Aeon: a New Interface for XBMC Posted by XanTium | July 10 21:12 EST | News Category: Xbox

From aeoncentral.com: [QUOTE] Aeon is a new interface for Xbox Media Center that revolves entirely around the user, their tastes and their media. Built specifically for HDTV, it uses the very latest features of XBMC's advanced skinning engine, rendering its textures natively at high definition. Aiming to offer full support for all of XBMC's library management and online features, it already boasts unparalleled user control of its information panels and 1080p backdrop changer. Comprehensive animation ensures smooth transitions between all states and windows, from Movie and TV libraries to Photo Walls and User Customisation. Aeon began life under the project title Xephyr, and is currently in the late "alpha" stages of development. While its design direction is established and its feature-set largely complete, there's still work to be done on vew types, user customisation and file management. As such, no bug reports are being requested at this time, though feature requests are still being considered. As the project enters its beta stage (planned for February 2008), a more rigorous process of public bug-testing and visual refinement will begin. A final version of Aeon is expected no later than Christmas 2008, by which time it should look substantially better than it does at present. The alpha version of Aeon includes the following features: * Fully animated Video browser w/ transparencies and drop shadows * Home page links including Movies, TV Shows, Pictures, Music, Games etc. * User-customisable, cross-fading backdrops for all viewtypes and Home options * Home page scroller w/ unique inline Settings options * User setup of Home page menu options * Interface-wide display of time/date and, optionally, local weather * Database library views for Movies and TV Show series/episodes * Fullscreen "Wall" views for pictures and videos * Discreet, interface-wide "Now Playing" panels * Unique "Roller" object for music album covers * Inline (i.e. no popup or dialog box) context menu for media views * Optional cosmetic effects including screen decorations and fullscreen vignetting * Unique "live tutorial" panels for every major screen and function [/QUOTE] Official Site: http://www.aeoncentral.com (thx to Hydraulix for the news) Download: http://www.aeoncentral.com (x-scene mirror (Alpha 11b))

Looks great

This looks utterly beautiful.

I swear XBMC is going to be what tips me over the edge and convinces me to get back into the scene and mod my second old Xbox.

cool. I think I am going to have to blow the dust off my old Xbox to check this out.

Holy friggen hell yea, where the hell did i put that old beater box?

i have been testing Aeon for the past few months and am quite impressed - still hasn't overtaken the default xbmc skin for me just yet, but it is very close and definitely has the "wow" factor to impress those new to xbmc...

thanks for continued development on a great media center...

What??? How the heck does it do HDTV, or do they just mean the skin outputs still images at HDTV resolution? My understanding was that the xbox1 will just never be capable of HDTV.

It's a great skin but I still use PM3 on my xbox but when linux xbmc is ready for morons like me I'll definitely switch to this skin with my HTPC because this skin is made for true HD along with HD content.

Xbox 1 is capable of doing 720p and 1080i. Almost no games support those resolutions and I am sure it wont render video files much over 480p but the dashboard should have no trouble doing 720p.

I run XBMC in 720p and looks great. 1080i is a bit much for it and chunks sometimes, mainly on the animated transitions.

It can play low bitrate HD resolution vids, but again chunks with high motion scenes.

h264 it does not like, xvid FTW.

Yep, the xbox1 will not only display XBMC in HD, it'll also upconvert your DVD's to 720p or 1080i. You'll need HD component cables though. Unfortunately it generally won't play true HD video though. 720p will drop frames and 1080p freezes altogether.

Yeah I went and read the site, when it comes to High Def they're talking mostly about the Linux version of it. Guess I'll have get back into Linux, if I really want to try this out.

This reminds me how bad I want to build a HTPC. I just spent a lot on a new panny plasma... must resist the urge to spend more.

So far after playing around with it tonight, or morning i guess , it's pretty nice. Very nice job overall. Can't wait to see the finish product. Can't wait till wide banner support is added to TV Shows.

