Kodi Visits SCALE, Plus the New Villain Shirt/Hoodie

We wanted to take a minute today to talk about our trip down to Los Angeles for the Southern California Linux Expo, otherwise known as SCALE.

XBMC/Kodi have been attending SCALE for the past several years now, and we’ve always very much appreciated the attitude and the organization of the event. It’s great to see familiar faces, cool projects, and lots of new people. This year Keith, Ned, Garrett, and Nathan (that’s me) attended, and we were excited to welcome Rick (username: ruuk), a new team member who recently made waves by developing the HDHomeRun Live TV add-on, who helped us man the booth at another incredibly busy event.

This year we continued the trend that’s been going back a few years of showing more and more ARM devices at the booth and fewer x86 boxes. Two years ago, the Raspberry Pi was the coolest, tiniest thing at the convention. This year, it was almost beefy compared to some of the devices we had to show off.

We also followed the path from last year of setting up the booth to resemble a miniature living room, so people could sit and watch Kodi while resting their feet from walking the convention floor.

On Day 2, Ned showed off the living room environment.

Beyond showing off a bunch of cool hardware, we gave a few interviews, including this fun one with Jupiter Broadcasting (Time is at 3:58:39 for those on mobile). And I gave a talk about how the fork of XBMC back in 2008 that resulted in the three projects XBMC/Kodi, Plex, and Boxee had a ripple effect that’s been steering the Kodi organization ever since.

When the showroom closed each night, we spent most of our time talking about how we could make Kodi better. Rick talked about his add-on work. Garrett talked about Retroplayer. Both looked exceedingly cool doing so.

Rick on the left, Garrett on the right

It was a fantastic weekend. We hope even more people can make it next year, when we’ll no doubt have even more toys to play with.

New Shirt

Also making its first appearance at SCALE was a new shirt we’re pretty pleased with. The last shirt was designed to give off a Green Lantern vibe, so we thought it might be fun to do the opposite with this one. If the last shirt was a hero shirt, we thought this time we’d make a cooler, darker villain alternative. Also, because people requested it, this one is available as a hoodie.