP Server: The crusty old web server is soon to be ripped out in favor of a much more interactive JSON-RPC one. Check out topfs2’s informative post. Watch for a web-interface contest!
• Addons Manager: Even better than it sounds. Will allow an easy way to manage addons, including among other things, PVR backends.
• PVR Frontend: Probably the most requested feature for XBMC. This will provide a unified experience to your choice of PVR backends such as: VDR, MythTV, Tvheadend, and MediaPortal TVserver.

Some of the bigger features like the Addons Manager and PVR Frontend will introduce significant churn to the codebase. We’ll likely suspend nightly builds at these times and recommend that SVN users take a break.

As usual, we’re working hard but can’t give any ETAs. The usual answer… “when it’s ready”.

Downtime Notice: We will soon be moving the site and all services to new home at WebHostingBuzz to cope with the ever-increasing traffic. This means that the blog, forum, trac, and wiki will all be down during the transition. If all testing goes well we’ll make the switch on Mon. February 8th. I’ll update this page after the move (no sense updating a 404′d site, right?) with the status.

Also be aware that all xbmc links will be changing, we’ll be moving all services to subdomains for easier management in the future. For example, http://xbmc.org/forum will move to http://forum.xbmc.org. You will be redirected automatically for a while, so don’t forget to update your bookmarks.

David Teirney and I just got back from hosting a successful booth at the Linux.conf.au open day in Wellington, NZ.

It was great to meet a bunch of people and show them just what XBMC is all about.  In particular it was great meeting Erik de Castro Lopo of libsamplerate fame, which we use for resampling audio when video is synced to the refresh rate of the monitor.

We had 3 systems showing off what XBMC could do, one of which was the MSI Windtop AE2020 – an all in one unit with a 20″ touchscreen kindly on loan from MSI Europe (Look out for an upcoming post where you’ll see some of the new touch stuff being utilized within XBMC.)

Thanks heaps to the Linux.conf.au organizing committee and everyone who popped over to the booth – we’ll definitely see you all again in Brisbane at next year’s Linux.conf.au!

Left: Jonathan Marshall (almost smiling for once), Right: Patrick, JM's helper for the day

After the recent post introducing our new build services and content delivery system, the response from users wishing to help out has been quite impressive. I wanted to quickly follow-up with another ‘thank you’ to the community that never ceases to amaze. Seven mirrors have since been added to the rotation (see here for a current list), and Fedora and openSUSE buildslaves have just been added to the buildbot. Thank you to Nate Davis with Med One Capital for these. Currently we will not be providing rpms, but just having them built nightly goes a long way towards making sure that our code works on as many distributions as possible. The nightly compiles will also help us to work more closely with distro maintainers, and ease the process of being added to official repositories.

I am still working to get back to everyone who has contacted us with offers to contribute, but I am finally almost caught up. Keep em coming!

If you happen to live near Wellington, New Zealand, you should drop by Linux.conf.au on January 23rd. Our very own Jonathan Marshall will be there hosting an XBMC booth along with David Teirney. Check out the full list of exhibitors here.

For those of you on the other side of the world near Los Angeles, be sure to visit the Southern California Linux Expo, where Sean Soria (malloc) and Cory Fields (hey that’s me!) will be hosting a booth February 20th-21st. The full list of exhibitors is here.

If you get the opportunity, please drop by and introduce yourself. Bonus points for anyone who makes it to both.

Remember a few weeks back when we announced our new Bytemark server? Well, we’ve already put it to very good use. In addition to setting up the buildbot mentioned previously, we’ve also created an extremely versatile file repository for XBMC use. Over the past few months, we’ve worked with several university and ISP link admins to create an extensive mirror system all over the world — one that can be used for xbmc releases, nightly builds, skins, plugins… the list goes on.

Before going any further, on behalf of the XBMC team and community,  I would like to give my sincere thanks to all of the mirrors that have agreed to host us. At the moment, we’re up to 13 and still growing. I’m especially grateful to Neil Bright and Georgia Tech who have offered to be our master mirror. See the link at the end of this post for a full list.

Read more…

What a way to kick off the new year with the release of Camelot and then the flurry of skins released thereafter. It’s time I join in on the release frenzy and add Rapier 3.0 to the mix. It’s been awhile since the last update and the changes are too numerous to list so it’s best to check out the changelog or this thread which highlights some of the more notable changes/features accompanied with screenshots. Some people have expressed worry that Xbox users would be left behind with the latest Camelot release but I’m happy to report Rapier 3.0 has no problems and runs smoothly as of SVN rev25497. Head over to the dedicated Rapier 3.0 release thread if you’d like to share your thoughts and/or have specific questions.

Update: Version 3.06 has been released which replaces the problematic fonts. CPU usage should be back to normal, check the download link for the latest version.

DOWNLOAD HERE

1080p HD content playback has always been the Holy Grail for any Media Center application but this has traditionally been difficult; playback using software decode alone requires a very hefty CPU and hardware decoding has only been made available recently using the nVidia’s VPDAU technology, available only on Linux. Windows has its own platform specific solutions and poor old OSX has no public APIs available at all. There really is nothing around with a common API that enables hardware accelerated 1080p HD content playback that can also be used under all three major platforms (OSX, Linux, and Windows). Well, that situation is about to change.

The Dark Knight vc1 running at 1080p on an AppleTV

Through hard work and the joint efforts of several TeamXBMC/Redhat developers and the Broadcom Media PC Group, cross-platform hardware decoding of mpeg2, h.264 and VC1 video content up to 1080p will be coming to XBMC on OSX, Linux, and Windows via the Broadcom Crystal HD Hardware Decoder (BCM970012). The Broadcom Crystal HD is available now in a mini-PCIE card with ExpressCard and 1X PCIE form factors to follow. This means that the AppleTV and all those lovely new netbooks, Eee Boxes and older Intel Mac Minis have exciting new potential.

This solution has a common programming API, so many 3rd party developers and applications will be able to leverage hardware accelerated video content playback across OSX, Linux, and Windows platforms with minimal source code changes. Best of all, this is an open source solution with full source code for driver and library available for OSX and Linux under a GPL/LGPL license. Wow, this indeed is the Holy Grail and a major score for the open source community as this means no more tainted Linux kernels! Support has already been added to XBMC under the svn trunk. Our bleeding-edge users can expect to find the feature in the next nightly builds from our community builders, the more patient can wait until the next stable release. Other media projects such as FFmpeg, MythTV and Xine will soon follow as their developers add support.

The Windows driver binary, as well as the Linux source code for the driver and library can be found at the Broadcom web site. For OSX, the binaries and source code for the driver and library will be hosted at google code. Users in the USA can purchase the Crystal HD mini PCIE card from Logic Supply for $69 at the time of this posting, and of course there’s always ebay for those outside the USA.