XBMC4Xbox

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

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The SVN Repo installer has become little use as most of the scripts and plugins it references are no longer maintained.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

Good news – the Paypal account is restored.

I would like to think that the big social media fuss wasn’t necessary and this would have been happily resolved quickly anyhow, but I somehow think it might have been more to do with the large discussion on reddit, all the Tweets, and the 220,000+ hits we had on the blog post. I am happy though about the outcome

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Here is the email.

Dear Julian Wills ,

Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding the recent limitation of your
PayPal account.

We have further reviewed your case and determined that your account is
currently not in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy. As such, the
limitation on your account has been lifted.

We sincerely appreciate your business and offer our apologies for any
inconvenience this disruption in service may have caused. 

In the future, if you have any questions regarding what items are
prohibited under PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy, please see the following
URL for the complete text:
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_US

Again, we thank you for your cooperation and understanding in resolving
this matter and appreciate the fact that you chose PayPal to accept
payments for your business. If you have any further questions, please
contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at euaup@paypal.co.uk.

Sincerely,
Zoe
PayPal, Brand Risk Management

 

This issue is now resolved – please see http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/2013/01/good-news-paypal-account-restored/

We have a donation page where we have accepted donations via Paypal for the project and site. This money goes towards the project, with money sent to developers, and helps covering costs etc.

Today I received an email from Paypal informing they have frozen my account.

Dear Julian Wills,

We are hereby notifying you that, after a recent review of your account
activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal's
Acceptable Use Policy regarding your sales / offers on
www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum.

Please refer to: 
- Transaction x
- Transaction x
- Transaction x

Therefore, your account has been permanently limited. 

Per the User Agreement, when PayPal permanently limits an account due to an
Acceptable Use Policy violation, we may hold your funds up to 180 days. We
will review your account at 30 days from the date of this email, we will
calculate our exposure and will release any excess funds to you for
withdrawal. If there are any funds remaining in your account at this time,
we will review your account every 30 days until either all your funds have
been made available to you for withdrawal, or a period of 180 days from the
date your account was limited is reached. Please log in to your PayPal
account and verify that your account information is accurate, as PayPal
cannot be held responsible for incorrect information provided by the
account holder.

You will need to remove all references to PayPal from your website/s and/or
auction/s. This includes not only removing PayPal as a payment option, but
also the PayPal logo and/or shopping cart. 

The PayPal User Agreement states that PayPal, at its sole discretion,
reserves the right to limit an account for any violation of the User
Agreement, including the Acceptable Use Policy.

Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive
payments for items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others
to engage in illegal activity.

The complete Acceptable Use Policy can be found at the following URL:
https://cms.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_GB

To learn more about the Acceptable Use Policy, please refer to our Help
Centre page here:
https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/helpweb?cmd=_help

We thank you in advance for your cooperation. If you have any questions,
please contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at
euaup@paypal.co.uk.

Sincerely,
Nadine
PayPal, Brand Risk Management

So it looks like I am guilty until I have proved my innocence. It is strange they refer to the forum link rather than the main site url. Am I being accused of something they have found on the forum? Hard to know since they give no real information at all to what I am guilty of. “PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” – in reference to? Are they suggesting XBMC4XBOX facilitates/encourages or instructs people to engage in illegal activity? Are they referring to the software itself or some specific forum discussion ? Hard to know, but no project donations have been used for anything like this. The transactions they listed in the email are just donations to the project from users. All money goes towards project costs, and to developers for their time.

Googling for this sort of email shows it happens by mistake time and time again. From freezing charity donation funds, to other cases similar to ours. I have had my Paypal account frozen twice before, firstly when a card expired (some random security audit), and a second time when I made a transaction from another country and it was frozen since I was connecting from a different geographic location. Both times were a pain to resolve, even though I did nothing wrong, which seems to be the way Paypal like it.

I have already spoken to them on the phone. But guess what, they can’t do anything, because I need to speak to the “AUP” team, who of course only have an email account. Email has been sent. I wonder how long this will take to resolve. I suspect later rather than sooner. It’s also worth noting that a note on my paypal account states “This limitation cannot be appealed against.“ – that’s fair!

*update*
I realise the article title with “Guilty until proven innocent” is not that well worded, and this is in relation to the AUP and not a court case. In hindsight I could have made it clearer. In fact it has been decided I am guilty of breaking the rules, with no real information as to how, and with no right to appeal the decision. Oh and hi to all the visitors from reddit that have kept me up late making sure the server doesn’t fall over Interesting to read other peoples stories and opinions.

Please do tweet/facebook/link to this post. If it gets some attention you never know, Paypal might actually look into it.

There is a large amount of useful software available for the XBox1. From original apps, to ports of emulators from other platforms. The large majority are ports of existing software. This was made possible usually due to the original authors making the source code available, often under the GPL licence. The idea is that you are allowed to use, and modify the code, but any changes will also come under the same licence – meaning you must make the source available to others.

