XBMC 11.0 Available

The latest release of XBMC (code-named Eden) media player and entertainment center is now available for download. According to the website, XBMC 11.0 milestones include improvements to Confluence (the default skin), massive speed increases, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, improved handling of unencrypted Blu-ray content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in Mac OS X (to match that feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, an upgraded weather service with GeoIP lookup, and more. 

Eden marks the first in-sync stable release for the Apple TV2, iPad, and other iOS devices. According to the website, developers have improved the method by which input is handled, including heavily upgrading JSON-RPC support – making remote control support much simpler in Windows and enabling unique methods of device communication with hardware. AMD devices are now also supported for GPU video decoding in Linux to some extent.

In addition to XBMC 11 for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and iOS, the developers also announced XBMCbuntu Final. According to the website, XBMCbuntu is very similar to past versions of XBMC Live. By default, the user boots directly into XBMC, and need never see the underlying OS. 

The announcement states that XBMCbuntu is now built upon a full LXDE desktop environment, which has a web browser (Chromium) with a fully updated (and updatable) version of Flash built-in and a GUI package manager ready to install and update all of the typical Ubuntu programs. For more information, see: http://xbmc.org/. You can download XBMC at: http://xbmc.org/download/.