XBMC 11.0 Eden is Now Available
It took a few beta releases, but XBMC 11.0, codenamed Eden, was released over the weekend. There are a whole lot of changes in the new version of the venerable HTPC software including an updated default skin, AirPlay support, support for rollbacks of add-ons, and a ton of performance optimizations. Hardware support has also improved as Eden will mark the first in-sync release for jailbroken iOS-based devices, though this will not include the 3rd generation Apple TV just yet. XBMC Live, the live CD version of XBMC has been replaced by XBMCbuntu. XBMCbuntu looks and acts much like the old XBMC Live release, booting directly into XBMC seamlessly, but it is based on a full desktop version of Ubuntu with complete apt-get support and Chromium web browser.
Long time XBMC users who have not been following the progress of Eden will be surprised by the new horizontal layout of Confluence, the default skin, but will otherwise feel at home. I have only spent a few hours with the final release, but it is immediately apparent that performance and reliability have improved since the first beta release in December, at least for the Windows version. All of the add-ons I have tried so far have worked just fine though I would not be surprised if some of the less-regularly maintained add-ons run into some problems. If you have already upgraded to XBMC 11.0, let us know what you think.
XBMC 11.0 Milestones include Addon Rollbacks, vast improvements in Confluence (the default skin), massive speed increases via features like Dirty-region rendering and the new JPEG decoder, a simpler, better library, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, better handling of unencrypted BluRay content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in OSX (to match the already available feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, an upgraded weather service with geoip lookup, and much, much more.