XBMC Media Center 11.0 Released, Install It In Ubuntu

XBMC Media Center is a free and open source (GPL) digital media hub and HTPC (Home theater PC) software, available for Linux, OSX, iOS and Windows.

XBMC 11 "Eden" has been released recently and comes with speed increases, better and simpler library, better unencrypted BluRay support, default skin improvements, better networking support, AirPlay support, upgraded weather service with geoip lookup and much more. The new version also brings support for Apple TV2 and iOS.

Changes in XBMC Media Center 11.0:

• addon rollbacks so you can install previous addons versions
• GPU video decoding on Linux to "some extent" for AMD graphic cards
• support for direct playback of ISO image files for Blu-ray Disc as well as video library integration
• addons can provide their own web interface
• improved mouse support, add better control for dragging of seek / slide / scroll bars, and click handling
• improved touch interface API and gesture support for XBMC's GUI Engine for all platforms
• new custom JPEG decoder which is at least 2x faster than the previous implementation
• support for SSA/ASS subtitle tags; italics, bold, and color for SubRip (.srt) subtitles as well as MP4 embedded subtitles
• upgraded ffmpeg
• improved Blu-ray Disc and harddrive playback support of unencrypted bdmv and mpls files without menus
• support for NFS virtual file server
• support for AFP (vfs)
• Airplay support for Videos, Pictures and Music
• asynchronous threaded background loading of metadata to XBMC's VFS (Virtual File System)
• improved TheMovieDB.org movie scraper by adding themoviedb.org posters scraping
• Linux: support for Texas Instruments OMAP4 (OMAP4430 and OMAP4440 with video decoding on IVA 3)
• dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.) implementation for Linux
• improved ARM processor architecture support for embedded devices and embedded system platforms

For a complete changelog, see THIS page.

There's also an XBMC ISO based on Ubuntu called XBMCbuntu which is built upon a full LXDE desktop environment, so when you exit XBMC, you'll get an Ubuntu-based LXDE desktop with applications such as Chromium, Synaptic or a file manager. To login to XBMCbuntu, use "xbmc" for the username, don't enter anything for the password and just click "login".

XBMC Media Center 11.0 "Eden" screenshots:

XBMCbuntu

Install XBMC Media Center in Ubuntu

To add the stable XBMC PPA and install XBMC 11.0 in Ubuntu 11.10, 11.04, 10.10 or 10.04, use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

The official XBMC PPA doesn't provide any packages for Ubuntu 12.04 for now but if you use Precise, you can use an unofficial PPA to install the latest XBMC 11:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock/xbmc-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

For other Linux distributions, Mac OSX, Apple TV, iOS, Windows or XBMCbuntu, see the XBMC Media Center download page.

via ubuntips