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The Forth of July, at least for most Americans, conveys visions of charred flesh on a grill, alcohol poisoning, and finger-amputating pyrotechnics. I do plan on partaking in every one of these cherished institutions, but first, a new release (HTTP, BitTorrent, Source)!

Please read through these notes carefully, as there are certain things that have changed and you’ll want to know about them.

• FIX: Fixed an annoying regression which caused some videos to play too quickly. Hopefully it helped you cruise through wife-selected gems such as “So You Think You Can Dance”.
• NEW: There is now support for “watered down” full-screen mode, and it’s enabled by default. This should provide compatibility with Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, Cmd-Tab, Cmd-Control-Esc, etc. Plus all three of you who use Remote Desktop to control it will be happy that the annoying tearing is gone. Also in this new mode, screen blanking has been improved, you can modify your settings on the fly without restarting. If you’d like to use the old mode, you’ll need to edit ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/AdvancedSettings.xml like this:

• NEW: Don’t allow disabling caches, as this could lead to problems.
• NEW: Enrique added support for Smart Crash Reports. This means that whenever you get a crash, you have the option of sending us the crash report. Simply click on the “Report…” button, and then in the bottom right, you’ll see a button for “Send to OSXBMC & Apple…” (which is enabled after the system configuration is gathered). Please, please, please, use this, we’ll get the crash reports, your bugs will get fixed, and then we’ll all drink beer and watch fireworks. Note also that the first time you run it, you’ll get a dialog asking if it can install Smart Crash Reports. (Note: I’ve heard this doesn’t appear on all machines, not sure why that is yet.)

• NEW: The XBMCHelper is now installed into ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC, so that people don’t have that problem upgrading the application because the file is in use. The helper is automatically upgraded if needed as well.
• FIX: The helper settings section has been renamed “Remote Helper” since it handles more than the Apple Remote.
• FIX: We no longer prevent you from using the helper if you’ve installed Remote Buddy. There should be no problem using the two together, although to be honest, I don’t use it myself. Many thanks to the developer for working with us on this one.
• FIX: That annoying problem where the Apple Remote brings up both Front Row and OSXBMC *should* be fixed. More like “worked around” actually, because it’s a bug in OS X. The side effect is that when the helper is running, it’s possible that applications like Quicksilver (who capture keys) won’t completely work. I say “possible” because (a) I haven’t tried it and (b) I don’t use Quicksilver while watching movies.
• FIX: Crash on startup for case-sensitive partitions. Thanks to Brent for helping me track this one down.
• FIX: A regression that prevented images from loading over SMB (does nobody use the app to view photos anymore?)
• FIX: Removed all the broken resolutions from the screen settings. We’ll get back into changing screen modes at some point, probably at the same time as we switch refresh rates for different media.
• NEW: Apple Movie Trailers script was updated to the latest version (thanks, Nuka!)
• FIX: The default port for the web server has been changed to 3000.
• NEW: Latest version of ofdb scraper was included.
• FIX: The keymap has a new entry for switching between audio languages in full-screen (the ‘a’ key). Also, the ‘c’ key works to obtain a context menu in the file manager view (which is needed to eject optical media). To obtain these new settings, you’ll need to whack your old Keymap.xml file.
• NEW: When starting from scratch, a default sources.xml is installed which provides people with some basic sources for photos, music and video. Many thanks to Isaac for these last four items!
• FIX: The smart folder code has been reworked a bit. It’s *possible* that some of the scanning issues that Jeremy was running into will be fixed. If not, it’s probably not the fault of smart folders.
• FIX: I’ve increased the latency by a few milliseconds in the Portaudio code to hopefully reduce or get rid of underflows entirely (resulting in audio dropouts). Please see if you notice any improvement, and check the log if you’d like to see what latency it’s using. N.B. The change will be subliminal (e.g. on my system the latency went from 1.5ms to around 9ms.)
• FIX: Who says we don’t save the best for last? That annoying bug where the app hangs when canceling a video that’s buffering (e.g. YouTube or AMT or FTP)? Fixed!

