A late Happy Xmas to you all, and wishing the best for the new year. What better than to give you a new XBMC4XBox release to test though. Just in time 🙂

The 3.5 Beta 1 release has seen a massive amount of work from the last stable, and includes all fixes from 3.3.3, but has been ongoing in development since the first 3.3 release. Released now as a Beta 1 as it does require some further testing, and there may be new issues or regressions, but I would encourage people to try it alongside the current stable and feed back any problems via the forum or bugtracker.

Changes include:

• Python 2.7.5 – includes working libraries for sqlite3, and fully working ssl. This brings far better compatibility with upstream XBMC plugins, and logging in on YouTube etc works, which it never did on the previous Python 2.4. This took many hours of work to do including building working python libraries compatible with the XBMC4Xbox architecture. Bugs may remain, but I hope it will be an improvement for most people.
• DVDPlayer has been updated to the FFMPEG 1.2 libraries which brings improved codec support, and new features. We still include two sets of FFMPEG libraries, one for the most common formats, and another which has everything.  Webm and XMV support is now added to the smaller library set, but please do report any issues/questions on the forum.
• Skin changes from XBMC to make backporting of xbmc skins easier.
• Many bug fixes and other improvements – you can always check on development activity via the Redmine activity page.

Many thanks as usual to the XBMC project for without their support and open source licence, we could not exist. Many congrats to them on the release of Frodo 12.3, and we are all exciting about their upcoming Gotham 13 release too. Cheers 🙂

Big thanks to all contributors, including a special thanks to Dan Dar3 for many bug fixes and his ongoing work on XBMC4Xbox Remote, to the many people who help in the of the running the forum, and those who have contributed financially to the project. My personal thanks to XPhazer, Ghostly, Xman, and co for moral support, and to Dom, Byron and others for providing users with skin customisations.

If you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox and want to show your support for the ongoing development please consider making a donation to the project. Please also do join in the discussions over at our Forum.

See the development page for links to the source code and the svn repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page.

XBMC4Xbox 3.3.3 has been released. It fixes problems with scrapers (TMDB scraper broke due to http://www.themoviedb.org/ deprecating their old xml API), as well as an issue with thumbnailing images that were not in JPEG format.

Fixes:

• Updated TMDB scraper (based on scraper from xbmc mainline), which now uses their v3 JSON API. Also has some additional settings for language now.
• Fixed issues with thumbnails / movie posters and IMDB / MoviePosterDB scrapers.
• Fixed thumbnailing of images not in JPEG format (A regression from an earlier release due to thumbnail / cache code cleanups)

Thanks to all those who reported issues, Foresto for the IMDB / MoviePostDB scraper fixes and http://xbmc.org for upstream scraper fixes.

If you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox and want to show your support for the ongoing development please consider making a donation to the project. Please also do join in the discussions over at our Forum.

See the development page for links to the source code and the svn repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page.

XBMC4Xbox 3.3.2 is out. It fixes a couple of issues that were introduced in 3.3.1.

Fixes:

• Fixed black background issue for Confluence Lite when interface is not in English.
• Fixed a problem with the recently updated build script that didn’t package up PM3 and Confluence.

See the development page for links to the source code and the svn repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page.

It’s been a few weeks since the 3.3 release, and here is a small update to fix a few issues and the addition of a bonus skin theme. Read on to also find out what may be coming soon to XBMC4XBox.

Changes:

• There were problems accessing the video/music playlists when nothing was playing.
• Adding plugins to the home screen of Confluence Lite cause script failures when launching.
• There was a minor text positioning bug in the seek dialog with PM3.HD.
• We now ship with a lovely green XBox theme for Confluence Lite – Go to Settings -> Appearance -> Skin -> Theme to switch.

Thanks to Dan Dar3 for the plugin fix, and DavPow for the green Confluence Lite modification, and the main XBMC project.

The playlist bug was reported by multiple people after the 3.3 release was out. To avoid annoying glitches in future releases, please do get involved and try out the earlier Beta releases. You can then report problems, and help us get them fixed before we do the final release.

I am currently busy working on a major python upgrade (Python 2.7.5 is actually in trunk and already working!) and implementing proper Addons support from the XBMC code base. It is a huge amount of work, with many long days already spent on it. If you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox and want to show your support for the ongoing development please consider making a donation to the project. Please also do join in the discussions over at our Forum and say hello.

The XBMC4Xbox Wiki is currently very out of date, having been re-constructed over the last year from old xml dumps after the last server admin went AWOL. We would very much appreciate anyone that could lend a hand, updating the wiki with information regarding latest features, and correcting / fixing many of the issues. If you are interested you can register right away and start editing.

