While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for your HTPC. Supporting an almost endless range of remote controls, and combined with its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, XBMC feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater.Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available.
Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.
While we are moving quickly to get new features into 11.0, the time has come for a maintenance release for Dharma. We recommend that all users update to 10.1 as soon as possible to increase stability.
The main focus of this release is to address a bug that could cause XBMC to freeze when updating a skin. We have held back skin updates from the main repository because of this, but now that it is fixed, they will begin rolling out in a few weeks.
This is intended as a bug-fix release only, no new features have been introduced. Notable fixes include:
- If an in-use skin was updated in Windows, XBMC would freeze
- Some RTMP streams in Windows did not play
- Included add-ons have been updated
- The correct referrer is now used for downloading add-ons, improving dependency statistics
- Crashes during playback on ATI hardware in some circumstances have been fixed
- Hardware decoding improvements for OSX
- Various small fixes
In addition, XBMC Live has been updated with the most recent packages, one of which includes a fix for the annoying SMB+Windows Live Essentials bug.
Those interested may check out the full changelog.