Some good stuff cherry-picked as well:

• Vulkanr got DVD playing working. So you should be able to insert a DVD into the drive and watch it play. To eject, go to the file manager and use the context menu. If it doesn’t eject right away, try again. Brilliant stuff, vulkanr! He also fixed another Python crash.
• Jmarshall fixed the <blackbarcolour> setting, and lots of other little things.
• Charleydoes fixed a crash on exit and a slow query.
• Spiff added .ogv/.oga file extensions.

We’ve had some really hot days, and not a lot of rain. Barkley’s favorite place has been our friend’s pool.

I dropped Anna off at the airport this morning; she’s on a two week trip to the mainland to visit family. Plus, it’s been raining all day. These two things conspired to keep me inside all day wrapping up the release. (That’s not entirely true, a couple of friends came over with a lot of beer and I spent the better part of the afternoon in an alcohol-induced stupor. But I digress.)

Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, torrent, source). I’m hoping that we can get this 0.5 release wrapped up and move on to the new and interesting things coming in 0.6. (Translation: please don’t report any more damn bugs for this version!) The next beta will be a release candidate.

• NEW: AC3 encoding. This is a killer new feature that allows your receiver to play full surround sound from “unsupported” formats, like AAC and FLAC. My hat is off to Ryan Walklin who got it working in record time. I know, we’re supposed to be stabilizing things for 0.5 final, but this was just too damn cool not to work in. Go play some Apple Trailers and then throw your Apple TV out the window.
• FIX: The infamous and incredibly annoying “CAPETag” bug, manifested by a crash in the middle of music playlists (randomly, of course).
• FIX: GIF image loading was kind of broken. I’m surprised nobody noticed. I guess everyone’s pr0n collection has moved to JPEG? Boobs do look better in 24 bit color.
• FIX: A crash with keyboard layouts (thanks to Enrique and Roman).
• FIX: Text subtitles with more than two lines would have missing lines.
• FIX and FIX: Lots of fixes to smart folders. We now run asynchronously and timeout after a while if nothing has been returned. Memory handling has been fixed (thanks, Enrique!) so it doesn’t crash when scanning a smart-folder-source to the library. And we respect the folders scope when executing the query.
• FIX: Switching between full-screen and windowed mode has been fixed to return to the same windowed resolution.
• FIX: Hugely reduced latency with controllers (XBox360/Apple Remote). The difference is unbelievable with the XBox360 controller, it should be indistinguishable from a wired controller at this point.
• FIX: Crash when displaying SSA subtitles in some cases. Thanks to Bad Mr Frosty and Parag for helping me track this down!
• FIX: Minor changes to the way we do vsync, not sure if it will improve things for people having trouble, but it won’t make things worse.
• FIX: Revert the logarithmic volume change. Not sure if it’s a Mac thing or not, but it just made things really quiet for the majority of the volume range.
• FIX: Crash on exit when exiting when a script is running.
• FIX: Some erroneous references to /opt/local in the libraries we ship in Resources.
• FIX: 187.avi was getting stacked with 300.mkv, and I can assure you that the latter really doesn’t play well after the former. Although, come to think of it, Samuel L Jackson yelling “This is motherfucking Sparta!” would be pretty awesome.
• FIX: The XBMCHelper is now killed again when you disable it in the settings.
• NEW: Enrique added support for CoreFoundation’s exception handling, so that we better log those sorts of errors.
• FIX: Enrique fixed a few more memory leaks and built the latest libcdio to fix a crash.
• NEW: (Bonus subtitle-lover’s feature) Rather than just being able to select the lowly Arial font (or whatever you tossed in the media/Fonts directory in your application package (and come on, who does that?) you can now pick from a large number of Apple-supplied fonts. Seen below is Georgia Bold. Please let me know if you have an answer to the question posed.