See the development page for links to the source code and the svn repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page.

The XBMC4Xbox team is proud to announce the release of XBMC4Xbox 3.3.

Improvements include

• New default Confluence Lite skin.
• DVDPlayer improvements – including:
  • Updated libraries for DVDPlayer (FFMPEG/libdvd et al).
  • Recognises additional video extensions as used by some XBox games.
  • HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) support.
  • Other playback improvements from XBMC.
• Updated VFS and Cache
• Improved 128MB Ram support.
• Built-in support for recently added videos/music for skins (without the need for Python).
• Updated MythTV support.
• Better out of the box support for universal / Microsoft Media Extender remotes.
• Password Manager for Samba shares allowing different usernames/password per share.
• Skinning improvements.
• Scraper updates.
• Various other code / library updates and improvements.

Big thanks to all those who have helped with this, including JezzX for Confluence Lite and XBS for his work porting it over to XBMC4Xbox. Thanks also to the developers at the XBMC project, as the majority of features were backported from their code base. Thanks to Dom, Jan, Kozz, Temhil, XPhazer and XMan as well as others over at the XBMC4XBox Forum for their help with scripting, code testing, moral support and help running things.

Please do join in the discussions over at our Forum, and if you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox please feel free to make a donation to the project.

See the development page for links to the source code and the svn repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page.

Here are some screenshots from the latest release. Enjoy.

Following on from Beta 1, Beta 2 is now ready for testing. Changes since 3.3 Beta 1 include

• Skin / Navigation fixes
• Some locale updates
• Workaround for Exif orientation with jpeg-turbo code

One of the changes works around an issue with skins and upper-casing accented letters for non English languages. To workaround this we now include the main navigation strings capitalised (which is how XBMC mainline will handle it for the next release as they have similar problems on some platforms). Currently this has been done for English and Spanish. If you want to help fix this for your language, please open a thread over at the forum, and I will provide instructions. I may well automate a fix for other languages before the final 3.3 release.

The upcoming 3.3 version of XBMC4Xbox has now reached a point where it should be stable for every day use, and can be put through more testing by end users.

The improvements in the 3.3 Beta 1 release include:

• DVDPlayer improvements – including:
  • Updated libraries for DVDPlayer (FFMPEG/libdvd et al).
  • Recognises additional video extensions as used by some XBox games.
  • HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) support.
  • Other playback improvements from XBMC.
• New default Confluence Lite skin.
• Updated VFS and Cache
• Improved 128MB Ram support.
• Built-in support for recently added videos/music for skins (without the need for Python).
• Updated MythTV support.
• Better out of the box support for universal / Microsoft Media Extender remotes.
• Password Manager for Samba shares allowing different usernames/password per share.
• Skinning improvements.
• Scraper updates.
• Various other code / library updates and improvements.

Big thanks to all those who have helped with this, including JezzX for Confluence Lite and XBS for his work porting it over to XBMC4Xbox. Thanks also to the developers at the XBMC project, as the majority of features were backported from their code base. Thanks to Dom, Jan, Kozz, Temhil, XPhazer and XMan as well as others over at the XBMC4XBox Forum for their help with scripting, code testing, moral support and help running things.

For those wanting to build from source, the 3.3-BETA1 version can be checked out with svn from https://svn.exotica.org.uk:8443/xbmc4xbox/tags/3.3-beta1

Development of the 3.3 release is still ongoing, but in the meantime, here is a small update to 3.2 that includes a few fixes and improvements, including:

• Thumbnail scaling calculations are improved to correct the low-res issue with wide icons.
• Included a modern new default web interface from Sander (called XBMC Reloaded).
• The SVN Repo installer has been replaced with the Addons4Xbox installer, that is able to install addons designed for XBMC.

The SVN Repo installer has become little use as most of the scripts and plugins it references are no longer maintained. To fix this Temhil created an Addons4Xbox installer that allowed installation of addons from XBMC addon repositories. This doesn’t completely solve the problem though, as due to our old python version, and differences in XBMC4Xbox from XBMC many of them don’t work out of the box. To remedy this, we have our own repository that contains fixed up versions of many of the most popular addons. You can see details of which have been changed and the current working status at  https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/addons/.

The Addons4Xbox installer still has some issues, and could be improved, but it’s works well as a temporary solution.

Thanks to Skatulskijean, Kozz, XPhazer, Sander and Temhil and everyone else who has helped.