We love the Raspberry Pi here at TDL and it makes a great little Media Center system by running XBMC on it. One of the best distributions of XBMC is Raspmc, there have been lots of improvements to it recently and the Raspbmc blog has a nice roundup of what’s new.
Some of the highlights include changes include a new Kernel (3.6), updated CES support, improved PVR support and rebuilt images.
You can get Raspbmc from their downloads page and more details on their blog
Raspbmc is becoming a very stable and refined product as I’m sure you have seen in the last couple of weeks. There’s still plenty of room for improvement and here’s what’s new:
XBMC is now in Beta
XBMC Frodo is now gearing up for release as we enter the Beta stage. This means an improvement in reliability, but most likely a few bugs to be ironed out. By reporting issues to Team-XBMC, you’ll make the final release of XBMC be amazing, be it on Raspberry Pi or your desktop.
Treating external drives better
Raspbmc will treat your external hard drive better. It does this by spinning it down after 20 minutes of inactivity. This will reduce your power usage as well as prolonging the life of your hard drive.
Resolution cap made togglable
Earlier in October, XBMC decided to clamp the resolution of the UI on the Pi to 720p. While this does speed up the UI and reduce the incidence of GPU Out of Memory events, it also blurred the UI horrendously. Other XBMC distributions targetting Raspberry Pi were quick to adopt this patch, however, we here at Raspbmc were less reluctant to do so. While we acknowledge the benefits of such a cap, we feel the user should still have a choice in the matter. Thus, while we have restricted the UI of new builds to 720p, we have allowed you to toggle this in Raspbmc Settings (to restore a 1080p UI). Raspbmc is the only distribution for Raspberry Pi that allows this.
Factory reset
It’s in early stages for the moment, but Raspbmc Settings will now allow you to restore your installation of Raspbmc to its original state. This restores your Raspbmc install to a completely vanilla state. We’re currently looking at ways to preserve your settings across reinstalls while still providing you the convinience of not having to reimage your card on a computer.
Prebuilt images are now offficially available
We understand that the installer does not suit everyone. Some people live in rural areas without broadband, don’t like the idea of a dynamic installer or never had any luck with our installation process. Pre-built images floated around the forum thanks to Mark but were never officially supported. Now, we are happy to announce support for pre-built images, available from our Download pages. These images will automatically resize themselves to make use of any size card on the first boot and ship with automatic updates disabled by default. Note: the official, dynamically installing image is still recommended, and the latter should only be used if you have issues with the installer.
Quieter XBMC
Improvements have been made in how we deal with the framebuffer. This means more RAM for the GPU (essential on those 256MB boards), as we’re not unnecessarily rendering to the framebuffer, and, a quieter XBMC (no system chatter when the screen dims)
CEC support updated
CEC support has been updated yet again, this time to version 2.0.4. This brings improvements to LG and Panasonic TVs
Better PVR support
We’ve added further PVR support by introducing additional addons. Thanks to Christian for emailing us and telling us the default build system only builds addons without dependencies.
Improvements in image rendering
Dom aka. popcornmix (a Raspberry Pi foundation member) has been hard at work making improvements to how XBMC utilises the GPU’s integrated image decoding capabilities. He brings quality, reliability and speed improvements to the table. Thanks Dom!
TvHeadend updated
TVHeadend has been updated. It is in a state of flux at the moment due to a new lead on the project, but it appears to be progressing rather well.
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@isdixon Will have to try and see if it’ll still support the LCD screen