I also cherry-picked some fixes from the linuxport branch, most notably:

• A crash opening context menus (yuvalt).
• Crash in Python selecting list items (nice one, vulkanr!)
• Better thread-safety in DLL trackers (charleydoes)
• Fixes to AC3/DTS buffering (elupus)

With these changes plus the crash on exit from the list above, Python support should actually be pretty solid, or at least getting there!

My sincere thanks to our community, you are all awesome. Almost 450 users on the forum, over 2000 posts, simply brilliant. We’re getting top-notch bug reports, and people are being really helpful and friendly.

Without further ado, your Barkley.

Family in town, not much time, but I wanted to get a new release out there. Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, Bittorrent, source):

• REG: Switching between windowed and full-screen mode when watching a video now works again.
• NEW: The genius known as bmfrosty realized that all Leopard installations come with Arial Unicode, so I’ve put some code in to intercept requests to Arial and redirect to the system-installed Unicode version. This means no more need to download and install the font for all you international folk, it should work out of the box! Simply select Arial as the skin font, and it should work. We’ll be putting more work in here shortly, including allowing you to pick more system-provided fonts.
• FIX: You can now add Smart Folders as sources.
• FIX: Some memory leaks playing sounds and loading images (thanks to riquedafreak!)
• NEW: We’ve upped the minimum cache size in a few cases to be more realistic for HD media. Still lots of improvements to be made in this area, but if you’re having trouble with frames dropping or jerky playback, make *sure* your cache settings are high enough.
• FIX: I’ve included a patch by crocodile that apparently fixes streaming from a Dreambox.
• FIX: The default on-screen time for the song information has been raised from 2 seconds to 10.
• FIX: New ffmpeg libraries to include a fix by elupus relating to seeking in MKV files.
• FIX: A patch by Roman Sokolov has been included which apparently helps out with Cyrillic input, switching keyboard layouts, and allowing hot-keys to work. I’m not completely clear on the fixes because, frankly, I don’t type in Cyrillic, but the patch was clean.
• NEW: Another part of the same patch, we now allow the desired URL encoding to be specified in a scraper. We default to UTF-8, and the new KinoPoisk scraper that’s been included in this release specifies CP1251.

Areas to test:

• Cyrillic/international keyboard input, Russian movie scraping.
• Smart folders.

Here’s a screenshot with Greek language enabled, using the system-supplied Arial font.

And finally, your moment of Barkley:

Assisted by the lovely Stella Artois, I worked a while this evening fixing some bugs. The result can be found here (HTTP, torrent, source):

• FIX: For ages now we’ve had trouble with large subtitles and the lovely Aeon skin (cases with fonts having point sizes great than 50). Well, no longer. Thanks to jmarshall for pointing me in the right direction on this one.
• REG: Amazingly nobody noticed, but playing movie trailers with the AMT plugin caused a crash. Luckily, before anyone complained, it’s now working again.
• FIX: Better behavior with switching between full-screen and windowed mode in terms of fonts and skins resizing correctly.
• REG: Caching A/V ratios tweaked, fixes frame dropping problem introduced last version. I tried a bunch of HD trailers and got frame dropping only when my pathetic connection couldn’t keep up.
• NEW: Bumped up maximum allowable cache size in certain cases.
• FIX: TIFF loading crash reported by superpea, fixed by upgrading to the latest version of libtiff.
• FIX: ProjectM was updated to 1.1 by malloc64 (nice work, mate!), and I recompiled for OS X. I ran into some problems on GMA950 (go figure), but worked around them. It *should* now work and not display garbage on the lower third of the screen. More tweaks may be needed, but I think it’s much better than the old one.

We’ve seen these racquetballs before, haven’t we?

OK, lots of good stuff. Nine people have forked the code on GitHub and started playing with it. We have some exciting things on the way. The forums are hopping, over 220 people have registered since they opened, and we just passed the thousand post mark. Enormous thanks to our moderating team, especially bmfrosty, ChoccyHobNob, phunkysai, and our very own iordonez. Really nice work making people feel welcome.

