Talk:XBMC v13 (Gotham) changelog

Posted initial condensed changelog for Gotham
Marry X(BMC)mas! I now posted an initial condensed changelog list here at XBMC v13 (Gotham) changelog just to help anyone get started. I am not sure if all the features and functions that I posted actually made it into Gotham before the feature freeze or not, or if some of them was bumped to the next of future version of XBMC, and some things that I did put it have probably been sorted into the wrong category. However what I am sure of is that I know I missed many things and that list is not complete, even as just a condensed changelog, so please, any assistance in improving is would be very much appreciated Gamester17 (talk) 13:54, 23 December 2013 (EST)

Tips for maintaining release changelogs
Hiya all! If any of you guys are looking to volunteer assisting with maintaining a condensed changelog then may I suggest that you utilize the XBMC article on Wikipedia and/or XBMC's own Wiki here on wiki.xbmc.org

XBMC condensed changelog is available on Wikipedia today as release history listed under the Releases section (click "[expand]" to see the list):
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC#Releases

Most of that information has been copied the Changelog (for a full changelog) and Releases (for condensed changelogs history) articles on wiki.xbmc.org or vice verse:
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Releases
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_v13_(Gotham)_changelog
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_v12_(Frodo)_changelog
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_v11_(Eden)_changelog

Before the changelogs wiki.xbmc.org was listed per point release:
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Category:Point_releases
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_9.04_point_release

Best source today is the closed pull requests, and you also have all non-pull repository checkins under Timeline on XBMC's Trac site:
 * http://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/milestones?state=closed
 * http://trac.xbmc.org/timeline

There used to be a condensed changelog available as Roadmap on XBMC's Trac but that has not been maintained for a long time:
 * http://trac.xbmc.org/roadmap
 * http://trac.xbmc.org/milestone/Future%20/%20Pending
 * http://trac.xbmc.org/milestone/11.0
 * http://trac.xbmc.org/milestone/10.0

Some more information on the new Frodo features also look to be available in the xbmc.org wiki today, and hopefully this will become a tradition to follow in future releases as well:
 * http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Category:Frodo_feature

Personally I think it is mostly uninteresting to keep a condensed changelog for each nightly or even alpha releases, as the monthly blog posts on xbmc.org work better for those. Regards // Gamester17 (talk) 14:00, 23 December 2013 (EST)


 * Very nice! Thanks for the tips, and great work as always on the changelogs :D -- Ned Scott (talk) 22:22, 23 December 2013 (EST)

Features and functions that did not make it into Gotham?
Here below is a condensed list of larger features and functions that it looks like they did not make it into Gotham but there still are opened pull requests or development branches for these things. Gamester17 (talk) 14:13, 23 December 2013 (EST)
 * Add a unified Games Manager Library and GUI front-end launcher with online metadata web scraping support
 * Add Games entry to the GUI, also introduces Game Addons as new type of addons with just-in-time emulator installation
 * Add Games Library for Game Metadata, exposing info (current level, number of lives, number of coins earned, etc.) to GUI
 * Add "Heimdall" new multi-scource metadata extraction engine and web scraper framework and addon API for compatible scrapers
 * Add new "Heimdall" compatible scrapers for Games (e.g. TheGamesDB.net), Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, and Music, etc.
 * Extend the Addon API to support Game Client Addons, supporting XBMC's VFS (Virtual File System), etc.
 * Add RetroPlayer Video Game Console Emulator (ROM image player) interface supporting the libretro API and emulator cores
 * Add generic and user-mappable cross-platform Joystick (and Gamepad) abstraction layer for joystick APIs and joystick clients
 * Add support for "Peripheral" Addons for updatable configuration of input devices
 * Add UPnP Multi-Client support with full UPnP server/backend Bi-Directional client/frontend communication and sharing
 * Add support for flagging of local verses remote content, and flagging of online verses temporary offline remote content
 * Add support for handling duplicate media in several ways (ex. multiple versions of same movie in different resolutions)
 * Add Pictures (Digital Images) Library GUI with metadata tags scraper to database and OSD interface
 * Add further optimizations to XBMC's GUI engine for faster rendering on low resource embedded devices
 * Add abstracted scene-graph deferred rendering for GUI renderer abstraction
 * Add framework support for binary addons (inc. closed source proprietary addons), for media player cores, and codecs
 * Extend Addons API to support binary addons (inc. closed source proprietary addons), for media player cores, and codecs
 * Add support for C#, Java, Go, Modula-3, OCaml, Octav], and Scheme addons via Groovy and SWIG code-generation
 * Add support for Lua, Perl, PHP, R, Ruby, Tcl scripting languages based add-ons via Groovy and SWIG
 * MIPS processor architecture support (Sigma Designs reference)
 * Add support for display on DirectFB support via Mesa and DRM for OpenGL ES 2.0 support
 * Added initial native support for rendering display and input on Wayland compositors
 * Add native XvBA accelerated video decoding for AMD/ATI GPUs on Linux
 * Add support for Place-Shifting streaming videos / music output ability to UPnP Server, Web Server and JSON-RPC API's
 * Add on-the-fly video transcoding output ability to the UPnP Server, Web Server, and JSON-RPC API's for remote apps
 * Add on-the-fly audio transcoding output ability to the UPnP Server, Web Server, and JSON-RPC API's for remote apps
 * Add on-the-fly image transcoding output ability to UPnP Server, Web Server, and JSON-RPC API for remote apps
 * Add initial optional X11 support on EGL (EGL-X11) based systems on Linux, full-screen mode only
 * Add native BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java) and BD-Live menu and navigation support for decrypted Blu-ray Disc (via libbluray)
 * Add Blu-ray AACS decryption and DRM encrypted playback via third-party library (libaacs)
 * Add support for High Efficiency Video Coding a.k.a. H.265 video decoding (as updated FFmpeg uses OpenHEVC)
 * Move music lyrics addon core handling to core and added native support for lyric plugin services
 * Move LCD API and LCDproc support out of XBMC's core and instead into a Python script service add-on
 * Move Last.fm scrobbler and Love/Hate scrobbling out of XBMC's core and instead into an add-on
 * Replace cximage and imagelib with the freeimage
 * Upgrade FFmpeg (libavcodec and libavformat) libraries to release version 2.x