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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."
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.
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