14 DAY TRIAL // XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, has finally reached version 13.0 after months of development.
XBMC is probably the most famous software of its kind and it's being used to power Linux distributions such as OpenELEC or Raspbian. Even if there are other solutions out there that can help users view most videos, music, podcasts and other sources of media that you can imagine, locally or through a network, no one does it with more style than XBMC.
“The dark night of waiting is finally over. Because here it is. The stable release of XBMC 13.0 Gotham edition. It has been months of hard work, improvements and testing since the 12.x releases. There have been around 530 commits (chunks of code change) done by 51 developers during this time.”
“Also a large group of translators who aided in making the user interface available in your local language. So we would like to thank every one, inside and outside of Team XBMC for their hard work and effort to make this possible. Not to forget all users who have been using the monthly and nightly builds, helping us test this upcoming release, and all third-party software libraries we use,” reads the official announcement.
XBMC 13.0 has been dubbed “Gotham,” which explains the developer's references to the Dark Night. The latest version comes with some pretty impressive features, that we have presented on a number of occasions. For example, XBMC 13.0 features Android Hardware Decoding (for 4.0 on up), Raspberry Pi and Android speed improvements, Stereoscopic 3D Rendering, better Touchscreen Support, better UPnP capabilities, numerous Audio Engine Improvements, and Settings Improvements.
Also, the Subtitle search has been drastically improved, Extended Python and JSON-RPC API are now available for the developers, FFMpeg 1.2 is now being used, stereo audio can now be up-mixed to 5.1 and sent through optical/SPDIF devices, the support for Windows XP has been dropped, a wake-on-LAN request feature has been added, numerous PVR fixes and updates with additional new features have been implemented, episodic bookmarks have been added, and movie sets are now user editable.
Keep in mind that these are just a fraction of the improvements that you will find in the latest version of XBMC. Check out the official announcement for a complete list of new features, updates, and changes. You can download XBMC 13.0 right now from Softpedia.