XBMC 9.11 Camelot Released For The Holidays

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XBMC 9.11 Camelot Released For The Holidays

Version 9.11 "Camelot" of XBMC (formerly known as the X-Box Media Center) is now available for Linux and all supported operating systems. The XBMC 9.11 update brings a new default skin, many user-interface improvements, enhanced surround sound support, support for Blu-ray sub-titles,support for RTMP Flash video streams, proper MMS/MMSH streaming client support, an updated FFmpeg implementation, new movie scrapers, and tons of other changes. There are also some Linux-specific improvements to XBMC 9.11 and they include PowerPC Linux support, Avahi Zeroconf support, and integration support for DeviceKit.Disks / DeviceKit.Power / ConsoleKit.Manager (too bad the projects renamed themselves). The full list of XBMC 9.11 changes along with download links can be found at XBMC.org...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzg0MA

[Zhick]

XBMC shure is a great piece of software, but what's still lacking imho is support for watching TV with it.
You can use it as a myth-frontend, but that sucks. Switching channels takes forever (way longer that with kaffeine e.g.) and there is no way to schedule recordings etc.
Luckily there's a development-branch which enables it to be used as a vdr-frontend, which sucks way less, but still isn't 100% perfect. It's not very stable, changing channels still takes long and some other annoyances. But when it's finished and merged to master I bet a Ion-box with it (or maybe by then ATi? One may dream) will make a kick-ass living room-pc.

[tmpdir]

zhick, a workaround: I've been running xbmc and vdr for quit some time now by using the remote to switch between both apps. This way I have xbmc as mediacontainer and the lightweigt VDR to watch tv and schedule recordings.

For me there is no need to integrate both. Switching between these two is fast, recordings can be watched from both vdr and xbmc and watching tv normally doesn't require any gui/skin at all.

Tips and script to get this done are on the xbmc forums. I've posted my own there as well.

[BlackStar]

This version is a distinct improvement over the previous one. Runs faster and smoother, especially when browsing folders with thousands of items and it's much more stable with VDPAU.

Unfortunately, I'm still getting buffering issues when streaming from my MAN connection. The algorithm seems to be very optimistic and only increases buffer size after several minutes of dropped frames (WMP manages to detect the correct buffer size from the beginning).

[mibo]

did they put AMD XVBA support in?

[Kano]

It is absolutely impossible to use xvba until you have got the sdk which most likely only 1 linux dev has got. you could use vaapi over opengl only...

[mibo]

Hmmm. AMD is soo stupid :-(

[n0nsense]

Hmmm. AMD is soo stupid :-(

They are not stupid.
They have limited resources. So they must decide about priority given to each task/feature.
Since video acceleration on Linux seems to be less important (less profit, they put more effort to issues/features disturbing their corporate clients.
10 developers will cost about 1,000,000 USD a year.
It's anything, but cheap to develop software.

[mibo]

despite your name I agree that your statement makes sense, BUT
there must be something like an SDK and the documentation because somebody could use it and get it working. So it seems to me that XVBA SDK/documentation just has to be released - this should involve not too much manpower.
Thus I think not open it up is stupid as it drives away customers.

[Kano]

It exits, but you can only use it via libva + xvba-wrapper (closed source written with that sdk).