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The SVN Repo installer has become little use as most of the scripts and plugins it references are no longer maintained.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.

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:

• librtmp Support (http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/) to support many online video streaming services.

• 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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