We haven’t heard much about XBMC 13 for a while, the XBMC team have been working on XBMC 12.2 but that doesn’t mean they have been standing still. There are new builds of XBMC 13 with lots of updates including a change to v1.2 of FFMPEG which has a big list of improvements and also the settings section of XBMC has been changed to it can now be controlled from outside of the XBMC or via separate UI screens. This makes it possible to have different levels of settings screens, skinned version of XBMC or run XBMC as a server.

Multi-touch touchscreens are now supported and there are gestures like swipe backwards, two finger context menu, image rotations and pinch to zoon. There are lots of other changes like movie management and Airplay volume. You can give the alpha version a try and read all the details on the XBMC blog.

With the release of XBMC 12.2 and GSoC, not to mention some behind the scenes work going on, an April cycle announcement was not published; however, thanks to a new process, both the April cycle and May cycle builds were built rapidly and efficiently (and on time). We have now switched from our old Billy the Buildbot to Jenkins for building our automated monthly alphas and nightly builds. Jenkins is quite a bit more intelligent and faster than our old buildbot, and we’re excited about the switch. In the future, for those who just can’t wait for a write-up about the newest alpha but tend to steer clear of the bleeding edge of nightlies, the new build should always be available on the 1st of the month at mirrors.xbmc.org/snapshots.

With that said, we’ve now completed months #3 and #4 of our monthly development cycle, and there’s a lot to talk about.

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