Today we are pleased to announce the first official testing release of 9.11, Codename: Camelot. It’s been quite a while since Babylon, so we’re very excited to begin the release cycle and work towards a new release.
Please keep in mind that this is an early alpha build, and it should be treated as such. While it’s not likely to burn your house down or eat your pets, it’s likely that testers will run into a few bugs. If this happens, please search TRAC to see if someone else has already reported it. If not, you may submit a QUALITY bug report. Keep in mind that the reason for releasing alphas/betas is so that we can get a better feel for what bugs are out there. If you don’t report them, we can’t fix them.
We are also still working hard to clean up the settings. Many useless ones have been removed, but there’s still quite a bit of rearranging to do.
There are a host of new features in this release, far too many to list here. The highlights are:
DirectX has replaced OpenGL for Windows
Numerous skinning engine updates which allow for use of some fancy new skins
Many improvements to the video player which allow for much smoother playback
Switch to Core Audio on OSX
Many VDPAU improvements under linux
Many platform-specific customizations
Much Much more. We will be showcasing the new features here on xbmc.org as the final release approaches.
Known Issues
Windows: DirectX runtime and Visual C++ 2008 runtime(x86/x64) are required. The installer will be updated to check for these.
Windows: ‘Windowed’ shortcut opens in full screen
Windows: Non-functional brightness/contrast
Windows: Discs inserted before XBMC is launched may not appear correctly
Windows: Some videos may not play back as smoothly as on other platforms
Linux: VDPAU de-interlacing is known to be broken
Note: Many of these problems have already been fixed since the alpha1 tag and should be resolved in the next testing release.
Download
If you like living on the edge and would like to try the alpha, head over to our download page. You will always find the most current official builds there. AppleTV users may update via launcher’s downloads.
As our readers probably know by now, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released today with many new features. For those who are considering making the move, here’s what you need to know as the update relates to XBMC:
Rather than wasting the time and effort required to update the current stable release of XBMC (Babylon) to work with Karmic, we’ve decided to focus on getting a new version out the door. This means that until the next XBMC release, it is recommended that most users stick with Jaunty. But there’s no need to panic; despite the fact that it’s taking a bit longer than we had hoped, development is shaping up nicely and the first 9.11 alphas should be rolling out very soon.
If you’re absolutely dying to live on the bleeding edge you could try the svn ppa, though you should NOT expect it to be stable (translation: don’t complain if something’s broken).
XBMC has gone a long way since its first stable release in 2004. It has evolved from a xbox only application into a sleek cross platform media center that runs on almost anything you throw it at. XBMC has thousands of users, is the mother of many successful derivative projects and commercial spin-offs and is written about in the international press on a regular basis.
It has been key to XBMC’s success that its user (or little Schumpeter’s) apply their creative destruction to the application and move it into new directions on a regular basis. Agathorn has done so with the integration of FanArt into XBMC, Yuvalt with the port of XBMC from xbox to linux which gave rise to XBMC’s cross-platform nature or motd2k with the addition of GPU accelerated video decoding. XBMC wouldn’t be where it is today without the contribution of the many designers, writers, coders, helpful forum users and bug reporters.
Community contributions: Noir... A skin concept by Ayala
XBMC for Mac is seeing some serious love these days. First up is a working IR remote under Snow Leopard (the crowd cheers). TeamXBMC is extremely grateful to Felix Schwarz (developer for Remote Buddy) for expanding his excellent driver framework and providing Candelair free to all. Candelair resolves the IR remote issues under Snow Leopard and is backward compatible to existing IR clients such has XBMCHelper. Candelair can be found here and is already compatible with the existing XBMCHelper IR client.
Not stopping at Candelair, Felix has also created an new HID remote class that resolves the need to fix up IR client when Apple changes the IR cookies. No more waiting for IR client fixes when Apple plays hide the cookies. Three cheers for Felix. The new HIDRemote class has already been integrated into XBMCHelper in our bleeding-edge builds and more detail about HIDRemote can be found here
Felix deserves a large round of applause for this effort and XBMC for Mac users should check out Remote Buddy for augmenting the capabilities of IR handling under OSX.
XBMC continues to work nicely on OSX and we foresee no problems regarding Snow Leopard for the forthcoming stable release.
Here’s a quick teaser for those of you who dream of using XBMC on a low-powered ARM platform some day. Our very own McGeagh briefly demonstrates XBMC running on the BeagleBoard using OpenGL ES 2.0 and even manages the obligatory playback of everyone’s favorite: Big Buck Bunny. This is still in early development and is nowhere near ready for public consumption, but it’s certainly a great step in the right direction. Kudos to McGeagh, keep up the good work.
Our friends at themoviedb.org have experienced a major hard drive failure (the database is fine) and they are hard at work rebuilding. This obviously means that XBMC will not be able to scrape movie information from TMDB at this time. There is no need to report the issue, please be patient as they recover. You can watch the status on their twitter page. Good luck guys, and thanks for all you do!
Update: Looks like the site is back up and scraping is functional.
A while ago ASRock Europe kindly lent me an ION 330 to try out as my new HTPC equipment. Got it delivered and started unpacking. It was packed in a neat box along with a hdmi to dvi adapter, a support cd and an anti-slip pad. The case looks just as good as it does on the pictures. Installed it with hdmi to my 37″ LCD TV and optical toslink to my surroundsystem. Booted it up and because it was a sample it came with Windows Vista preinstalled.
Installed XBMC quickly to it and took it for a testspin using AEON as a skin, since it’s pretty demanding on the hardware. Navigation inside the skin seemed fine, noticed that it was a lot smoother than the NVIDIA ION box I had tested before. So surely there is a benefit from having a dual core Atom 330 instead of a single core Atom 230. Did not see any real sluggishness in the skin. Music playback and picture browsing was fine and the little I tested plugins it worked fine as well. Read more…
Today we are pleased to announce the first official testing release of 9.11, Codename: Camelot. It’s been quite a while since Babylon, so we’re very excited to begin the release cycle and work towards a new release.
As our readers probably know by now, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released today with many new features. For those who are considering making the move, here’s what you need to know as the update relates to XBMC:
Our friends at 
A while ago 
