Xbian one of the great XBMC builds for the Raspberry Pi has reached the Alpha 5 stage. It’s been a couple of months since the last alpha and this features a new xbian-config system as well as using XBMC 12 Frodo.

There are also Raspberry Pi firmware updates and the development team say it’s much faster than Alpha 4. Download instructions and more details on the xbian.org site.

XBian 1.0 Alpha 5, out now!

After two months of massive coding, we bring you the fifth alpha version of XBian 1.0!

From the development point of view XBian 1.0 Alpha 5 took the most man hours (we’re awaiting feminine team members). We’ve completely rewritten xbian-config and created a custom implementation for an animated splash. We also welcomed a new team member specialized in python under the name of belese (and sadly had to say goodbye to Hexagon). Belese worked hard on a xbian-config port inside XBMC. XBian can now be fully customized inside XBMC (currently only supported under the Confluence skin). Last but not least, we’ve finally included XBMC v12 final. A lot of improvements in both the Raspberry Pi firmware and the XBMC software make Alpha 5 notably faster than Alpha 4.

All questions, bugs or fixes can again be posted on our forum, you can also come celebrate with us in ourIRC-channel.

Changelog:

Bugfixes

Issue #88: Make advancedsettings.xml Frodo-proof

Issue #182: XVID playback stops

Issue #189: [xbian-config] 4 Packages – mislabelled

Issue #204: Fix grey blocks in video when skipping/forwarding movie

Issue #206: Choppy xvid playback – timestamp issue with packed B frames

Issue #217: Fix problem with 8192cu wireless chip (solution included)

Issue #222: Switching to next video results in just sound (black screen)

Issue #225: Out of memory while playing Youtube

Issue #228: Error: Requested setting (audiooutput.guisoundmode) not found

Issue #234: Cannot troubleshoot /var/log/messages and kernel not used

Issue #242: Add swap file (128 MB static size)

Issue #246: [xbian-config] wlan settings problems with special characters ($)

Issue #248: Fix (auto)mount issues

Issue #252: Root not available as source in XBMC (only Fusion available)

USB automount permissions

Moved tty0 udev permissions out of 99-input.rules

Fixed dirty vchiq permission hack

Improvements

Issue #10: XBMC Frodo stable

Issue #125: Splash screen on boot

Issue #159: Delay when setting audo / Mute doesn’t work

Issue #181: Change cachemembuffersize

Issue #193: Terratec Cinergy DVB-T Stick Dual Rev 2 recognized as Rev 1

Issue #195: Update Raspberry Pi firmware

Issue #212: External HDD Spin down after 5 minutes

Issue #235: RaspberryPi Crash, have watcher automatically restart PI

Issue #238 and #243: Remove skin audio settings in confluence

Issue #239: Add ondemand WOL capability to XBian

Issue #251: Add TL-WN821N firmware

Issue #267: Add speedlink remote support

Fixed the black screen on XBMC shutdown

Moved (initial) boot script to the initramfs so everything can be setup in a single boot

XBian-config additions

Issue #99: [xbian-config] More standard dialogs

Issue #110: [xbian-config] Make overclocking a radio dialog and show current settings

Issue #114: [xbian-config] Make a port for inside XBMC

Issue #126: Command line control of xbian-config modules

Issue #142: [xbian-config] All ports XBMC resolution setting

Issue #143: [xbian-config] Bash Settings like language override and disable autostart

Issue #144: Integrating xbian-config in the confuence skin

Issue #194: xbian-config suppresses error messages

Issue #249: [xbian-config-bash] UTF-8 support for multi-lingual support