News from http://xbmc.org – http://xbmc.org/zag/2012/10/05/10-anniversary-for-xbmc/

Note that this news is written as a perspective from XBMC not XBMC4XBOX (Although it’s a 10 year celebration for us too). Thanks and a big congrats to Team XBMC for their hard work building XBMC, and taking it from the XBOX onto other platforms. Kudos!

Happy Birthday To Us!

Today marks a very important and proud milestone in our history. On 5th October 2002, one of the first ever betas of the XBMC source code got uploaded, as the result of a merge between two different home theatre applications. Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joined the Xbox Media Player team and the two projects were merged. The first release of the combined projects was called “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released, 10 years ago to the day!

We have had many releases since then, reaching the first stable of the newly named “Xbox Media Center” v1.0.0 in 2004, another name change to “XBMC” v2.0.0 in 2006 and Linux support in 2007. As we developed and grew, there were even more stable releases all the way up to the multi-platform “Eden”, and the soon to be released “Frodo”.

The project has continued to evolve, with many changes such as the move from CVS to SVN and now ultimately GITHUB, support for various new platforms and a huge amount of new features, add-ons and beautiful skins.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and commitment to XBMC over the last 10 years, from the creators, developers, testers, skinners, add-on writers and especially to the users – you are the reason the project was started and without your constant support, we wouldn’t still be here!

Every one of you has made XBMC what it is today and helps us go from strength to strength. We hope you are as excited as we are to see what the next 10 years will bring!

Here’s to the next 10 years!!

This was also posted on our forums, so feel free to discuss there – https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=525&p=4459

Thanks to XPhazer, we have a handy realtime conference chat system set up, using TeamSpeak so that users and developers can chat about the project, and other things. A good way to discuss ideas, as well as get to know other users.

TeamSpeak is a communication system including high quality voice communication, text chat, file sharing with many great features. It is available for all major platforms including Windows, Linux and Android.

Full Instructions and server details

In the last two and a half months there has been a lot of progress with XBMC4XBOX.

This project site has improved, with better integration (visually) of the forum, as well as a brand new bug-tracker at http://redmine.exotica.org.uk/projects/xbmc4xbox which includes all the data from the old Sourceforge hosted Trac. The restoration of the wiki is currently in progress, thanks to the help from the XBMC team – especially Ned Scott – who has provided us with a full xml dump of their wiki to use as a base for the reconstruction.

The forum is now getting established and currently has 400 members with over 3500 posts. If you haven’t signed up please do – and join in the discussions. You will find a friendly bunch of XBOX enthusiasts, with topics covering skin / python development, XBOX modifications and more. It is also a good place to get help if you are having any troubles installing or using XBMC4XBOX.

Development of the XBMC4XBOX codebase has been ongoing with numerous improvements and the introduction of the Confluence Lite skin to the development builds, which functions much the same as the version shipped with XBMC. Thanks to Jezz X and the XBMC team, as well as XBS for modifying it to work with our code and Dom Dxecutioner for the global search functionality.

If you would like to test any of the bleeding edge code, you can find nightly builds on the download link above. It is recommended to install alongside your current version as there may well be issues that need fixing, but feedback about problems is always welcomed over at the forum.

RetroArch is a modular multi-system emulator system that is designed to be fast, lightweight and portable. It has features few other emulator frontends have, such as real-time rewinding and game-aware shading. For each emulator ‘core’, RetroArch makes use of a library API that we like to call ‘libretro’.

Libretro is the API that RetroArch uses. It makes it easy to port games and emulators to a single core backend, such as RetroArch.

For the user, this means – more ports to play with, more crossplatform portability, less worrying about developers having to reinvent the wheel writing boilerplate UI/port code – so that they can get busy with writing the emulator/porting the emulator/game.

Read more…

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.

This is a brand new website for the XBMC4XBOX project. Please bookmark it – https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk

What has Happened?

The http://www.xbmc4xbox.org site was hosted and managed by someone else. They have not been around since the end of May 2012, and at the end of June 2012, the site went off-line for non payment. So far efforts to contact the admin have failed, and there has been no luck to bring it back on-line even temporarily as the hosting provider is only accepting payments from the account owner.

This was always my worry when not hosting the project myself, and when only one person has access to the system.

What about the old forum contents and Wiki

The forum does not seem to be cached anywhere, so I can’t even get a list of the forum areas. The content is lost so long as the admin is not contactable, and the site is offline.

The Wiki content is available on some web archives still. We also might be able to get a dump of pages from the xbmc wiki (rolling back to the point before they added material not related to the xbox1)

Please Help!

If you think you could help in anyway – perhaps you have a dump of the old wiki, or want to help rebuilding it, or anything else, please join in over at the forum

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.

The old girl’s still got plenty to give. With hardware that’s now 10 years old you’d be forgiven for thinking the xbox classic’s time is up, however the old girl has still got plenty to give. True enough a lot of people now have HTPC’s, standalone media players or the latest games consoles to stream in true HD to their big screens. This however certainly doesn’t mean the demise of our trusty old xbox… Where else could you buy a media center that’s able to stream content from the internet (or locally) in a wide variety of formats, have an amazing library function, double up as an arcade machine and boot up in seconds? And all for the price of a couple of pints of beer! Yes these great warhorse machines can be picked up second hand for amazing prices, I know I’m not the only one to have picked one or two up for as little as 99p from a certain auction site.

So how do you use your xbox these days, are you still using it as your main media center? Obviously not everyone has an HDTV, in which case the xbox is still unbeatable but for those of us that do what happens to your xbox once you’ve upgraded to newer hardware? Personally I have one in every bedroom and also one in the shed (so I can sit in the garden and watch movies/football with a few beers in the summer). With a simple network connection (homeplugs are a great choice if you don’t like wiring) you can have all your media located on one dedicated machine and stream from there. Whether it’s a dedicated server, NAS or simply a PC you can store all media on that one device and then scan it all into your xbox libraries meaning thousands of movies/tv shows but only one large HDD needed. Of course you could just use the xbox to stream directly from the internet – how do you use yours?

Courtesy of Whufclee