Plex Media Center

Alright, it’s been way too long since the last release! I apologize. Profusely. I’ve been busy getting the code moved over to Github and taking care of some other related things. It might seem like all I’ve been doing is drinking beer, but I assure you, that’s far from the truth. Really.

I’m going to write another post tomorrow detailing how totally awesome git and GitHub are, with some detailed instructions on how you can contribute to the project as a developer. For now, I’ll leave you with a link to the tagged source for this release.

Clearly we still have some rebranding/renaming to do; for now, imagine OSXBMC as standing for “OS X Barkley’s Media Center” or “OS X Bad-ass Media Center”.

Here is what’s new in this release:

• NEW : Support for Aliases.
• FIX: Listing directories with broken symlinks is wonky (things went missing).
• FIX : Timezone off-by-one issue (really fixed this time!)
• FIX : Mouse cursor sometimes shows up. I double-doggy dare it to show up now!
• NEW: libdvdcss is included, which should help with DVD playing (thanks, tokyovigilante!)

Also, I’ve updated to the latest Linux code, which has lots of good stuff as well. Vulkanr has made some great progress on getting libcdio into shape (with the help of davilla), and as a result, support for media on optical disks should be along shortly.

Here are the links (torrent, HTTP) to the release. Since a lot has changed since the last one, I’m sure I probably screwed something up.

Here’s your dose of Barkley; he’s swimming around in some salt water pools and watching Anna take a dive (and probably wondering why it looks like she only has one leg).

A few days ago, there was a heated internal email discussion going on amongst the XBMC team members. The topic: whether or not to kick me and the other OS X people off the team. There was an actual vote taking place, with retractions, explanations, concessions. One of the OS X people got called a rather offensive name.

I watched this all with a calm sense of detachment. Why? Because I’m totally over it.

When I started porting XBMC to OS X, and then joined up with our little ragtag team of like-minded individuals, the goals were simple: To take what we considered to be the best media center in existence, and make it run on the Mac. The second goal was to make it stable. The third goal was to integrate it fully into the Mac ecosystem. And the fourth goal was to make it even better than it already was.

What became clear to me watching this vote is that these goals can no longer be met as members of Team XBMC. That’s why I voted in favor of kicking us all off the team. I simply do not have the stamina, patience, or desire, to deal with all the drama surrounding our union. I will not go into details here, for the sake of professionalism, and it must be said that I still have a great deal of respect for nearly all of the XBMC team.

Having covered that, where to from here?

We will continue to work on XBMC for the Mac. We are forking the code (it will be hosted on Github). We will still keep roughly in sync with the Linux code, and of course the XBMC team is welcome to merge our changes back into their tree.

The biggest change here is that we will no longer be operating under the restrictions imposed by the team. We can clean up and simplify the settings as we see fit. We can remove features that don’t work right (sometimes, less is more). We can add whatever new features our users are asking for, in the manner of our choosing.

We will be announcing new support forums shortly, and we will be posting details on the Github repository.

Also, we’re definitely looking for talented graphic designers with an eye for typography to work on a top-notch Mac-themed skin.

If you’d like to join us, we’d love to have you. And by “join”, I mean “work with us”. There will be no formal team, nor will there be any getting voted off the team. Think of projects like Mono, Wine, or Linux as models.

It’s an exciting time, and there is a lot more to discuss. Peace out.

EDIT: I’ve closed comments for this thread. It’s time to get some work done.

Just to dispel any rumors or myths to the contrary, we are – of course – planning on checking our changes back into the Linux branch of XBMC, just as we’ve done with all previous releases.

Trying to release a stable and polished product to our beloved OS X community while the Linux XBMC code churns like an Amish farmer making butter ain’t easy. I’ve been burned in the past trying to get some changes checked in and then finding that I had to update more of my local tree than I wanted to as a result.

In addition, posting comments here about violating licenses, harassing our team every few hours on IRC, and sending accusatory emails are really not the best way to get on our Christmas list. Contrary to popular belief, we do this for fun, and the less fun it becomes, the less likely we are to continue doing it.

In the longer term, we’re looking into solutions to this which will likely involve either creating an OS X branch in SVN, or creating a GIT repository somewhere where you can get access to more realtime source updates.

Until then, please, be kind and patient as we work to resolve a few more issues in the betas and then get our changes back in SVN.