Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Mark McCall from AutomatedHome was kind enough to interview me about the direction of XBMC for OS X. I know what you’re all thinking, I should stop wasting time and just get back to coding, and you’re absolutely right. I’m totally ashamed of myself. But if it brings new users to our beloved media centre (notice my annoying British spelling), then perhaps it’s for the better.

I’ve read about a few ways of doing this, but this evening it occurred to me that using iTunesFS might be really easy and work quite well. Sure enough, load it up, add the new share and you’re browsing and playing your iTunes library.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to share this new FUSE filesystem via SMB. It appears that you have to set the allow_other option, but I had no luck getting this to work via sysctl. If you can figure it out, post a comment!

We’ve gotten over 1200 responses on the survey, and I wanted to start by just thanking everyone for taking the time to complete it (and cullman for suggesting the idea and writing the survey)! We learned a lot, and will use this information as we move towards 1.0, in terms of features and bug-fixes.

First of all, let’s look at the demographics. Here are the top five countries; I’m amazed at how many people are in Sweden (unless Pike was busy clicking).

Isaac here,

Many of you have noticed our bug reporting and download site is down. It should be back up soon. In the meantime if you want to get your hands on a copy of XBMC a mirror is available here:

http://tv.aninga.net/XBMC/?C=M;O=D

This message brought to you by Maggie and Simon.

While we sweat away perfecting the Apple Remote/Universal Remote code, please help us out by taking our short survey. We’re trying to get a better sense of our community, which will help us prioritize features and schedule things better in general.

I wish I could say that one lucky respondent to the survey will win an all expenses trip to Maui, where he or she will be forced to work cleaning our house for a week. In reality all you’ll get will be our eternal gratitude. Thank you all in advance!

For some reason, OS X seems to be reluctant to output 1080p to TVs, and usually defaults to 1080i. At first I thought it was the cable (a 50′ HDMI cable purchased from Eforcity for $40), but that turned out to work perfectly. The problem was that the only option for 1920×1080 that showed up in the Displays System Preference was interlaced.

However, when I checked the “Show displays in menu bar” option, lo and behold, there were two options. Both of these looked exactly the same, but when I switched between them, I found that one was 1080p and the other was 1080i.

I found this to be the case on both Macs I tried it on, so check your TV and make sure you’ve got progressive mode enabled!

The Apple Remote work is taking a bit longer than I expected, so another release is probably a good idea, to share some of the bug-fixes and new features that are complete. Here are the changes in this release:

• NEW: High quality software upscaling is now supported. You can specify preferences in Video -> Player as to when the scaling is enabled and what scaling algorithm is used. This makes a huge difference when viewing SD content. It takes quite a bit of processing power, but the good news is that decoding SD content doesn’t.
• NEW: Monitor blanking is now supported. When selecting a full-screen mode, you have the option of telling XBMC to blank the other monitors. The preference is in Appearance -> Screen. I suspect Martin will be happy that he can stop throwing a sweater over his iMac, which sounded like a total fire hazard to me.
• NEW: The built-in web server now works. Among other things, it serves as an alternate remote control for those of you using a laptop as an expensive remote. Make sure to set a port above 1024.
• NEW: You can now store your own skins in the /Users/XXX/Library/Application Support/XBMC/skin directory, to avoid having to move aside and reinstall skins every time you upgrade. Thanks to d4rk for coding this up!
• FIX: A crash when reading WMA files.
• FIX: The OS X mouse cursor sometimes made an unwelcome appearance in full-screen mode.
• FIX: Settings that made no sense for OS X have been removed to reduce confusion.

The XBMC source has been updated to near-trunk as well, which means a host of improvements and fixes. Note that the new music library features may still have some kinks, but hopefully things work pretty well for you.

We’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline for 0.5.0, including the improved Apple Remote support and some display/computer sleep stuff that Cayce’s been working on.

Also, as a side note, if you have a moment, register your usage of the application on http://osx.iusethis.com/. I’ve tried to update the version on there, but unfortunately someone else “owns” the application and doesn’t seem willing to give it up.

And now of course, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.

OK, I just adding software upscaling as a full-fledged feature for the next release. Both bicubic and lanczos upscaling is selectable, and you can enable it for SD content only, or if you’re feeling like making your CPU sweat, for all content (meaning 720p is upscaled to 1080p using the same algorithms, and — to my eyes, at least — little visual effect).

I think the next thing I want to look into on the quality front is ffmpeg’s ability to post-process. If you look at the bottom of this page, you’ll see what looks like a very impressive example of (I think) a deblocking filter. It even looks like the XBox XBMC code had preferences for post-processing (with mplayer), but they were lost in the port to Linux (which doesn’t use mplayer). If anyone out there has experience with ffmpeg and knows some good settings to use, please let me know.

So for lack of anything better to do, I played around with getting swscale (a component of ffmpeg) to attempt performing high quality software upscaling. By default we perform bilinear upscaling, and with SD content, it looks pretty crappy, with lots of jagged lines.

After getting it to work, I took a couple of screenshots to show you the difference. In terms of performance, my desktop had enough power to do bicubic upscaling of both SD and 720p content to 1080p. It has to be said that it is definitely an expensive operation.

The win was most obvious — to my eyes, at least — with SD content. Here’s a sample from the intro of a movie. The first is bilinear (notice the jagged circle), and the second is bicubic.

Pretty nice, right? Now let’s try 720p, with some good diagonal lines taken from Kevin Spacey’s jawline:

We’ve restructured the milestones on our Trac site to correspond to specific versions and better illustrate the bugs and features that will make it into these versions. A few things to note about this:

• When you’re reporting a bug or requesting a feature, please leave the milestone blank! Please do indicate the version for bug reports.
• We’ll decide which milestone (if any) will include the bug-fix/feature based upon a few things: the number of comments the ticket receives, how difficult it is to implement/fix, and how important it is to our core user group, comprised primarily of our wives and Barkley. (Hence, anything requiring opposable thumbs is out.)

Remember, the more detailed the bug report, the more likely it is that (a) we’ll look at it and (b) we’ll be able to fix it.

Thanks!