This release (HTTP, torrent, source) is named after jeremymc7 since he gets the honor of having two Trac issues closed out.

• NEW: Support for EAC3 audio. In theory, at least. I have to admit to not having any EAC3 content laying around, but I assume the guy who wrote the code for ffmpeg *did*. Thanks to Martin for pointing me to the patch. Also added .m2t/.m2ts to the list of recognized extensions.
• NEW : Support for Smart Folders. Pretty cool, actually.
• FIX: DVD playing over SMB (and other VFS protocols). I know I’ve lied repeatedly in the past about this working, but this time I’ve made sure of it. I hope. To be completely honest, I only tested VIDEO_TS folders and not .iso files.
• FIX: XBMSP support. I’ve also misled you about this one in the past, but this time I actually verified that it works. This combined with iTunesFS is now officially my favorite way of getting my iTunes libraries playing remotely.
• FIX: User’s skin folder wasn’t being created.
• FIX: Profiles are saved and loaded correctly now, to the Application Support area.
• FIX : Scraper/IMDB/filesystem bugs that prevented files named “Broken (2006/I).mkv” from looking up correctly.
• NEW: I have news for you. Those cache settings that you’ve been tweaking to get just perfect, don’t actually do anything. Pure placebo effect. Well, until today, at least. They’re now hooked up and actually work. Superpea will dig this.

I also updated to the latest linux XBMC and ffmpeg code. Some notable changes there:

• Allow opening .nrg images for DVD [wiso]
• Large 15MB memory leak after every song played [charleydoes]
• Python unicode string handling fixed [vulkanr]
• Some fixes to OpenGL renderer [elupus]
• Fix to framedropping for libmpeg2 [elupus]
• AC3/DTS resync fixes [elupus]

Areas to test:

• Cache settings.
• AC3 passthrough.
• IMDB.
• DVD playing over SMB.
• EAC3.

We have an avocado tree next door, and if Barkley finds a ripe one on the way home from a walk, he carries it over to the yard, and the only thing left within ten minutes is a pile of avocado peel and a happy pup.

OK, couldn’t resist making a micro release (Torrent, HTTP, source) to fix a couple of problems.

• NEW: Mixdown for AAC 5.1 (many thanks to tokyovigilante for the patch!) Those HD trailers from Apple work perfectly now.
• FIX: Crash playing certain MKV files (great bug report by bmfrosty).
• FIX: DVD playing over SMB (and other network protocols) should work now. mtehonica, if you could test, that would be much appreciated.

Bob Jelica pointed out that it might be nice to list areas to focus on testing with each release, and I think it’s a great idea. Here are the areas which I think might still be problematic and for which it would be awesome to get some detailed Trac reports for:

• Power saving settings (sleep display, sleep machine) in the app.
• OS X screen savers and multiple displays.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend! If you haven’t stopped by the forums yet, come on in, the water is warm and there are no sharks.

Here’s a tasty release which hopefully takes the edge off the weekend like a cold beer on a hot day. I felt bad because I think the last beta took a few steps back. Hopefully this one will set things back on the path to stability. Download is here (Bittorrent, HTTP) and source is here.

• FIX: “Pulsing” icons problem. Also fixes poor performance in library mode, and crashes when removing items from library or renaming them.
• FIX: Extremely ill-advised change to fix the “simultaneous SSA subtitles problem“. I’m relying on bmfrosty, God Emperor of Subtitles, to tell me if it works and if I broke anything else in the process.
• FIX: Logs are now saved in ~/Library/Logs, where they belong.
• FIX: VobSub subtitles seem to show up now (this bug).
• NEW: Rudd’s latest SSA patch for extracting embedded fonts. bmfrosty can play around and see if it helps things.
• Updates to latest ffmpeg and linuxport code. This includes a few months of ffmpeg development, so quite a bit of things might be working better now. Let me know if you see any regressions.

Look for fixes and improvements to the Apple Remote and power/screensaver issues in the next betas.

