Heavily upgraded JSON-RPC support, plus remote control support

The XBMC development team has released a major new iteration of its free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. Available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, the codename Eden XBMC 11 release has been boosted by improved cross-platform support, better performance all around, and a new set of theming enhancements.

This media center application has a sophisticated library management system and is now compatible with iOS and Apple TV.

For developers, XBMC's JSON-RPC compiler APIs now benefit from an overhaul, which sees them tangibly improved. The team hopes that current enhancements will encourage third-party developers to start building new applications that take advantage of the option to control the XBMC over network connections.

Specifically, the JSON-RPC API has been bolstered by support for batched requests. "We've vastly improved the method by which we handle input, including heavily upgrading JSON-RPC support, making remote control support much simpler in Windows and enabling unique methods of device communication with hardware. Now even AMD devices are supported for GPU video decoding in Linux to some extent, thanks to the inclusion of VAAPI."

According to the development team's official product blog, "XBMC 11.0 milestones include Addon Rollbacks, improvements in Confluence (the default skin), speed increases via features like Dirty-region rendering, and the new JPEG decoder, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, better handling of unencrypted BluRay content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in OS X (to match the already-available feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, and an upgraded weather service with geoip lookup."