XBMC Eden 11.0 Launched

Posted in: XBMC|By: Cris|March 25, 2012

XBMC Eden 11.0 is finally ready. It took over a year to develop but it is well worth the wait. You can expect massive improvements on playback, rendering is now less CPU intensive thanks to Dirty Region rendering support and, overall, XBMC looks and acts smoother. Noticeable XBMC Eden’s new features include a new Confluence skin with horizontal menu layout, improved unencrypted Blu-ray content playback, AirPlay support, Weather service auto-configuration trough IP lookup, more accurate scrapers, and a simpler, much improved library handling.

XBMC addons functionality was also greatly improved, with new extension points being added and, most importantly, addons can now be rolled back. If an addon breaks or is lacking a feature previously available, you can choose to go back to a previous version. XBMC remote control support has never been better. JSON-RPC was upgraded to allow for a much better input handling, making life much easier, specially under Windows. Besides the new supported hardware, like Apple TV 2, iPad and other iOS Apple products, VAAPI support was added and AMD GPU playback is possible, with some limitations.

XBMCbuntu

XBMCbuntu is now the official full-blown XBMC distribution. XBMC Live was retired for good in favor of a much user friendly distribution. XBMCbuntu is built upon a full LXDE desktop environment, in a way that allows the user to never see the underlying OS, if we or she so chooses. XBMCbuntu boots directly to XBMC, much like XBMC Live, but user can also choose to boot to a normal desktop, fully equipped with Chromium browser, complete with upgradeable Flash support and package manager. This means an updatable XBMC experience is now possible. No more complicated update procedures that crash your HTPC.

From a user point of view, the vast majority of changes can’t be seen. They consist mainly of improvements, teaks and code optimization. Others, such as the new Confluence Horizontal, an Aeon inspired layout seen above, are noticeable and require some degree of adaptation. XBMC’s default skin now allows for addons to display under the main menu, in a contextual way. XBMC video addons under Video menu, music addons under Music menu, etc. A much appreciated feature that truly makes XBMC experience that much nicer.

XBMC Eden’s new features are simply too many to describe here but, if you have the patience, ready below a very summarized changelog. It gives you an idea of what happened in a year. While we update our download pages, you can find the final XBMC Eden release here.

XBMC Eden general changes

XBMC addons API and manager

Added support for all addons to provide their own web interface
Added support for handling multiple web interfaces
Added support for addons to save their setting values to their own settings.xml file before quitting
Added support for multi-file selections in the file browser dialog
Added support for addon rollbacks, enabling users to choose previously installed addons over more recent revisions
Added support to search addons in the addons manager
Extended addons API to support adding extension points for service addons

XBMC GUI Engine

Added Dirty Region support to further reduce CPU usage
Added a custom JPEG decoder, at least 2x faster than the previous cximage implementation
Added support for auto login of a specific selected user profile, improving Kiosk Mode
Added xbmc.Player().getAvailableAudioStreams() and xbmc.Player().setAudioStream() commands
Added support to identify DTS-HD – DTS-HD MA and DTS-HD HRA – profiles in audio stream list
Added support for skinners to show buffering progress for streamed or cached files
Improved mouse support. Better click handling and control for dragging of seek, slide and scroll bars/li>
Improved touch interface API and gesture support for XBMC’s GUI Engine for all platforms
Improved XBMC’s GUI Engine and Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful

XBMC playback

Added support for UDF 2.5 filesystem reading to XBMC’s Virtual File System
Added support for direct playback of ISO image files for Blu-ray disc as well as video library integration
Added support for vertical shift of video image with slider setting
Added support for color and font styles tag in MPL2 MicroDVD subtitles
Added support for SSA/ASS subtitle tags. Italics, bold, and color for SRT SubRip subtitles
Added support for MP4 embedded subtitles
Added support delay tag in vobsub subtitles
Added support for a new extended version of MPlayer’s EDL – Edit Decision List – format
Added PlayerControl built in function to allow jumping to a percentage offset from a key mapping
Added support for Slingbox
Added support for NFS Virtual File Server – VFS – on all platforms
Added support for AFP Virtual File Server – VFS – on all platforms except Windows
Added Airplay support for Videos/Pictures on all platforms
Added Airplay support for Music on all platforms except Windows
Added Audio/L16 support for better DLNA UPnP client compliance
Added a slider for volume amplification and dynamic range compression during video playback
Added an option to pause video playback during refresh rate changes
External subtitles now have preference over internal subtitles
Extended PathSubstitution from playlists to all files for users of shared MySQL databases
Improved UPnP renderer
Improved the adjust refresh rate feature to pick the best rate, rather than the closest multiple
Improved Blu-ray disc and harddrive playback support of unencrypted bdmv and mpls files without menus
Removed subtitle caching. Only needed on Xbox because of the severe memory restrictions
Removed all dependencies of libmms libraries from XBMC’s code in favour of FFmpeg native MMS support
Removed all dependencies of liba52, libdts, and faac libraries from XBMC’s code in favour of FFmpeg native support
Upgraded FFmpeg – libavformat and libavcodec – audio/video codec and demux library

