A late Happy Xmas to you all, and wishing the best for the new year. What better than to give you a new XBMC4XBox release to test though. Just in time 🙂

The 3.5 Beta 1 release has seen a massive amount of work from the last stable, and includes all fixes from 3.3.3, but has been ongoing in development since the first 3.3 release. Released now as a Beta 1 as it does require some further testing, and there may be new issues or regressions, but I would encourage people to try it alongside the current stable and feed back any problems via the forum or bugtracker.

Changes include:

• Python 2.7.5 – includes working libraries for sqlite3, and fully working ssl. This brings far better compatibility with upstream XBMC plugins, and logging in on YouTube etc works, which it never did on the previous Python 2.4. This took many hours of work to do including building working python libraries compatible with the XBMC4Xbox architecture. Bugs may remain, but I hope it will be an improvement for most people.
• DVDPlayer has been updated to the FFMPEG 1.2 libraries which brings improved codec support, and new features. We still include two sets of FFMPEG libraries, one for the most common formats, and another which has everything.  Webm and XMV support is now added to the smaller library set, but please do report any issues/questions on the forum.
• Skin changes from XBMC to make backporting of xbmc skins easier.
• Many bug fixes and other improvements – you can always check on development activity via the Redmine activity page.

Many thanks as usual to the XBMC project for without their support and open source licence, we could not exist. Many congrats to them on the release of Frodo 12.3, and we are all exciting about their upcoming Gotham 13 release too. Cheers 🙂

Big thanks to all contributors, including a special thanks to Dan Dar3 for many bug fixes and his ongoing work on XBMC4Xbox Remote, to the many people who help in the of the running the forum, and those who have contributed financially to the project. My personal thanks to XPhazer, Ghostly, Xman, and co for moral support, and to Dom, Byron and others for providing users with skin customisations.

If you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox and want to show your support for the ongoing development please consider making a donation to the project. Please also do join in the discussions over at our Forum.

See the development page for links to the source code and the svn repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page.