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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 site:slashdot.org" returns 6000 results, so they probably assume /. readers already know what it is.
In any case,
XBMC Media Center (formerly Xbox Media Center) is a free and open source cross-platform digital media hub and HTPC (Home theater PC) software with a 10-foot user interface designed to be a media player for the living-room TV using only a remote control as the input device. Its graphical user interface (GUI) allows the user to easily browse and view videos, photos, podcasts, and music from a harddrive, optical disc, local network, and the internet using only a few buttons.
(From Wikipedia)
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This is for the people who want a 10 foot interface on their little nettop hooked up to the TV.
My UID is prime... is yours?
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.
I've tried a few versions of XBMC (and have 11 downloading in the background, just to take a look), and I never really understood the big deal about it.
With the original XBox, okay, cool, you had a fairly high-functionality networked media player running on a $99 console gaming system. Neat.
But on a modern PC? Running a variety of programs to handle each individual media type in a manner I prefer for them doesn't present any sort of burden to me or to the system. I have no real reason to stay within the context of a single program that can do-it-all - I just make a new desktop shortcut to my preferred handler of format-X, and bam, I have it always instantly available to me.
So tell me, Slashdot - What have I missed here that makes XBMC so impressive?
You're missing a wife. Because mine (despite having a masters in engineering and a CCIE) is completely unwilling to use a PC connected to our home theater. She wants to access media the same way she uses a DVR, and with the same remote. XBMC provides that experience. Plus it works with Airplay.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Why do you assume that he didn't read TFA or do a Google search because he found it too difficult?
He did neither of those things because he couldn't be arsed.
Yup, that's a technical term! You definitely wouldn't want the usual 2-foot computer UI when you're on your couch fairly far from your screen. Heck, I have my occasional issues with it when I'm not so far...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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
Well the Eden logo in TFA refers to it as XBMC Media Center. In addition the logo used on wiki.xbmc.org (similar to the eden logo) also refers to it as xbmc media center. So you can keep "correcting" people if you want, but if the official site uses XBMC Media Center it is obviously an acceptable name for the product.
It's not quite your stated ideal, but I'm happy with XBMC running on a rooted Apple TV. Cheap, easy and the videos look fantastic (without having to run iTunes or transcode anything!).
I just this weekend dropped my homebuilt system I have been using for over 10 years, have not seen anything which has ALL the features I want before. I'm very impressed by this piece of software. Scales really well to big collections, nice fast "GF proof" UI and pretty stable. HD Audio (DTS-HDMA, TrueHD) is still missing in the Linux version which is a bummer but I can live without that and start from the CLI when I need the full experience, don't happen that often. The scraper (matching movies to get actors, descriptions and so on) works really well and altough some cleaning up was needed it didn't take too long. There are cheap iPhone and android apps to browse and start movies, also without using the phone as a remote, and more as a browser. Using as remote pretty much sucks on a touchscreen since you can't feel the buttons. I'm very glad I tried this and hope it will be a keeper for years to come. Now of to install the new version since I installed the RC yesterday.
One advantage you might want to consider is that one day Microsoft may "be forced" into an agreement with a digital rights enforcement organisation and have to prevent windows media centre from playing stuff that was not rented or licensed via Zune Market or one of the legal app stores. With XBMC running on some variant of Linux, the music and videos you can play today are likely to be playable 10 years from now.
For the Metadata on movies and TV shows I've found a 3rd party tool works best. Ember is what I use and I really like it. there are others, you can find them in the 3rd party tools section of the XBMC forums. While you're at it check out Sickbeard, SABnzb, and maybe Couchpotato. There's another tool for music too but it's apparently not well supported and I've had no interest in it. The bitstreaming works on windows with the right build but honestly DTS is fine for me right now and I believe it will downsample THD etc. as needed.
Anyway, lots of good stuff out there for XBMC!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Most of those codecs like X264? ILLEGAL in any country that signed Berne, all that? Is patented.
I thought Berne was about copyrights, not patents.
ALL the major formats ARE PATENTED
True, but all patents essential to VP8 are licensed permissively.
Mark my words the next version of H.26x WILL have DRM support
I thought digital restrictions management was a feature of a container, not a codec. For example, CSS is part of the DVD container, which is based on the MPEG-2 container, and doesn't touch the codec at all. The closest thing to DRM in a codec is BD+, which warps parts of the frame to make them friendlier to the underlying codec (and can disable unwarping in an environment that appears not to conform to the system's C&R rules), and I haven't seen anything other than Blu-ray that implements anything remotely like BD+.
I think the power of XBMC isn't in the default installation. It's in the streaming add-ons that are available.
I've got one installed called freecable. It lets me stream from any TV episode that's available on basically any TV show's website. ie: The official CBS website will stream episodes of CSI. On XBMC, I just go to Free Cable -> CBS -> CSI -> Full Episodes. My wife and I are seriously thinking of getting rid of our cable subscription completely. Haven't watched anything that wasn't streamed through XBMC in several months.
With XBMC v10, add-ons are easy to install and update, via repositories. v10 add-ons (and repositories) seem to be compatible with v11, so there's a lot out there already.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Runs real smooth on an Intel Atom based system (Acer Revo R3600 & R3700). Can't get much more under powered than that.
I think the trick is to use a graphics card that can offload the video playback.