The developers of open source media center software XBMC have released a new build of XBMC 13 Gotham, sporting a few shiny new features including support for stereoscopic 3D video and for hardware-accelerated decoding on Android devices.

At the same time, the team is dropping a feature (or a bug, depending on who you ask): support for Windows XP, Microsoft’s aging but still relatively popular desktop operating system.

XBMC for Windows now requires Vista or later. The software is also available for OS X, Linux, and Android.

XBMC 13 Alpha 7

While XBMC has been available for Android for a while, up until recently it’s relied on software decoding, which means you’ve needed a pretty fast processor to handle HD video playback. Now XBMC can take advantage of the graphics chips in many phones, tablets, and TV boxes to decode H.264 and other supported video codecs.

At this point you’ll need a device running Android 4.0 or later — and XBMC 13 doesn’t currently support hardware decoding on devices with Amlogic or Allwinner chips.

3D video support now works with videos encoded in SBS, TAB, anaglyph and interlaced formats. The media player can’t yet handle 3D Blu-ray videos.

The team has also made some changes to the menu system, removed the default weather app (to stop XBMC users from hammering Weather Undeground with forecast requests), and fixed a number of bugs.

You can find more details at the XBMC blog.

thanks Ramon!

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

9 replies on “XBMC media center adds Android hardware decoding, drops Windows XP support”

  1. a fool who frustrates almost 40% of its potential users/clients/supporters by purpose.and btw who the f””” is vista?

  2. Gotham does support Amlogic, but you have to use a build that enables the amlplayer. The generic builds simply don’t have it enabled, due to the funky way amlogic does stuff.

    There’s no one left to develop XBMC for XP, and it was standing in the way of major bugs. It’s 12 years old, has no hardware decoding support, and isn’t even the best option for old hardware. Linux installs like OpenELEC and XBMCbuntu are free and run much better than XP for older hardware. If you don’t like it, find someone willing to work on XBMC for XP.

    1. Do you know if this latest version of XBMC does hardware accelerated playback for Rockchip 3188 devices? It seems 90% of Android set top boxes out there use Rockchip’s quadcore cpu, and the sellers have claimed for the last year that this or that version of XBMC plays 720p smoothly even without hardware decoding, but that seems never the case.

      1. I believe so. There is/was an issue on the rockchip side that should now be fixed. I will try to find out for sure.

        1. That would be great – I’ll keep an eye out for the comments section. I’m surprise this isn’t a bigger deal on the freaktab forums. I’ve been searching for more info about this update.

  3. Microsoft still supports Windows XP (security updates) until January, 1, 2014, so decision – drop support for Windows XP – is premature.

  4. Dropping WinXP support is a big mistake. XBMC is a big deal out here in Asia where most machines run WinXP. Bad move IMHO XBMC.

  5. Weird that they tell you which chipsetss aren’t supported instead of which chips are supported. All the people getting Android TV set top boxes would like to know.

Comments are closed.