XBMC4XBOX 3.0.1 Stable Released!

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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.

Further information and history

XBMC4XBOX was once called XBMC (XBOX Media Center), then it was ported to other platforms and became plain XBMC or XBMC Media Center without the XBOX connection. To differentiate our version from the mainline multiplatform XBMC we renamed to XBMC4XBOX.

Apart from the name the next noticable thing is the changed version numbering. The last official release was 9.11 Camelot, which at the time was more closely connected to the multiplatform XBMC that had been in development for some time. We have reverted to version numbering that doesn’t include a reference to a date for release. Now it’s a simple major.minor version – which is what was used also before XBOX Media Center became XBMC. New releases will be made when they are ready rather than having set release dates.

In previous years there has been less developer interest in the XBOX version, as the new multiplatform version of XBMC became the primary concern. As of last year, only one developer (Arnova) still looked after the XBOX version. Lack of interest from the XBMC developers got to a point where a new home was needed for the XBOX codebase, and earlier this year it was moved to its own home on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc4xbox/

A community site had already been set up at http://www.xbmc4xbox.org and was chosen to replace the forums on xbmc.org where XBOX discussion was no longer relevant. http://xbmc.org only deals with the versions they develop for.

After the move, interest seemed to increase with some new developers joining to help out. Over the last year the XBOX has seen more development that it has for a long time. In fact even the mainline XBMC has benefited from at least a few fixes from our code base.

The new release is the result of a great community effort with many people contributing bugs, patches, translations and scripts.

Future

We all like improvements on our favourite software, and so, to everyone looking forward to the next release, please do consider how you could help us improve the software and make it even better. We are always after new developers, people to help maintain scrapers, translators, python script coders, and anyone else who has a great idea or even just a bug report or feature request.

Credits

Thanks to all those who have contributed – especially to Arnova, Bomb Bloke, Buzz, Craig, Dan Dare, Highland Sun, Nuka, xbs, Geeba and all the others who have helped. Thanks everyone!