I did notice it freezes in both 1080i and 720p modes frequently when in Wall view and also won't play video's, due to the fact that memory is running out. (Freemem:0-1MB shown on my LCD screen), but that could be since i use 386 sized icons. However when using with Back-Row, it never drops below 16-17MB, granted there's also not more then 18-20 on the screen at the same time either.
Which is why i found 386 being perfect, since 512 sized was doing that even on Back-Row, and 386 still looks REALLY nice and clear in detail anyway.

Great job so far, will this hopefully be added to the SVN? So some of us junkies can get daily/weekly updates on each progress?

Looks nice!
But i cant get my xbmc dash to let me use the 720p 1080i option i cant mark them any ideas ??

given how the xbox couldn't handle aspects of the 360 skin for XBMC how well is it handling this, which is way beyond what the 360 skin was in terms of processing power demand.

i just can't envision the dashboard running all that smoothly.. ??

but your the man to answer that since you have been testing it.

so,,,, how smoothly does it operate when moving from movies to music, to settings, to main screen etc etc.

Nice, will give this a try, shame I don't have some Xbox 1 HD cables

Hi djdafreund,

I have been following Aeon for months now, wide icons will not be fully supported at any stage (although I believe there is an option to enable them in the skin settings screen). The issue is they dont really work well with the design concept of the skin.

DJH (the designer) has created a huge amount of high quality TV show posters that can be used to get the best out of the skin, all available from Aeon Central

They are now available from the TVDB also, we can only cross our fingers that there will be an option to choose what XBMC downloads in the near future!! For the time being you can easily assign the icon yourself!!

Cheers

Mark

you are correct - Aeon is just an interface for xbmc and does not enhance the xbmc software capabilities for improved HD video playback.




i have not personally played with the 360 skin enough to be aware of those handling issues, but the Aeon interface transitions are quite smooth, barely a noticeable difference between PM3. and i am not a special tester, just found Aeon a while ago and have tried a few revisions...remember that the current stage is still only alpha11b...

looks great, only looks horrible on the games section where i have wide icons and text in the setup and so on is illegible due to the fact i have a SD 4:3 screen. Other than that looks goooood. Not sure if I would change over to it though, so far i am enjoying Vision 2.

Looks pretty sweet, will have to give this a try .

Wonder why this skin just made it here now, I was enjoying it for over a year now since it was first released...

Check out XBMC forum for more skins if you dont know about it already.

Why is it designed around HDTV when

- The Xbox can't display 1080p at all, ever.
- In the entire Europe market region, the Xbox component cable wasn't even available, meaning no 480p without making a trip to ebay.com.
- The Xbox can't play back h.264 in 480p30, let alone 720p30 or 1080p30.

I'm sure this will meet with a fantastic reception from the 200 or so people in the whole entire world that own a DreamX.

Actually, scratch that: I don't think the DreamX can playback 720p either.

In conclusion, this isn't Xbox news. XBMC don't care about the Xbox anymore, and haven't for a good few years. It's not even the platform that development happens on; it just gets the occasional backport from the Linux version.

Can't say how much i love this work. Keep it up! and thanks muchos.

I have The new Rambo movie.....I ripped it to a H264 MKV file and it plays just fine on my XBMC. Also have a H264 version of "The 40 yr old virgin".....it works good too.

There are threads here and on XBMC.org that tells you which bitrates to code your videos (for H264) so they will work with XBMC.

It wont do "ACTUAL" HD......but it does upscale the picture as much as it can.




@ MrFish.....This is XBOX-SCENE , not XBMC-Scene, so if people wanna talk about Xbox or Xbox news this is the place....XBMC may not "care" about the Xbox anymore, but Xbox-Scene DOES. The members of Xbox-Scene DO. And if you bother to check.......The forum you are posting in is listed under the catagory of(XBMC) Skin Development which is under "XBMC for XBOX"......Did you see that.......for XBOX.

do you have the hdtv component av pack?

You will have to go into the original xbox dashboard and set the options there first.

This is awesome. Hope they integrate some way to randomize backdrops.

Also wtf am i doing wrong, I can never get the automated scan to run properly in the library, renders the whole thing pretty useless...

hmm backdrops should be randomized by default... works fine with my setup anyhow.

