XBMC Frodo and AudioEngine

[Hdale85]

So the big new thing in the new Dev build of XBMC is AudioEngine. It's a complete new engine to replace the old out dated one that XBMC has been using since the days of the original Xbox. For more information check out this.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=AudioEngine

It supports 24bit audio formats up to 384kHz, and adds support for DTS-HD MA and TrueHD along with many other new features. In my opinion this is going to really bring the XBMC platform to the front of the HTPC world (even though I think it already has a huge share of the market as is) and bring it well into the future. We're now at the ability to play Blu-rays natively and support the new audio formats and they've been implementing TV tuner capabilities as well as PVR functions. So finally there may be a full solution to take over Windows MCE before too long.

[PewterTA]

I've been using XBMC for the longest time. It's now really starting to really take things beyond most others. I'm loving it!

Well not for music, but for for movies and pictures that is!

[aud19]

Play .flac?

[Hdale85]

Yes it plays ALL formats....at least ALL formats that I know of lol.

Jason there is an amazing distro that's based on a super stripped version of Ubuntu and runs XBMC, it's called OpenELEC. The entire OS is less then 200mb's and you can put it on a flash drive or whatever you want. It doesn't matter about write cycles much because it loads the entire OS and components straight into memory and runs from there on boot up. It's an incredibly stream lined approach and was incredibly easy to setup. They are generally a bit behind on the current releases as they have to build it all together to work for different platforms. They are doing beta's right now with XBMC 11 but they are likely very stable just doing the last few tweaks before making it official. I generally always run a nightly build (although now I think they are monthly?).

Dan I agree! I use it for music as well I think it does a pretty fantastic job and with the new AudioEngine it's supposed to be better even. I've been using XBMC since the original Xbox lol. I'm waiting on the final few parts to come in to build my new HTPC that's based on the Fusion platform so I'm going to try out a Frodo build and see if it's stable enough to use currently.