Month: May 2013

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.

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

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