Download XBMC Media Center 13.0 Beta 2

It’s been floating around the internet for a few days, but the second beta release of XBMC Media Center version 13.0 is now also officially available on the XBMC website. This cross platform media center software is developed for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, AppleTV and the Raspberry Pi. Version 13.0, which has been codenamed Gotham, contains a large number of changes. For example, there is hardware decoding in Android and support for 3D material, and significant improvements have been made to the audio engine. The release notes for beta 2 look like this:

Fixes

• Subtitles for videos over http should now support the same subtitle functions supported by local media (Note: Certain subtitle issues will only be fixed when non-default skins provide updates. Other fixes are in the works.)
• Rockchip devices on Android will no longer cause XBMC to crash occasionally during playback
• PVR Programming Guide cleanups
• AudioEngine improvements to handling AC3 and DTS, as well as smarter handling in Android and intelligent EAC3 recognition
• Crash on exit should be fixed on various platforms
• JSON-RPC file listing fixes
• DXVA fixes in Windows for older Intel GPUs
• Wording and grammar fixes throughout the UI

Additional Features Not Mentioned in Beta 1 Announcement

As some users have rightly noted, while almost every major feature has been highlighted in some form or other in the various monthly blog posts, not all of them were discussed in the Beta 1 blog. The following is a list of a few of those that probably deserve a second round of attention. (Additionally. there are a few XBMC 13 features that are not quite working now, due to changes such as the iOS 7 update. We will hold off discussing those until the bugs have all been worked out.) For now, however:

• When initiating a library cleaning, XBMC will send a wake-on-lan request to any sleeping servers first, before cleaning the library, to ensure that content isn’t unnecessarily cleaned
• Numerous PVR fixes and updates with additional new features updated on a per-platform basis. For more info, check out our PVR wiki page
• Copy/paste support on Windows, OSX, and iOS to match copy/paste support elsewhere
• Movie sets are now user editable
• Episodic bookmarks – If episodes are not broken into individual parts (eg Adventure episode 1 and 2 are in the same video file), a bookmark can be set that will cause launching episode 2 from the UI to go directly to the bookmark in the video file