As mentioned previously, we have now moved into a monthly development cycle, in which we merge new features at the beginning of the month and then perform bug fixes through the rest of the month. This means, at the end of every month, developers, bug-reporters, and those willing to deal with potentially highly unstable builds can try a snapshot from the current development cycle, and the organization will have a more stable and predictable development cycle. For those of you who would prefer a stable version of XBMC, we will always recommend the most recent stable release (XBMC 11.0), but for the brave, you are welcome to try the end of the month build. To give an idea of just how unstable/alpha these builds can be, there will almost certainly be months in which some platforms won’t actually have usable builds. For example, the iOS build will not be available this round. As always, we recommend you backup your userdata folder before upgrading.

With that said, let’s review some of the more notable changes in the April Changelog.

First on the list is a major reshuffle of XBMC settings. In the past, many of the controls for allowing XBMC to interact with your network were found on the Network page. Because the Network group was primarily being used for interacting with various external services, the Network page has been entirely replaced with a Services page. The “Internet Access” setting, which was the only other purpose of the Network page, has been moved to the System page.

XBMC has quite a lot of services to deal with these days!

Next, extending XBMC’s default ability to scrape sets, we’ve now added a new “Sets” submenu item.

For all you iOS users out there, we have an even more exciting announcement. Those of you with iPads, recent iPod Touches, and recent iPhones that are running XBMC will now be able to switch your screen from the local screen to your TV using one of the available TV Out cords provided by Apple.  Then, you can use your local screen as a remote control. Or, to put it more succinctly, mirroring for XBMC is now enabled. For a video on how this works, see below. (Note: as already mentioned, the lack of an iOS build for April means this feature will not actually be available until iOS nightly builds start back up again. Keep an eye on our social network pages, as those will likely be the first places with news on the builds.)

On the library front, in addition to Names, Year, Runtime, and many others, a new Date Added sort field has been enabled. This field works slightly differently than the old “Recently Added” sorting. Rather than sorting the files by how recently they’ve been added to XBMC, the files are now sorted by when they were added to your local computer or server. This way, when refreshing an old show, that show won’t suddenly take up all the spaces in your Recently Added field. Instead, Recently Added really will only show items that you have recently added to your collection.

Finally, Addon, Remote Control, and Skin Developers will be happy to hear that yet more json-rpc controls and websocket support have been added, along with PictureInfo tags.

Conclusion

For a full list of all the April changes, feel free to take a look at our list of closed April milestones. Also, keep an eye out for the May Cycle. Our developers are working extra hard to hopefully include one of the most requested feature additions of the past two years. Feel free to make some guesses as to which feature that is in the comments. Or, if you are feeling a bit brave and a bit lucky, just start downloading now!

There is lots going on in XBMC-land, so now seems like a good time for an update on all fronts. I’d like to touch quickly on several areas, there are sure to be some follow-ups coming soon.

We’ve been busy

This was mentioned a few weeks ago on the forum but was never brought up here: In a recent presentation to the Linux Foundation, XBMC was listed in the top 50 live projects (gleaned from Ohloh’s statistics). It is truly an honor to be among the others in that list!

Releases

We have struggled in the past to put out timely releases, because it’s hard to get everyone to quit adding new features long enough to freeze for testing and go through the release motions. To counter that we have borrowed a page from the Linux kernel’s development flow, and added our own touches. We consider this an experiment and we’re not sure if this will be what we settle on going forward, but it’s certainly a start in the right direction. Here’s how it works:

For each major release, we will have monthly merge windows. For roughly a week we will furiously merge in the approved features that have been queued up in the form of pull requests at Github. That leaves the rest of the month for testing and bug-fixing. Then we’re back to a fun new merge window. After a few of these cycles, we will do a hard freeze and enter the Beta/RC stage, followed by release. The hope is that we can move away from a model of constant code-churn to one broken into chunks of stable/unstable periods.

So there it is in its theoretical glory. There are still lots of details to work out, but so far it has been working well. Having features queued up gives us a more clear way to discuss what is going in, and for users to know what to expect. For now, we are using issues at github to manage milestones as it provides a nice interface for discussion (and even a shiny green ‘merge’ button). It will take a few of these merge windows for us to get a feel for things, and from there we’ll begin charting out the Frodo release schedule.

Nightlies

As the April merge window is closed and things have settled down, nightly builds have resumed. It remains to be seen if it will make sense to host nightly builds during the chaotic merge windows.

A few things are up in the air for the Ubuntu PPA, since we have now been accepted into the official repositories. We want to be sure that nightly users have seamless transitions to official releases if they choose, so unstable PPA builds are still on hold. Also, due to some issues with iOS5, ios/atv2 nightly builds are on hold as well.

GSOC

We have 4 students participating in GSOC this year! Congratulations (and thanks) to Tobias Arrskog, Sascha Montellese, Andres Mejia, and Alasdair Campbell. We’ll certainly dedicate a post in the next few days to their projects, for now their proposals can be seen on the clunky GSOC Page.

In a continuation of the series begun with our write-up of the USB-CEC adapter, we would like to take the time today to highlight another adapter out there that makes controlling XBMC dramatically easier. This week, I’d like to introduce Chris (psuedo7 in the forum), who will be telling us a bit about the project FLIRC.  I’d also like to invite any other software writers or manufacturers to contact me in the forums at username natethomas, if you have come up with a new and unique method for improving the usability of XBMC and would like to share your project.

Take it away, Chris.