XBMC Library

Added asynchronous threaded background loading of metadata to XBMC’s Virtual File System
Added support for cleaning the music library via CleanLibrary music command
Added a “Play from here” context menu button for TV shows episodes in the video library
Added support to specify the default action (Play, Resume, Show Information, Choose) on videos
Added support for disc stub cataloging DVDs, BluRays, etc.
Added Movie Collections support, along with the ability to toggle collections on and off
Changed “Set Content” to “Edit Content Settings” after content is set
Combined Files and Library mode for videos. Should make life easier for new users

XBMC scrapers

Added support for scraping Movie Collections
Improved TheMovieDB.org movie scraper by adding themoviedb.org posters scraping
Improved TheTVDB.com multi-lingual TV shows and episode scraper
Improved Freebase music scraper

XBMC Confluence skin

Added ability for users to easily add and remove addons as items on the home screen menu
Added codec flagging images for DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio
Greatly simplified the way FanArt works throughout the skin and the settings for it
New Confluence Horizontal home screen layout

Other XBMC Eden changes

Added weather lookup by IP
Added ability to handle and allow access to multiple web interfaces at once
Added option setting to play videos within picture slideshows
Added dimming setting to the built-in picture slideshow screensaver
Added support for sorting depending on current locale
Added advancedsettings.xml option to disable the display of startup splash image (enabled by default)
Added support for batch requests to the JSON-RPC API
Added support for requests by notification to the JSON-RPC API
Added advancedsettings.xml option to configure the TCP port used by JSON-RPC (defaults to 9090)
Cleaned up and improved JSON-RPC API
Improved the features of the default web interface
Improved JSON-RPC API and made it compliant with JSON-RPC 2.0 specification
Removed Weather from XBMC core and switched to Weather Underground as the default weather provider plugin

XBMC Eden OS specific features, changes and improvements

XBMC for Linux

Added support for JSON-RPC server over Bluetooth
Added support for Texas Instruments OMAP4. OMAP4430 and OMAP4440 video decoding on IVA 3
Added dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.)
Added proper timezone support for systems based on Slackware Linux
Added altname (alternative name) support to LIRC mapping for linux-input-layer devices
Added lircmap for Conexant’s CX23885 IR (infrared) recievers
Added lircmap to switch between subtitles with iMON Pad remote control
Improved ARM processor architecture support for embedded devices and embedded system platforms
Improved OpenGL ES and EGL support for embedded devices and embedded system platforms
Improved OpenMAX Video Decoding Acceleration support

XBMC for iOS

Added support for Apple A4 (ARM) iDevices, including Apple TV 2G, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G and iPad, effectively all jailbroken iOS products
Added hardware accelerated video decoding support for H.264 decode on iOS via Apple’s VideoToolBox API
Added support for OpenGL ES hardware accelerated rendering of XBMC’s graphical user interface on iOS
Added Retina support
Added initial iOS Touch, Gesture and Inertial scrolling support for XBMC interface on iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and iPad
Added an APT repository for Apple TV and Cydia with packages for iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and iPad
Ported XBMC to iOS 4.x. We are proud to add “XBMC for iOS” to XBMC’s existing list of supported operating-systems

XBMC for Mac OS X

Added dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.)
Added support to adjust the display’s refresh rate to match the video’s frame rate
Improved Apple VDADecoder Video Acceleration support. Requires Snow Leopard and NVIDIA 9400 or later
Improved XBMC’s build system to make compiling much easier