Believe it or not, this is what Barkley used to look like.

I am back from hiking 20 miles in two days down into the Haleakala volcano crater. I wish I could say I missed Internet access (I did try to check my email on Anna’s iPhone in a moment of weakness, but there was no service), but in reality it felt great to get out and explore the island.

This is another in a series of betas in which we’re focusing on fixing bugs. Here are the fixes that made it into this release:

• FIX: Scott updated the XBox360 controller keymap, mapping the white and black buttons to the two buttons above the triggers and made some other improvements and fixes. NOTE: You will have to remove your existing keymap.xml in ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/UserData. As before, failure to do so may result in your having fairly unpleasant interactions with carnivorous dinosaurs.
• FIX: The screensaver kicked in after 10 seconds no matter what the time was set to.
• FIX: Our European friends will be happy to know that accented characters now show up correctly when browsing files and directories. Thanks to Roman for pointing me in the right direction. Total amount of time spent tracking this down including the time I invested last time (in which I gave up) was probably about 10 hours, so it feels really good to nail this one.
• FIX: Timezone selection has been removed, and we now use the OS X timezone. This fixes the DST problem people reported, and allows the timezone selection to be handled in a single place.
• FIX: Weather is fixed.
• FIX: Scripts are fixed (silly release building error).
• FIX: Red and blue were swapped in SSA subtitles.
• FIX: Allow selecting any available audio device as a passthrough device. This should enable people with external USB interfaces with digital output to use them. NOTE: You may have to reselect your audio output device if you’re doing passthrough.
• FIX: Much improved bold-ing and italic-ing thanks to jmarshall.
• FIX: Mediasources.xml and profiles and plugins were incorrectly read from and written to application bundle.
• FIX: Potential fix for the XBMC helper losing exclusive access to the Apple Remote (and thus holding down play putting the machine to sleep). Please test, and if you still run into the problem, let me know if you’re running in full-screen mode, windowed, or both, along with any other details that may help track the problem down.

As we all know, making a release is just another excuse to post yet another picture of Barkley, who turned three on Saturday. The release is available here as a torrent, or here as an HTTP download. Enjoy!

I have been coerced into going camping for the next two days, up behind the volcano. It’s apparently freezing at night, full of sharp rocks, is reminiscent of Mars, and there’s always the chance of waking up in a pool of lava. Why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to such abuse is really beyond me, but I agreed go before hearing many of the specifics.

So while I’m freezing my ass off and probably getting devoured by dinosaurs that have survived the last 65 millions years on a strict diet of hikers, I thought it would be only fair to leave you with a beta release of what we’ve been working on for the last month. This is, to quote Scott, the “throw out your XBox” release.

NOTE NOTE NOTE: You MUST delete your Keymap.xml file, and probably should delete your entire Application Support/XBMC folder before upgrading. If you don’t and then file a bug I will feed you to the dinos myself. This is also a beta and so does still have some glitches.

This release is based on very nearly the latest “linuxport” code, which means you have a month full of bugfixes and new goodies and hard work by the rest of the XBMC team. Our motley OS X crew have mainly been drinking tequila, but in between bouts of body shots, we had a bit of time to bring you some new stuff:

