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 http://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.
I am pleased to announce another release of XBMC4XBOX – v3.2
A number of bugs have been fixed, including a working fix for the lockups when using UPnP. There has been some significant performance improvements also, with the addition of the libjpeg-turbo library. Based on some code from XBMC, and some of our own, we now use this SIMD optimised library for decoding and thumbnailing JPEG images. The speed up is very noticeable – with navigating photos feeling at least twice as fast as before. XBMC4XBOX will now also use less memory when displaying and zooming in on images.
Release Includes:
- libjpeg-turbo support for images
- Fixed UPnP lockups
- Browse by Country support in movie library
- Scraper fixes
- Switch to Roboto font in Confluence skin
- Plenty of misc bugfixes and code backports from xbmc mainline
- Lots of code refactoring to better match upstream changes
Thanks to all those who helped out, including those who spent lots of time helping users on the forums. Thanks to http://xbmc.org for the support after we lost our previous hosting place (see previous news). And thanks for all the code of course 
Hope you enjoy the release, and should you want to show your support, donations are always welcome – and much appreciated. We are also always on the look out for anyone who is able to contribute time and skills to the project, from the main code development to skins and python scripting.
It’s been close to a year since the last stable release. The truth is, the nightly builds have probably been more stable than the last release as some useful fixes went in soon after. Due to lack of free time, and developers, it’s taken a while to get around to doing another point release but finally – here it is – XBMC4XBOX 3.1
There has been a lot of improvements over the last year – changes since 3.0.1 include:
- FFMPEG Updates
- DVDPlayer Updates/Fixes (Such as improved DVD Seeking and Slingbox support)
- PAPlayer Updates
- Updates to libcurl/polarssl/librtmp
- Scraper fixes
- Lots of other misc bugfixes and improvements.
For more details of changes you can check out the source history over at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc4xbox/
Thanks to all the XBMC developers on over at http://www.xbmc.org as many of the changes are backports from their code base. Also a big thanks and farewell to Arnova, who has been supporting the XBOX over the years but no longer has any need for his XBOX1. He will continue to develop XBMC for Linux though.
We are now down to a single developer on this project. If you know some C++ or can help in other areas, and you wish to spend some free time helping out with the project – please do get involved and post an introduction over at the forums.
We are pleased to announce stable version 3.0.1 of the popular media center platform XBMC
for the 1st generation XBOX (now called XBMC4XBOX). A huge amount of work has been put into this, and it features numerous additions and improvements over the last release such as:
- Updates to dvdplayer’s ffmpeg libraries, including some tweaks for additional speed. Performance with h.264 for example is much improved from previous releases thanks to plenty of optimisations upstream.
- Many improvements and bug fixes to the video/music libraries and scrapers.
- Python updated to 2.4.6 as well as improved compatibility for addons intended for mainline XBMC.
- Support for encoding CD’s to the FLAC format.
- We now ship with a customised version of the Confluence skin optimised for the XBOX.
- Bug fixes and updates to many core components such as Samba and libCurl – such as compatibility with Windows 7 shares.
and plenty more!
Join the community at http://www.xbmc4xbox.org. Nightly builds can be downloaded from http://www.xbmcsvn.com, where the stable release should also soon be available.
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