XBCM has released version 9.11 of their Xbox Media Center with a whole slew of updates, changes, and tweaks. The most noticeable difference is the new default theme. XBMC switched over to the new Confluence theme as the default with the recently updated PM3.HD set as the secondary default. As part of their cleanup, XBMC also removed the older PM3 theme in favour of the newer HD version.
With the latest release comes new features such as the automatic extraction and display of video file information such as audio/video codec, aspect ratio, and resolution details. The update to major codecs including libavformat and libavcodec within the newer FFmpeg package provides users with a smoother, cleaner playback as well. Many of the scrapers and scripts have now been updated too. Enough of me though, time for the meat of the post. Below are some of the more notable changes in XBMC 9.11 and a couple of snapshots, but head on over to the XBMC site for the full changelog and to download this latest release.
 XBMC Movie Info |
 XBMC Confluence Video Info |
- Settings menu reorganized and cleaned up
PLAYBACK:
- Updated FFmpeg (libavformat and libavcodec)
- Implemented better WAV/PCM handling on 64-bit operating-systems
- Added support for MPL2 (Blu-ray) subtitles format
- Added support for RTMP (Flash) live video streams, plus skip, pause, and resume feature (Possible Hulu support in the future maybe?)
- Added proper MMS/MMSH streaming client (libmms) support
- Added audio and subtitle delay pop-up to the GUI
- Improved Commercial Skipping, EDL (Edit Decision List), and SceneMarker support
- Options for smoother video playback by syncing the video to the refresh rate of the display
- Extension of ExternalPlayer enabling multiple external players based on file-extension (Nice for using PowerDVD 9 to play blu-ray ISO's)
- Added overlay renderer for dvd/vobsub/xsub
LIBRARY:
- Performance improvements to SQLite queries
- Support for movie sets and a sortorder tag in the Video Library
- UPnP MediaServer compliant with DLNA standards
- Ability to view pictures over UPnP in XBMC and many fixes to the UPnP library
- Reorganized MythTV directory structure to separate TV Shows from Movies
- Scrape studio info for TV Show/Season/Episode, info is available via studio field item
- Changed handling in Scrapers and NFO replacing «thumbs» with multiple «thumb»
- Added library update on resume if coming from suspend/hibernate
- Ability to scrape and scan TV Shows into the video library by air-date via TheTVDB.com
SCRIPTS:
- TheMovieDB.org (TMDB) movie scraper upgraded to version 2.1
- TheMovieDB.org scraper now scrapes trailers from dtrailer.com
- Improvements and enhancements to the TVDB.com TV Show scraper
- Improvements and enhancements to MTV Music Video scraper
- New freebase scraper for music with FanArt support via htbackdrops.com
- Fixes and additions for the mymovies.xml scraper
- Changed default from Open GL to DirectX for GUI and video rendering
- Added Crash Dump for Windows
- Support Milkdrop visualizations
Linux-Specific:
- Added support for Debian building and packaging to the XBMC SVN
- External libraries options when compiling XBMC for Linux to make it more distro agnostic
- Support for PPC (PowerPC) processors in XBMC for Linux (OpenGL support required)
- Avahi Zeroconf (Zero Configuration Networking) for XBMC webserver
- Added DeviceKit.Disks integration
- Added DeviceKit.Power and ConsoleKit.Manager integration
OS X Specific:
- Logitech Harmony Universal Remote support
- Added support for CoreAudio API and removed the PortAudio API code
- AC3 and DTS digital audio pass-through to SP/DIF on Apple TV via CoreAudio API
- Support for running external Applescripts
- Support for command-tab application switching
- Support for OS X Spaces
Hello there, just stopped by doing some research for my Logitech site. Amazing the amount of information on the web. Looking for something else, but great site. Cya later.