• NEW: Apple Remote support. This is a big one. There’s now a helper that runs and communicates with XBMC. Among other things, this allows you to use the Apple Remote to start XBMC, a highly requested feature. The code has also been rewritten to handle the buttons much faster, so you should notice none of the pesky delay that’s been present up until now. There are preferences for the Apple Remote in Settings -> System -> Apple Remote which let you specify three modes. Disable the Apple Remote support if you want to use a third party application (e.g. Remote Buddy, Sofa Control). Isaac has been working relentlessly with both companies to ensure that you have great behavior with those apps, and he is the one who did all the Apple Remote keymap programming. Very nice work! Standard mode is what is enabled by default, and is intended for those using, well, an standard Apple Remote. The other mode is Universal Remote, which I’ll explain in the next bullet item. The Always Running option instructs the helper to start on login and always run, so that you can use it to start XBMC. If you hit the menu button when in the home screen, XBMC will exit, and another press of the menu button starts it back up again, so it works just like Front Row but without sucking.
• NEW: Universal Remote support. This is totally awesome, and the brainchild of Cayce and Scott who are both Universal Remote-aholics. When I met them in person for the first time, they had each independently brought their universal remotes along to try to convince me that their model was the best. I cannot make this stuff up. Scott sports a Harmony 550, and Cayce has an URC-MX900. Cayce’s remote could definitely best Scott’s in a fight, but Scott’s remote is sexier. Anyway, they came up with this cool scheme that I coded in the XBMC helper to allow sequences of Apple Remote buttons to allow for many more commands than the standard Apple Remote could support, even with holding down buttons. Check out this page for details on the mappings and you should be able to program your Universal Remote. You can change the sequence delay time to work best with your specific remote. Thanks to Scott for testing the crap out of this with his Harmony, and really making sure it works well.
• NEW: XBox360 controller support. Rounding out our controller portfolio is the XBox 360 controller. Good for those MAME games, when we get them working. This controller worked with SDL, but the code was buggy and once the controller shut down, you were screwed. I moved the code into the XBMC helper and tweaked d4rk’s awesome event client stuff a bit to support what we needed with analog sticks. The controller will fall asleep and wake up fine, and you can use the big X button to start XBMC if it isn’t started. You’ll need these drivers, and you may want to replace one of the kexts with the one here since it fixes a bug when plugging and unplugging the USB receiver. Again, thanks to Scott who tirelessly worked away to create a keymap for this controller.
• NEW: SSA Subtitles. This was a oft-requested feature, especially by the infamous Bad Mr Frosty. Luckily for him, a new XBMC team member named Rudd integrated support for libass (used by mplayer). We took his code, started with the default libass, integrated some fixes and enhancements from mplayer, and enabled enca support (which can detect languages in subtitle streams using some cool techniques). Fontconfig support has also been enabled and so SSA subtitles should work perfectly now, except in the case of fonts embedded in MKV files, which Rudd is working on.
• NEW: Sleep displays and computer. Cayce added two killer features for this release. There are new options in Settings -> System -> Hardware that allow you to have XBMC turn off your monitor after a specified time, and also sleep your Mac after a specified time. Great stuff! Since the Apple Remote can wake the Mac from sleep, this ends up being really nice.
• NEW/FIX: Unified upscaling, fixed problems with interlacing. The initial software upscaling code was pretty hastily thrown together. I cleaned it up for this release and the software and hardware upscaling options are all available from the on screen video settings menu when viewing a video. This is nice because you can flip through the available settings to compare them. NOTE: There is a known issue with a single frame of solid green when moving from software to hardware modes, and vice versa. My OpenGL fu is weak. We also enabled a new algorithm available in ffmpeg called “sinc” which is supposedly quite good, but also very computationally expensive. A mini is not usually enough to use sinc upscaling, but feel free to give it a try.
• NEW: Skip to next/previous chapter in DVDs. If you’re watching a DVD, hitting up/down on the Apple Remote (or keyboard) skips by chapters.
• FIX: Shoutcast crashes. The guy working on the Windows port (charlydoes) fixed the memory corruption issue with Shoutcast streams, and they should now work perfectly. Awesome work!
• FIX: Skip to next/previous video doesn’t work. I’m pretty sure d4rk fixed this one.
• FIX: Subtitles look squashed in 720p/1080p. The infamous Jmarshall fixed this one. I’ll buy him a beer or five when we visit New Zealand.
• FIX: Add “Get Album Information” back to context menu when not in library mode. I was very sad when this option didn’t work anymore so I put it back in. It doesn’t save the information to the database, but it’s useful for reading an album review or getting a thumbnail.
• FIX: Navigation through menus with Apple Remote might leave you stuck. Navigation should work perfectly now in all skins.

