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XBMC V11 Eden Has Been Released
New submitter themib writes "After only two release candidates XBMC v11.0 Eden has been released. The latest version contains many updates and new features, including: Addon Rollbacks, Confluence improvements, Dirty region rendering, a new JPEG decoder, movie scraping, better network support, a new upgraded Weather service. This announcement also heralds the new XBMCbuntu Final."
XBMC is meant for media centers. If you're not using it on a PC you're using as a media center, then XBMC is likely not for you. It is called "XBMC Media Center" for a reason.
Question: What advantages do you see over Windows media center in Windows 7? Not having run XBMC since leaving XP in 09 I am curious as to what advantages you find over what is built into Win 7, is it better on resources? does it give you more Internet TV options? How is its hardware acceleration? Because while i can see the advantages clearly for something like the pi, where you are talking about a device that takes less power than your average cable box I just don't see offhand what advantages one could get from XBMC running on top of win 7.
Primarily it's format agnosticism and skin capabilities. 99% of my library is in MKV format, which WMC does not care for, and the Alaska Revisited skin is gorgeous.
It does take advantage of hardware acceleration.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Dirty region rendering is where you only redraw areas that need to be updated instead of drawing the whole screen every frame. It was a lot more common in the older days, and can still be useful for low-power, low-performance devices to keep a larger screen up-to-date. This is precisely why XBMC is implementing it - to reduce overhead of a mostly-idle screen (lower power usage when not viewing media). And I am very happy to see that - too much software doesn't care how much demand it puts on the system as long as it looks good. There is so much being put into trying to make hardware more energy efficient, but an even easier low-hanging fruit is the software.
I see under 25% CPU utilization with an ATOM\ION box that draws less than 20watts decoding 1080P and surround sound audio. It easy to control with my phone, an IRDA remote, or a WEB browser. It plays nearly any format and can play audio or video from my iPhone as well as display pictures from it. It also didn't cost me anything to install since Linux is free and so is XBMC. Since I run multiple HTPC this is nice in that it saves me money. It's nice that it's constantly improving too!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org