Current XBox 1 developers seem to have no respect for the GPL and no respect for the work of the original authors of the software they have ported. They are building on top of others work, but keeping the changes private. This is an issue that has been bothering me for some time, but has gotten significantly worse over recent times. We wouldn’t even have the large selection of emulators had the source not already been available. It seems a pretty easy concept to grasp – we benefit from  the source licence of the original software, so we should follow suite and comply with the original authors wishes. Licence aside, it’s still the respectful and decent thing to do.

What is happening currently, is not only a breach of the original licences, but very disrespectful to the original authors.

I have read countless excuses, the most prominent one being “Author X will use our code if we release it and they don’t release theirs”. This isn’t an excuse though – if they are breaking the GPL, then why not contact them about it (or the original authors of the software). The old saying “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. Devs should look at their own compliance first.

XBMC is GPL licenced for example, and as such we make all XBMC4XBOX code available in a public code repository – http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/development/ – if you use code from XBMC in your own GPL project, you are expected to release the source. (http://xbmc.org/team-xbmc/2003/10/31/please-respect-the-gpl-license/

There have been discussions (some heated) about this recently. I happened to be reading a forum earlier that suggested I was breaking the GPL, by providing XBMC code to others who are not GPL compliant. This is of course nonsense – and I did no such thing. Our code is public, and the author in question took the patch from our repository. Thanking me in a readme is actually no thanks at all if you are breaking the source licence. Today was the first I had heard about it, and the code in question.

Because of this and the fact XBMC code was being used in a few of the emulators I wrote a polite request on the http://www.emuxtras.net forum for the sourcecode to a emulator update. Shortly after my post was deleted, so I asked again and queried the deleted post.

Pretty shameful state of affairs. How do you think all the original authors would feel – to see the way their hard work is being abused. This childish attitude has to stop. I am hoping when I get a reply later the author in question on emuxtras is going to do the decent thing.

That goes for the all the GPL emulators over at Emuxtras that are not released with source, coinops, and the XBMC based apps such as Dragon/Vision. Release your source code. Even better work on it in a public repository, and you can all benefit from each others improvements, as well as making it far easier for people to collaborate.

It’s worth noting this doesn’t happen in the other homebrew scenes. This bad behaviour seems an Xbox exclusive.

One last note:
Something that came up in an earlier discussion, was an accusation of double standards on our part, for arguing about the GPL and then providing builds created with the XDK, which is a breach of Microsoft’s end user licence. One wrong does not excuse another, but we will not be providing any new builds.

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 – http://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.

WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?

Right now it’s unique in that it runs the same emulator cores on multiple systems (such as XBox1, Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, etc).

For each emulator ‘core’, RetroArch makes use of a library API that we like to call ‘libretro’.

Think of libretro as an interface for emulator and game ports. You can make a libretro port once and expect the same code to run on all the platforms that RetroArch supports. It’s designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind so that the porter can worry about the port at hand instead of having to wrestle with an obfuscatory API.

The purpose of libretro is to help ease the work of the emulator/game porter by giving him an API that allows him to target multiple platforms at once without having to redo any code. He doesn’t have to worry about writing input/video/audio drivers – all of that is supplied to him by RetroArch. All he has to do is to have the emulator port hook into the libretro API and that’s it – we take care of the rest.

The Xbox 1 port of RetroArch has the following features:

– Real-time rewinding (though most emus will not likely run fast enough on Xbox 1 to handle this at fullspeed)
– Switching between emulator cores seamlessly, and ability to install new libretro cores

EMULATOR/GAME CORES BUNDLED WITH XBOX 1 PORT

The following emulators/games have been ported to RetroArch and are included in the Xbox 1 release of RetroArch.

For more information about them, see the included ‘retroarch-libretro-README.txt’ file.

– Final Burn Alpha Cores (CPS1 – CPS2 – NeoGeo) [version 0.2.97.26] (***)
– FCEUmm (Nintendo Entertainment System) [recent SVN version]
– Gambatte (Game Boy | Super Game Boy | Game Boy Color) [version 0.5.0 WIP]
– Genesis Plus GX (Sega SG-1000 | Master System | Game Gear | Genesis/Mega Drive | Sega CD) [version 1.7.0]
– SNES9x Next (Super Nintendo/Super Famicom) (**)
– VBA Next (Game Boy Advance) (*)
– Prboom (for playing Doom 1/Doom 2/Ultimate Doom/Final Doom)
– Mednafen PCE Fast (PC Engine/PC Engine CD/Turbografx 16)
– Mednafen Wonderswan (WonderSwan/WonderSwan Color/WonderSwan Crystal)

All of the emulators listed above are the latest versions currently available. Most of them have been specifically optimized so that they will run better on Xbox 1 (some games would not reach fullspeed without these optimizations).

* VBA Next doesn’t run at fullspeed on Wii (VBA Next is a RetroConsole Level 2 emulator port). It will be replaced by a port of gpSP in the near future.
** SuperFX games will not run at fullspeed – a special version of SNES9x will be developed for Retro Console Level 1 systems.
*** The biggest Neo-Geo ROMs that can be loaded are around 23+MB in size, such as Real Bout Fatal Fury 1 and King of Fighters ’96.

For more information and a download please visit http://www.emuxtras.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=2156

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.