XBMC media center

XBMC media center is a media-player jukebox and entertainment hub for all your digital media. XBMC is a cross-platform and open source software (GPL) available for Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows operating-system, and the Xbox game-console. XBMC can play a very complete spectrum of of multimedia formats, and featuring playlist playback, audio visualizations, picture viewing, slideshows, and weather forecast functions, together with a multitude of third-party addons and plugins.

• Release Date: Mar 25, 2012
• Addons Framework, API, and Manager
  • Added ability for all addons to provide their own web interface (and handling of 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 (python) file browser dialog
  • Extended Addons API to support adding extension points for Service Addons (xbmc.service)
  • Added support for Addon Rollbacks, enabling users to choose previously installed addons over more recent revisions
  • Added the ability to search Addons in the Addons-Manager
• GUI Engine
  • Improve XBMC's GUI Engine / Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful
  • Added option for auto login of a specific selected user profile (good for kiosk mode)
  • Added commands for xbmc.Player().getAvailableAudioStreams() and xbmc.Player().setAudioStream()
  • Added support to identify DTS-HD (DTS-HD MA and DTS-HD HRA) profiles in audio stream list
  • Add ability for skinners to show buffering progress for streamed/cached files (similar to YouTube)
  • Improved mouse support, add better control for dragging of seek / slide / scroll bars, and click handling
  • Improve touch interface API and gesture support for XBMC's GUI Engine for all platforms
  • Added Dirty Region support to reduce CPU usage
  • Added a custom JPEG decoder, at least 2x faster than the previous implementation (cximage)
• Playback:
  • Added UDF 2.5 filesystem reading support to XBMC's VFS (Virtual File System)
  • Added support for direct playback of ISO image files for Blu-ray Disc as well as video library integration
  • Added an option 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 SubRip (.srt) subtitles
  • Added support for MP4 embedded subtitles
  • Added support delay tag in vobsub subtitles
  • Gave external subtitles preference over internal 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
  • Upgrade FFmpeg (libavformat and libavcodec) audio/video codec and demux library
  • Improved Blu-ray Disc and harddrive playback support of unencrypted bdmv and mpls files without menus
  • Removed subtitle caching (as it was 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
  • Remove all dependencies of liba52, libdts, and faac libraries from XBMC's code in favour of FFmpeg native
  • Added support for NFS virtual file server (vfs) (all platforms)
  • Added support for AFP (vfs) (all platforms aside from Windows)
  • Added Airplay support for Videos/Pictures (all platforms)
  • Added Airplay support for Music (all platforms aside from Windows)
  • Added Audio/L16 support for better DLNA UPnP client compliance
  • Improved UPnP Renderer
  • Added a slider for volume amplification and dynamic range compression during video playback
  • Added an option to pause video playback during refreshrate changes
  • Extended PathSubstitution from playlists to all files for users of shared MySQL Databases
  • Added the ability to adjust the display's refresh rate to match the video's frame rate in OSX (Feature already available in Windows and Linux)
  • Improvements made to the adjust refresh rate feature to pick the "best" rate, rather than the closest multiple
  • Added DXVA Deinterlacing support
• Library:
  • Combined Files and Library mode for videos
  • Add asynchronous threaded background loading of metadata to XBMC's VFS (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 the option to specify the default select (Play, Resume, Show information, Choose) action on videos
  • Changed "Set Content" to "Edit Content Settings" after being set
  • Added disc stub support for cataloging DVDs, BluRays, etc.
  • Added support for scraping Movie Collections, along with the ability to toggle collections on and off
• Scrapers:
  • Improve TheMovieDB.org movie scraper by adding themoviedb.org posters scraping
  • Added movie set scraping'
  • Improve TheTVDB.com (Multi-Lingual) TV Shows and Episode scraper
  • Improve Freebase (English) music scraper
• Skins:
  • Confluence: Home screen switched to horizontal layout
  • Confluence: Greatly simplified the way FanArt works throughout the skin and the settings for it
  • Confluence: Added ability for users to easily add / remove Add-ons as items on the home screen menu
  • Confluence: Added codec flagging images for DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio
• Other:
  • 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
  • Make JSON-RPC API compliant with JSON-RPC 2.0 specification ( details)
  • Cleanup and improve JSON-RPC API
  • Added advancedsettings.xml option to configure the TCP port used by JSON-RPC (default is 9090)
  • Improve the features of the default web interface
  • Removed Weather from XBMC core and switched to Weather Underground as the default weather provider addon
  • Added weather lookup by IP
• Linux Specific:
  • Add support for Texas Instruments OMAP4 (OMAP4430 and OMAP4440 with video decoding on IVA 3)
  • Added dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.) implementation for Linux
  • 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
  • Provide JSON-RPC server over Bluetooth
• iOS Specific:
  • Ported XBMC to iOS 4.x (adding "XBMC for iOS" to XBMC's existing list of supported operating-systems)
  • Added support for Apple A4 (ARM) iDevices, inc. Apple TV 2G, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, the 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 / Inertial Scrolling support for XBMC interface on iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and the iPad
  • Added a APT repository for Apple TV, and Cydia with packages for iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and iPad
• Mac OS X Specific:
  • Added dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.) implementation for Mac OS X
  • Improve Apple VDADecoder Video Acceleration support (requires Snow Leopard and NVIDIA 9400 or later)
  • Improve XBMC's build system to make compiling XBMC much easier
• Windows Specific:
  • Added support for NV12, UVYV, UYVY, and YUV2 rendering (software and ps)
  • Added dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.) implementation for Windows
  • Added DXVA video rendering option
  • Improve XBMC's build system to make compiling XBMC much easier