With Feature Freeze now being in effect and the team is working towards a Beta release which we still have not set a release day for, the last two months have had tons of new additions and fixes to XBMC, both major and minor. A quick look at the change log shows well over 800 new commits (commits are chunks of code additions/changes) in the month November and for December the change log shows over 500 commits. Of course we will not stop there and continue improving stability as at the moment of this writing more than 100 commits have been added.

Here are some mention worthy improvements:

- Continues improvements on the Audio Engine

- A complete overhauled and improved audio settings page

- Sensitive info is now hidden from the debug log, like password and user names for sources (not for add-ons though).

- User interface improvements in PVR section

- Library items are not cleared any more when you do “clean library” and your server is temporary off-line

- Improvements in Music library handling

- 3D playback fixes

These are just a small grasp from the total change log as it would be to much to mention every one of them.

Although XBMC Gotham is still considered alpha software which may contain several bugs it is already used by many users who are quite pleased with it as it fixes several bugs that couldn’t be fixed in Frodo. As an additional note, since we are now at feature freeze and we believe that each day the stability increases (and most of us use it every day) you could also start using the nightly builds which are created each day.

By using these you are assured of the most up-to-date version with the latest fixes and can help us track down any additional issues that remain and hopefully fix these before final release.

Important

As already mentioned in previous blog posts like “Note to Add-on developers” and “Feature freeze” when installing a Gotham build you might face the fact that certain add-ons will report their selves no longer compatible. It takes some time for add-on developers to adjust and update their add-ons. Most of the add-ons found in the XBMC.org repository have been updated. If you have acquired additional add-ons through a third-party repository or website please contact those websites, forums or developer(s) where you downloaded them from. As almost any add-ons (except a few) are created by third-party developers we are not responsible for their maintenance or if you experiences problems with them. So again it is best to try and contact the developer and help him track down why it fails so he can try fixing it. Only for add-ons that are located in our XBMC.org repository you can browse the add-on website and see if there is already a quick link to the dedicated forum thread. If not you can find most of them here: Add-ons Help and Support. Be sure to also read the additional Forum rules before posting.

List of Gotham blogs

For people who want to read up the developments and various improvements done since Frodo here’s a quick reference list in reverse order:

XBMC 13 – Gotham: Note to Add-on developers

Making Subtitle Search Better

XBMC 13 Gotham – September and October

Gotham 13.0 Feature freeze

XBMC DevCon 2013 LiveBlog

XBMC 13 Gotham – August

XBMC 13 Gotham – June and July

XBMC 13 Gotham – April and May

XBMC 13 Gotham – March

XBMC 13 Gotham – February



Conclusion

Should want to download and install XBMC, please visit our download page.

* Official XBMC downloads

How to Contribute

If you use these builds, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac (following this guide: How to submit a bug report), provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like. For a current FAQ on XBMC 13, visit our Gotham FAQ.