News

It’s been quite a while since we’ve posted an update, but rest assured we’ve been very busy behind the scenes. The new add-ons system is now nearly complete, the only missing piece is the add-ons themselves. So let’s fix that! Here’s a quick refresher course for those who may have missed it. We have…

Last week have been a busy week indeed and I have focused on getting the dirty region based rendering to work. I am glad I followed my mentor’s advice and did dirty region before moving to an event based rendering, especially considering that when dirty region rendering works we have gotten an event…

Status Finally XBMC runs on Angstrom, turns out it was optical code paths deadlocking while loading. Commited a –disable-optical-drive on the gsoc branch. XBMC Runs on C4 at about 10-15 fps (15fps in 640×480 and 10 in 720p) but koen have tried it on the new BeagleBoard xM which does an amazing 38fps…

LinuxTag 2010 was a great success, and XBMC was there in Berlin to do its part. In attendance this year: Sigurdur Olafsson (sho), Stephan Diederich (mdd), Gunnar Norin (blittan), Michael Probst (Stephan’s friend and helper for the week), and Cory Fields (theuni). Also, Matthias Kortstiege (vdrfan…

After discussion with my mentor we decided to not use the EVAS model suggested in my last weekly report. While it might have worked it would have taken to much time to realize which is a bad idea due to the limited time of GSoC. Hence I have started altering the guilib to do the actual event based…

Since I’ve been without computer the last week the status update will be slim. Status Committed the initial patches to get XBMC on Ångström building Decided on an abstracted rendering model which works like EVAS. Basically guilib will add drawable elements to the render system. When an animation…

While I had exams last week there were some major work done with getting Ångström working as a development environment for XBMC, much thanks to the extremely helpful people over at #beagle!. The plans for next weeks will consist mostly of reading up on already created technologies as I won’t be near…

Finally the GSoC have begun and while I have been plauged with exams this week I have made some accomplishments. It is sad but next week will also be filled with exams but hopefully I will find some time during the weekend. First of I planned to fix up and use Ångström but since I just recieved…

XBMC (XBMP really) started as a program for modified XBOX consoles. In the following years, XBMC has grown into a multi-platform, multi-architecture media center that runs on most standard hardware. The hardware and legal limitations of the XBOX were always a concern and the Team has instead focused…

First Weekly report of GSoC 2010, this is what have been done prior to the actual start. Status Downloaded ångström files and partitioned the SD-Card Recieved the BeagleBoard Installed and set up ScratchBox Sandbox version on the EventBased solution Plans Install the ånströmdistributionon the…

I have been selected by the Beagleboard community and Google to work on Google Summer of Code 2010. My project will consist of optimizing the rendering of XBMC for the embedded market. The Beagleboard is an arm based embedded device. Similar hardware can be found in the smart phone segment, for…

For the second year, XBMC will be hosting a booth at LinuxTag in Berlin, June 9-12. The list of exhibitors is quite impressive, and there will be several influential speakers. For the Americans, we will also be attending OSCON on July 19-23 in Portland, Oregon. This is one of the bigger open-source…

After meeting the fine folks from Linux Journal at SCALE this year, we discussed doing an interview to give their readers more insight into the world of XBMC. A few months later Steven Evatt tracked me down for a quick Q/A. See here for the result, and don’t forget to leave any questions you may…

This promotional video has been linked several times in the XBMC IRC channels in the last few days so it seemed appropriate to post here (it gets good at about 3:00). It’s flattering to see that the manufacturers have taken notice of our project, and even seem to have it in mind when designing their…

Apple has long been known to be tapping the GPU for accelerated video decode under OSX with their private applications such as iTunes or QuickTime player. Even with the AppleTV, there are there hints of some sort of CPU/GPU decoding deep down inside the private OS frameworks. The release of Snow…

It’s been a while since we’ve updated our readers on the status of things, so I wanted to give a quick preview of how the addons are shaping up. Many nightly users are itching for new builds, and those that have compiled their own have been greeted by broken plugins, scrapers, etc. This is by design…

In another sign that the project is growing up, we are happy to announce that XBMC is now legally represented by the Software Freedom Law Center. This has been in the works since our introduction at SCALE a few months back and today it is official. From their website: We provide legal representation…

After a nasty lightning strike at our ISP, we were temporarily left with no networking and no power. That in itself is not so bad. Unfortunately, due to the power loss, there was substantial filesystem corruption and data loss to deal with. After the crash, we were able to recover everything but the…

The next version of XBMC is shaping up quite well, with a host of new features already in. For a refresher, see a few posts back. Next up is the merge from the addons branch, the underpinning of the new addons manager (go figure) as well as the basis for the PVR frontend branch. Once finished…

We would like to welcome our latest sponsor, 9×9 Networks. The nice people over at 9×9 are using XBMC as a frontend for their delivery network, and have agreed to make a reasonable annual donation to the XBMC Foundation to help us with travel expenses for conferences, accommodations for developer…