XBMC 12 open source media centre adds Live TV and Android support

The team that develops the open source, platform-independent XBMC media centre software has released version 12 of its software, code-named "Frodo". Among the most important new features are the platform-independent support for live TV, complete with recording feature, the option to use HD surround formats (DTS Master Audio and Dolby True HD), and a wider choice of supported operating systems, including initial support for Android devices.

The developers chose a client/server approach to implement the platform-independent TV support. XBMC uses add-ons to communicate with third-party TV servers – even if both run on the same computer. This is a similar approach to how the MythTV software implements its live TV features and is compatible with MythTV backends. If the TV server runs under Windows, users have a choice of Argus TV, NextPVR, MediaPortal and DVBLink. Linux users can choose from MythTV, Tvheadend and VDR, while Mac users can use MythTV.

XBMC itself continues to run under Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Apple TV 2). However, iOS operation requires the device to be jailbroken. Other officially supported new platforms include the Raspberry Pi mini-computer and, for the first time, Android on ARMv7 processors with Neon Media Processing Engine; unofficial versions support other ARM processors too.

XBMC 12 is available for download for all of these platforms from the project's web site. The source code for XBMC is hosted on GitHub and is made available under the GPLv2.

(fab)