XBMC media centre audio sub-system rewritten for HD audio

The XBMC project's new audio sub-system for high-definition audio, "AudioEngine" (AE), has been merged into the codebase for XBMC and is now available in the nightly builds of the open source media centre software. According to XBMC development team member Damian Huckle, AudioEngine has been in development for two years and represents a "complete re-write" of the core audio sub-system, consisting of approximately 22,000 lines of code.

While still undergoing development, AudioEngine for XBMC already features support for the DTS-HD "Master Audio" and Dolby TrueHD 7.1 channel surround sound formats, as well as support for high quality 24-bit and floating-point audio at up to 384,000 Hz. Other improvements include built-in sample-rate conversion and transcoding; also, support for bitstreaming in the PAPlayer music player used by XBMC and full support for ReplayGain.

Huckle says "It's still early days for AE", adding that, "Bugs will be found, and new and exciting features added". The developers also plan to add rules-based decisions for output formats, a range of digital signal processors (DSPs), and custom channel-mixing and mapping. The new AudioEngine will be included in the upcoming version 12 release, code-named "Frodo".

Further information, including a full list of AudioEngine features, can be found in the announcement blog post and on the AudioEngine wiki page. Those interested in testing out the new AudioEngine can do so by downloading one of the nightly versions of XBMC. The current stable release of XBMC is version 11 code-named "Eden" from March.

See also:

• Open media centre XBMC 11 "Eden" released, a report from The H.

(crve)