http://www.osxbmc.com Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:11:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A warm welcome to the new visitors! Please come visit the forums, which are hosted on a more beefy machine (which lives in someone's bathroom, but that's another story). http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/07/07/were-experiencing-higher-than-usual-traffic/ As most of you know, we've been searching for a new identity since we split from XBMC. Names aren't easy to come by, and domain names are even harder. We received some great suggestions from our user base (Meteor Center, Media Hugger, etc.). Ultimately though, we wanted a name that ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/07/05/announcing-plex/ 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 ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/07/04/release-050b10-happy-forth/ Among some of the cool things coming in the next beta is an (optional) different method for entering full-screen. Many of you have requested compatibility with Growl, Exposé, Spaces, Cmd+Tab, and Cmd+Ctrl+Esc. I've resisted doing this because, among other reasons, supposedly there is an OpenGL performance hit in windowed mode ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/07/02/coming-in-the-next-beta-full-screen-lite/ 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 ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/21/release-050b9-surrounded-by-sound/ 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 ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/13/release-050b8-its-greek-to-me/ 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, ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/09/release-050b7-lucky-seven/ OK, I wanted to track down two issues quickly, and I didn't feel like it was worth making a whole new release (yet, at least). This binary (please uncompress with "bzip2 -d" and replace OSXBMC.app/Contents/MacOS/XBMC) should fix the following two issues: FIX: Greek characters (and really any non-ASCII characters) ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/08/regressions-fixes/ 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 ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/08/release-050b6-the-jeremy-release/ OK, so you'd like to build from source and contribute to the project. Git (and GitHub) make this really easy, and give you powers far beyond what non-distributed version control systems like Subversion provide. The problem with Subversion and CVS in open source projects is that they're like a walled fortress, ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/02/use-the-source-luke/ 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). ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/06/01/release-050b5-time-for-a-release-candidate/ 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://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/31/release-050b4-weekend-update/ It *totally* slipped my mind to mention in the release notes, but we have new support forums here. Come on in, make yourself an account, say hello. Many, many thanks to Isaac (a.k.a. iordonez) for setting them up. http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/30/support-forums/ Alright, it's been way too long since the last release! I apologize. Profusely. I've been busy getting the code moved over to Github and taking care of some other related things. It might seem like all I've been doing is drinking beer, but I assure you, that's far from the ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/30/release-050b3-back-on-track/ A few days ago, there was a heated internal email discussion going on amongst the XBMC team members. The topic: whether or not to kick me and the other OS X people off the team. There was an actual vote taking place, with retractions, explanations, concessions. One of the OS ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/21/exodus/ OK, seriously, how am I supposed to focus on coding when this monster is hanging about three feet away from my door (which is open to let in the breeze)? It's so big that I found Barkley in its web this morning, poor pup, and when I tried to shoo ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/18/keeping-me-company/ Just to dispel any rumors or myths to the contrary, we are - of course - planning on checking our changes back into the Linux branch of XBMC, just as we've done with all previous releases. Trying to release a stable and polished product to our beloved OS X community while ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/13/the-source/ 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 ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/12/release-050b2-duct-tape/ 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 ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/07/release-050b1-mo-betta-beta/ As some of you have accurately pointed out, we've slipped past the release date listed for 0.5. Before the comparisons with Windows Vista start arising, let me assure you that we're working hard on it, and have one or two minor things to finish up before releasing. We're thinking about ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/05/02/version-05-is-just-around-the-corner/ Mark McCall from AutomatedHome was kind enough to interview me about the direction of XBMC for OS X. I know what you're all thinking, I should stop wasting time and just get back to coding, and you're absolutely right. I'm totally ashamed of myself. But if it brings new users ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/28/interview-with-automatedhome/ I've read about a few ways of doing this, but this evening it occurred to me that using iTunesFS might be really easy and work quite well. Sure enough, load it up, add the new share and you're browsing and playing your iTunes library. The only thing I haven't figured out ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/27/accessing-your-itunes-library/ We've gotten over 1200 responses on the survey, and I wanted to start by just thanking everyone for taking the time to complete it (and cullman for suggesting the idea and writing the survey)! We learned a lot, and will use this information as we move towards 1.0, in terms ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/23/survey-results-and-status/ Isaac here, Many of you have noticed our bug reporting and download site is down. It should be back up soon. In the meantime if you want to get your hands on a copy of XBMC a mirror is available here: http://tv.aninga.net/XBMC/?C=M;O=D This message brought to you by Maggie and Simon. http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/22/alternate-download-location/ While we sweat away perfecting the Apple Remote/Universal Remote code, please help us out by taking our short survey. We're trying to get a better sense of our community, which will help us prioritize features and schedule things better in general. I wish I could say that one lucky respondent to ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/16/please-take-our-survey/ For some reason, OS X seems to be reluctant to output 1080p to TVs, and usually defaults to 1080i. At first I thought it was the cable (a 50' HDMI cable purchased from Eforcity for $40), but that turned out to work perfectly. The problem was that the only option ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/12/a-quick-1080p-tip/ The Apple Remote work is taking a bit longer than I expected, so another release is probably a good idea, to share some of the bug-fixes and new features that are complete. Here are the changes in this release: NEW: High quality software upscaling is now supported. You can ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/08/release-045-an-interim-release/ OK, I just adding software upscaling as a full-fledged feature for the next release. Both bicubic and lanczos upscaling is selectable, and you can enable it for SD content only, or if you're feeling like making your CPU sweat, for all content (meaning 720p is upscaled to 1080p using the ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/05/high-quality-upscaling-in-next-release/ So for lack of anything better to do, I played around with getting swscale (a component of ffmpeg) to attempt performing high quality software upscaling. By default we perform bilinear upscaling, and with SD content, it looks pretty crappy, with lots of jagged lines. After getting it to work, I took ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/04/experimenting-with-bicubic-scaling/ We've restructured the milestones on our Trac site to correspond to specific versions and better illustrate the bugs and features that will make it into these versions. A few things to note about this: When you're reporting a bug or requesting a feature, please leave the milestone blank! Please ... http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/04/02/roadmap-improved/