14 DAY TRIAL // XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, has just reached version 13.0 Beta 2, marking the release of another important milestone in the development cycle.
Even if the XBMC 13.x branch has spent a year in development, its makers are not wasting any time, and two weeks after the initial release they have just pushed another version, with many fixes and changes.
“It’s been a mere 13 days since beta 1 came out, and already we’re ready for beta 2. This is almost entirely a ‘fix’ beta release, meaning no new features, only a more rock solid foundation,” reads the announcement.
According to the changelog, subtitles used for videos loaded over HTTP should now support the same subtitle functions supported by local media (which is a very nice feature to have and which was sorely missed), Rockchip devices on Android will no longer cause XBMC to crash, a number of PVR Programming Guide cleanups have been done, and JSON-RPC file listing fixes have been added.
Also, wording and grammar fixes have been implemented throughout the UI, an XBMC crash has been fixed on multiple platforms, a number of AudioEngine improvements have been implemented to better handle AC3 and DTS, and more.
The XBMC 13.x branch brings some very interesting changes, like Android hardware decoding, Raspberry Pi and Android speed improvements, stereoscopic 3D Rendering, better touchscreen support, improved UPnP capabilities, audio engine improvements, better subtitle searches, and much more.
Other smaller features were also added in the XBMC 13.x release. For example, XBMC will send a wake-on-lan request to any sleeping servers first, lots of PVR fixes and updates have been added, movie sets can now be edited by the users, and episodic bookmarks have been added.
XBMC media player is being used by many companies and development teams for their own products, which means that soon there will be a lot of other upgrades for a number of applications and Linux distributions. This is just the case with OpenELEC, which already has a version out that is based on the 13.x branch of XBMC.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of new features, updates, and changes. Download XBMC 13.0 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.