XBMC DevCon 2013
Nathan Betzen
It’s been a busy year since XBMC’s 2012 Developers’ Conference. In that time, XBMC 12.2 was released. The Raspberry Pi became one of the most used (if not the single most used) pieces of hardware to run XBMC. Hardware decoding in Android has become a real thing if only in alpha builds. PVR was added to the official XBMC release. The XBMC home page got a whole new look. Frankly, the list runs longer than any person should ever want to read.
And quite nearly all of that was sped up (or in some cases made possible) by the 2012 XBMC DevCon. The wild thing is, it’s very possible that we’ll see far more improvements and overall changes over the next 12 months than we even scratched the surface on in the past year.
DevCon: 11 – 13 October, 2013
To make that happen, we’re excited to announce that the 2013 XBMC DevCon will be the 11th through the 13th of October in Munich, Germany. That’s roughly one week away. This year, we’ll continue talking hardware decoding in Android. We’ll talk video game emulation. We’ll discuss improvements to the GUI, UPnP, and device to device communication. And, perhaps most exciting to all you users out there who are running stable XBMC, we’re going to set the path for the release of XBMC 13: Gotham.
Much like the previous two DevCons, we’d like to take a moment to thank our DevCon sponsor, at-visions. These events simply wouldn’t be possible without their generous contributions. And this year, we’d like to give all of you a new option of contributing too.
2013 DevCon T-Shirts
We know quite a lot of you last year expressed interest in purchasing a DevCon t-shirt. This year, we took that to heart and started our first ever t-shirt sale campaign. From now until the 13th of October (the last day of the conference), you have the opportunity to support XBMC, open source software, and the developer beer fund. After that, the shirts go away forever. On the back of each shirt is stamped this year’s DevCon, so people will always know that you were a supporter in one of the most epic XBMC years in history.
The rules of this campaign are pretty well exactly like the rules of a Kickstarter campaign. Our printer requires that 100 people order a shirt, and they can ship those shirts worldwide.* If 100 shirts are ordered, the shirts get printed. Needless to say, way more than 100 can be ordered, if that many people want to buy the devs a beer (or if just one person wants 500 shirts for some reason). If not, nothing gets printed, and nobody is out any money.
*Note: There appears to be a small error on the Paypal checkout page for non-US users. The shipping costs on the Teespring checkout page are correct.
From here, we’ll leave it up to you, the users, to make this happen. Spread the news far and wide! Show your friends that you supported the development of XBMC.
Beers, Users, and Devs Night
Finally, we’re extremely interested in truly meeting up with our users this year. To that end, we’d like to invite all of you, and particularly those of you in Bavaria, Munich, Germany, and wherever else seems reasonably close to hang with us. We’re still working out the last minute details, but definitely leave a comment below (or in the forums) if you’re interested in visiting. We’re excited to see you and get your thoughts, opinions, and whatever else, and we’ll be sure to update the blog in the next few days with hard data.
Conclusion
It’s time for a guessing game. So many things have happened to XBMC since DevCon last year, it’s hard to say which was the biggest. In the comments below, we’d love to hear your feedback. What do you think the biggest change, feature, fix, or improvement is going to be in the coming year? Perhaps at next year’s DevCon, we’ll take a look at a few of the guesses and mention our favorites.
But for now, we’re excited to get planning and working. And, once again, for those of you who can make it, we’re excited to see you on Beers, Users, and Devs Night!
