Jools

Ten years ago today, the XBOX console was first introduced to North America. Since then, it has seen the release of many great games, including many of the best selling video game series’ of all time, and one of the largest online communities for games which allows gaming online, downloading new games/content, and tv, movie, and music streaming. The XBOX is now one of the top selling consoles of all time.

Even more impressive however, are the efforts of people who receive no compensation for their work other than the thanks of like minded people. Shortly after the release of this console, a modding community was founded and has been growing steadily since then. XBOX users are now able not only to play XBOX games, but games from nearly every console up to the 5th generation through emulators. There are also full versions of Linux running very well on this console.

XBOX users also have access to arguably the best media center application on any platform. XBMC started because the XBOX needed a good media player, but it evolved into something so much larger. Streaming media files from the network with library organization, weather support, XBOX game trainers, a game/program launcher, and an entire build of python to run a plethora of scripts which can be created by anyone. XBMC has been unsurpassed by many other media applications, some of which you must pay for.

The best part about all of this? It is available completely free and open-source, made by other XBOX users in their free time.
I think it’s high time to congratulate everyone who has contributed to make this console come as far as it has.

Thank you Mwaterbu for allowing me to post this on the front page as I don’t believe I could have written it better.

Happy birthday Xbox Classic and thanks for all the good times.

Xman.

2000 forum users and 5000 RSS subscribers.

Long live XBMC for Xbox!

Dan Dar3

It’s been a while since I’ve had a bit of a write on the front page but here I am. As most of you know, we have hit over 2000 members and this is rising by the day which is always good to see. I’m always amazed at the versatility of “the old black box” as it hits it’s 10 years of reliable service. I only wish they made P.C.s with such reliability, something I don’t think Microsoft intended when they designed these machines.

There has been much development since the last stable release and Arnova and Exobuzz are continually improving on the way XBMC works for us all. It’s always good to check out how the latest builds perform on your machine with there smoother operation and extra features. Just make sure to read up on the forum on how to upgrade your build and it’s a relatively simple operation. It’s also good to try the different skins other than the default 3 that come with each new build. Simply grab the skin or skins you’d like to try and add it in your skins folder in the XBMC folder and select it in your XBMC appearance settings and your XBMC’s appearance will change to that of the new skin. I also like to change the sounds but that’s a more in depth procedure that is best left to the forum.

Anyway, I’d like to welcome all the new members that have joined the forum since I last welcomed new members and look forward to there input and comments on the forum.

Xman.

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.

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!