Hello XBMC.org Readers,

My name is Chris (or pseudo7 on the forums). I’ve been an XBMC user for about 3 years, firstly using my mac then using a shuttle box running Openelec (so I didn’t have to keep connecting/ disconnecting my MacBook Pro).  I love XBMC: the application, the project and everything it envelops.

(Disclaimer – whilst I am “staff” (Read: a forum moderator) on the FLIRC forums I am not employed by Flirc and do not benefit directly, financially or otherwise, from the project I am about to discuss.)

I have recently come across a product which has enhanced my XBMC experience, and I wanted to give back to the community and share my findings about Flirc.

Much like the previous Pulse-Eight article, my intention is to highlight what I think is a great product that many users may not have heard about that dramatically simplifies the process of building an XBMC htpc.

What is Flirc?

Flirc allows you to pair your same television remote to your computer with easy one-time setup software.

Flirc is a small USB infra-red (I.R.) adapter that receives I.R. commands from a remote control. Read more…

Linux users rejoice! Thanks primarily to the hard work of Andres Mejia, XBMC has been accepted into the official Debian distribution! In the past we have been unable to make it into Debian as the sheer size and complexity of XBMC made the review process so difficult, so Andres, an XBMC developer who was working to become a Debian Developer already, volunteered to maintain it himself. Yesterday, his Eden packages were accepted. For those unclear about what this means, Debian unstable users will now be able to install XBMC without using any third-party repositories.

We have already been included in several major Linux distributions, but Debian is a big target because of the size of the community around it. As most Linux users are probably aware, other major distros such as Ubuntu and Mint derive (or derive indirectly) from Debian, and sync their packages regularly. Andres succeeded in requesting a sync to Ubuntu in time to hit Precise Pangolin, so users of this next LTS release will be able to install XBMC with just a few clicks (or an apt-get). We hope this will lower the barrier to entry for many users who are not familiar with PPAs.

There are a few notable differences between the packaged Debian/Ubuntu versions and the ones from our ppa or XBMCBuntu:

• decss support (encrypted dvd playback) is disabled unless libdvdcss2 has been installed from a third-party repo.
• libav is used rather than ffmpeg, as Debian unstable has gone this direction.
• AFP (Apple File Protocol) support is currently disabled due to packaging issues.
• rar support is disabled due to Debian policy, which we hope to resolve soon by switching to libarchive, which Andres is personally working on as well. The guy is a unstoppable!

Now there’s one less step to get to the XBMC goodness…

It’s been over a year in the works and today we are excited to announce that XBMC 11.0 is finally ready and available for download. You can find XBMC 11.0 here.

XBMC 11.0 Milestones include Addon Rollbacks, vast improvements in Confluence (the default skin), massive speed increases via features like Dirty-region rendering and the new JPEG decoder, a simpler, better library, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, better handling of unencrypted BluRay content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in OSX (to match the already available feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, an upgraded weather service with geoip lookup, and much, much more. Check out the highlights in the summarized changelog.

The new Confluence

In addition to our many software improvements, we’ve increased our reach in the realm of hardware support since Dharma was released. Eden marks the first in-sync stable release for the Apple TV2, iPad, and other iOS devices. We’ve vastly improved the method by which we handle input, including heavily upgrading JSON-RPC support, making remote control support much, MUCH simpler in Windows, and enabling unique methods of device communication with hardware. And now even AMD devices are supported for GPU video decoding in Linux to some extent, thanks to the inclusion of VAAPI.

Beyond XBMC 11 for Windows, Linux, OSX, and iOS, we are also happy to announce XBMCbuntu Final.

XBMCbuntu is very similar to past versions of XBMC Live. By default, the user boots directly into XBMC, and if he/she chooses, he or she will never see the underlying OS. However, unlike Live, XBMCbuntu is now built upon a full LXDE desktop environment, which has a web browser (Chromium) with a fully updated (and updatable) version of Flash built-in and a GUI package manager ready to install and update all of the normal Ubuntu programs a typical Linux user might use. The user may now toggle between XBMC, which auto-starts, and a normal desktop if he or she chooses. And, perhaps most exciting for many users, XBMC will now be upgradeable, both from command line and from the GUI package manager, without fear of crashing the XBMC experience.

Naturally, those users who do not want to see the desktop will never need to. When you boot your computer, you will be booted directly into the XBMC homescreen, just as you are right now. The only clear difference is the new power underneath the hood. Those users who have already installed the Beta version of XBMCbuntu can upgrade to final using the apt-get upgrade commands.

There are truly an incredible number of updates and improvements between Dharma and Eden. But don’t take our word for it. Download XBMC 11.0 Eden now.

We are pleased and excited to announce to everyone that we have been accepted as an official GSOC mentor organization this year.

From now until the 26th, we would like to encourage all our faithful student users (and other interested students) to visit our GSOC Ideas Page, review some of the ideas we think might be good ones, and then feel free to provide input on any ideas you may have in the Student Project Proposal area. Alternatively, feel free to jump into the #XBMC IRC room on Freenode and chat about any project you’d love to cover.

From March 26th to April 6th, we encourage any interested students to apply at the GSOC home page to work with XBMC. After that, we’ll notify applicants whether we get to work with each other according to the GSOC schedule.

All of us at Team XBMC are looking forward to getting some good work done this summer, and we’d love for you all to work with us!

A quick note to let our users know that we have applied to be a sponsor for this year’s GSOC. Some of you may recall that we were accepted a few years ago, and by proxy thanks to the BeagleBoard project in 2010.

We’re confident that the recent buzz from the Raspberry Pi among other things will help this year, though it’s always a fierce competition. If you are interested in applying, please head to our project page and begin thinking of what you might like to hack on!