News

It has been quite a while since the XBMC team has gotten together as a group to discuss the project in person. The time and effort it takes to assemble a group of people from around the world is truly staggering. We are proud to announce that this year’s conference is being sponsored by at-visions…

Well, beta 3 had a few regressions. So rather than moving along to rc1, we decided to throw out one last (we hope!) beta. There a few things to take note of: Live now contains an Audio Mixer. You’ll find it in the Programs section. Non-Live users (Linux and OSX) may install it from the add-ons…

Nearly one month after the release of Beta 2, the latest Dharma pre-release is ready for testing. We have been working very hard to to stabilize XBMC for the final release; there have been over 300 commits to the release branch since the last beta. Notable fixes include: Lots of Live fixes and clean…

Thanks to the excellent mirrorbrain project, we will be upgrading the backend to our mirror system tomorrow to take advantage of some new features, some of them were even added at our request (thanks again Peter)! As a result, beta testers for the upcoming Dharma release may experience a brief…

Just over two weeks after beta1, the next pre-release version of Dharma is ready for testing. We have closed many bugs, touched up some translations, and updated a substantial number of addons. With beta2, we also made the last-minute decision to include web-interfaces as addons. This means that we…

Today we announce the first beta in what we hope is a very short pre-release cycle. Dharma has been in development for over 9 months now, and we’re quite happy with the result. The improvements are too many to name, but head over to the milestone page to get an idea. By far the biggest new feature…

This is the last weekly report and I would like to thank google and the beagleboard community for the fun summer! It have been a wonderful opportunity and I’ve learned heaps and gotten extremely interested in embedded development. Status Done further investigation regarding finding the performance…

Before we go into the actual status report I would like to be abit nostalgic, this is the last week of feature addition after all. Before GSoC XBMC didn’t even compile on angstrom and now I just finished watching a SD video which ran without the BeagleBoard breaking much of a sweat! I have had much…

Status Overlay is scaled and positioned according to how the skin wants it. Overlay playback is tearing free and rather fast. Runs bunny 480p almost perfect while before it was about 5fps. Finally got crosscompile working. Thanks again koen for all your help providing me with builds up to this point…

Status OMAP Overlay is hooked up to XBMC and works rather well (for a few seconds) Switched the yuv transformation from swscale to the NEON method created by mru. Have created a hack that should get rid of the memcpy, needs major redesign though to get it into trunk though but probably ok to use for…

Last night jmarshall created the Dharma branch, which will eventually become the stable Dharma release. That means that from this point on, only fixes and important updates will go into the release branch, while trunk remains open for business. So for all the skinners, translators, and add-on…

Status Understood how OMAP Overlay works and how it should be done, thanks to måns awesome application omapfbplay. Implemented a VideoRenderer in XBMC which transforms from yuv420p to yuv422p via swscale. I might use the neon optimized from Måns at a later stage but for now I isolate the unknowns to…

Nearly a year ago, topfs2 started working on a remote client for Android phones and was shortly joined by me, not even having my phone yet. The project grew rapidly and soon the_alien and mikkle joined the show. While the app was always freely available via Google Code, we’ve decided today that it’s…

Status Finally gotten the dirty region based rendering solution to work on the Beagle Board. During the week I’ve tried rendering to a framebuffer and render this buffer to the backbuffer but it was incredibly slow but Måns Rullgård (mru) pointed me to track dirty regions from 2 frames back, i.e…

It’s been quite a while since we’ve posted an update, but rest assured we’ve been very busy behind the scenes. The new add-ons system is now nearly complete, the only missing piece is the add-ons themselves. So let’s fix that! Here’s a quick refresher course for those who may have missed it. We have…

Last week have been a busy week indeed and I have focused on getting the dirty region based rendering to work. I am glad I followed my mentor’s advice and did dirty region before moving to an event based rendering, especially considering that when dirty region rendering works we have gotten an event…

Status Finally XBMC runs on Angstrom, turns out it was optical code paths deadlocking while loading. Commited a –disable-optical-drive on the gsoc branch. XBMC Runs on C4 at about 10-15 fps (15fps in 640×480 and 10 in 720p) but koen have tried it on the new BeagleBoard xM which does an amazing 38fps…

LinuxTag 2010 was a great success, and XBMC was there in Berlin to do its part. In attendance this year: Sigurdur Olafsson (sho), Stephan Diederich (mdd), Gunnar Norin (blittan), Michael Probst (Stephan’s friend and helper for the week), and Cory Fields (theuni). Also, Matthias Kortstiege (vdrfan…

After discussion with my mentor we decided to not use the EVAS model suggested in my last weekly report. While it might have worked it would have taken to much time to realize which is a bad idea due to the limited time of GSoC. Hence I have started altering the guilib to do the actual event based…

Since I’ve been without computer the last week the status update will be slim. Status Committed the initial patches to get XBMC on Ångström building Decided on an abstracted rendering model which works like EVAS. Basically guilib will add drawable elements to the render system. When an animation…