Remember, this is a beta release, so there are likely still little issues lurking. Python is still known to be unstable, unfortunately. Seeking using the analog triggers is still a bit strange. Weather appears to be broken. We’ll likely be making a few more tweaks to the 360 keymap. Please post issues you have with the beta either here or on the XBMC forums, and help each other out. Hopefully we’ll make the final 0.5 release within a week or two, possible with a few more beta iterations.

In terms of controller options, we realize there are many more out there, but the three described above (Apple Remote, Universal Remote, and XBox 360 controller) are the only ones we will support or write code for, as we believe they provide a complete gamut of options, and frankly we’d rather work on getting PacMan to work than on getting every last controller to work.

The new release is available here as a torrent, or here by regular HTTP download.

And now, your moment of Barkley. Yes, he’s hoarding three raquetballs, which he believes will eventually hatch into little blue squeaky smurfs.

This new release still only works on Leopard and Intel. No plans at all, present or future, to move to PPC or Tiger. (Note that I’m linking to another page with another big Leopard/Intel warning, and the new release is at the bottom of the page).

NOTE: You will almost definitely want to move Sources.xml aside and then whack the “Application Support/XBMC” folder, as lots of related things have changed, and it’s best to get a fresh start. If you report a problem, and I find that you didn’t start over from scratch before reporting it, I will be very upset with you.

• NEW: Fixed up the virtual keyboard. No more assertions, and you can type with a real keyboard (even backspace works). Since Enter is used to “hit” a virtual key, you will need to navigate to the Done key.
• NEW: Fullscreen support has been enhanced to support other-than-primary screens without setting environment variables (now that everyone’s figured out how to do that). I also renamed “desktop” mode “full screen” mode to clarify a bit. Some people will probably hate this. Others will love it. Can’t win ‘em all. Basically if you have multiple screens, and you scroll through the resolution settings, you’ll see multiple “full screen” settings, one for each screen. The thing about that resolution list that confuses me is that some are windowed modes (720p, 1080i), and some are intended to be full-screen video modes (where XBMC would actually set the mode for you). Right now, all you have to know is that the full screen modes labeled as such DON’T change the video mode, so you’ll do that in OS X, get it how you like it, and XBMC will use it.
• FIX: Updated the scrapers to the correct versions, you should now have much better luck scraping. I took all but the latest and best maintained TV scraper out of the release. Also, I made a network fix to avoid timeouts that probably would have otherwise occurred. I also tried to track down a library problem someone reported with multiple sources of which XBMC would allegedly forget all but one upon restart, but no luck reproducing the problem.
• FIX: The release now comes with a much better Keymap.xml file, which includes a mapping for the context menu (the C key). This sort of thing is why you want to whack the application support files.
• FIX: There was a serious race condition in some of the audio code (PortAudio specific) that could lead to a crash when playing videos.
• FIX: The RSS feed file was added back in, and reset to default to something a bit more interesting for Apple users.
• NEW: Some progress playing IFO/VOBs. I built some needed modules (e.g. MPEG2 decoder, dvdnav, etc.) and although I don’t own a single DVD I was able to get some VOB files to play. Sort of. If you’re still watching DVDs, isn’t it time you moved into the 21st century?
• FIX: A serious problem that prevented lots of audio streams from playing at all (and thus resulting in fast video), notably ones with strange sample rates (with strange being anything other than 48KHz/44KHz, I think).
• FIX: I applied the XBMC subtitles fix to the ffmpeg library, which means that one person who was complaining about ugly subtitles might be happier now. And buy me some beer.
• NEW: D4rk made some enhancements to the way we interact with SDL, to the effect that we no longer need a custom SDL build. He also got full-screen toggling working (the ‘\’ key). Very tasty.
• NEW: Shoutcast audio sources seems to work. YMMV. I was grooving to some rap earlier today that made me wish I hadn’t gotten it working.
• NEW: The SMB client is now included, although I haven’t done much with it. Lots of people wanted this one.

This release brought to you by our very own Barkley.