That's just it. On the Xbox, this skin won't deliver anything near what it promises, thus this news is not relevant to Xbox Scene. If it were 'XBMC scene', then it would fit right in. The filing of this thread under 'Xbox1 forums' does not magically grant the xbox a 400% clockspeed upgrade, nor does it make PAL Xboxes compatible with HDTV.

I'd go so far as to say that your argument here is completely the wrong way round.

Finally, most of the people reading (and posting to) this thread came here from the front page, which is purportedly for Xbox news. Not news about XBMC side projects that were never intended to work on the Xbox.

You've actually tried the skin then have you MrFish? It will run on PAL xboxes, it just isn't designed for it in mind, so will not necessarily use the screen realestate optimally. Any user of a PAL xbox can quite happily switch over to NTSC and use HD cables if they wish, and many do.

Xantium (or someone else in charge of xbox-scene) obviously thinks it's news, and I think he'd be the one to know, given that he runs the site.

Yeah, it runs fine on mine (NTSC) as well in both 1080i and 720p, but 720p is of course smoother. I did use it back when it was still called Zephyr, but wanted to mess around again with it to see the changes. Looks great!!

It looks like the site is down, maybe they exceeded bandwidth (too bad, I was about to download a bunch of the image packs):

'Account Disabled

This account has been disabled. If you are the owner of this web site please contact the system administrator or billing department to re-enable this account.
'

first off, This skin doesn't work well at all on my 4:3 SDTV, so my xbox is keeping PM3.

I did however install it on my linux install of XBMC and it looks and functions great. My only issue is the fact that it froze my pc when I attempted to exit xbmc using the shutdown command in the skin.

I know. I do. I had to import a cable from the US, because they're not sold anywhere in Europe. Switching to NTSC is a pain in the arse, and not practical for everyone. I'm certainly in a minority having an Xbox in Europe that can actually do HDTV. If, by 720p, you mean HDTV.

FWIW, I use the default skin, but with XBMC hacked to read all animation durations as one millisecond, and the font replaced with MeiryoKe PGothic. And that's quite wanky enough, thankyou.


Yeah, that's good reasoning: the article is great because it'll score me points with the mod to say so. Have you read the front page recently? The only real qualification a front-page article requires is to start with 'for immediate release', or to be hosted on some blog the poster likes. Ideally, it should be a press release about how the the 360's doing in the format war.

That is not true, stop trolling(!), making up lies about things you clearly no nothing about to get a rise out of it, (yes what you are doing is the definition of trolling).

XBMC for Xbox gets updates to its SVN practically every day. AEON on the Xbox does too run is 720p and 1080i, (and has very smooth animations in 720p I might add).

Component cables for the old Xbox can still be bought in game and electronic stores here in Sweden (that is Europe in case you did not know), and anyone can find . Even a 10-year old kid can switch over their Xbox to NTSC after they connected a component cable to it (it is as simple as downloading the Enigmah video selector ISO, burning it to a CD-RW or DVD-R then booting the Xbox with it), and once you have switched over tyour Xbox to NTSC you can enable 720p and 1080i in XBMC for Xbox.

aeoncentral.com website is now currently down because it got so high-traffic from various websites on the web (a lot of people though this was great news) and that slowed down the server it was running on so much that the hosting company had to disable the account so it would not affect the other websites that are running on the same server.

Looks great a very promising start.
I will start using it as soon as they incorporate wide banners for TV shows.Hopefully in the next update.

Dude if you dont like it here then fook off, I like it, I also dont travel around looking for new skin updates for my xbmc because I was happy with the vision skin. Thanks to this peice of news I have tried and really like aeon. If you dont like it thats fine say so and move but to come back time and again to convince others that your right? you have to much free time on your hands buddy.

Oh and as for hd cables for xbox. your lying through your ass son I got 2 set of HD cables in the UK and NOT from import shops I got them from GAME. The only problem being that you need to switch your output from PAL to NTSC so as to be able to output 720p and 1080i, which isnt that big a deal since theres a nice easy quick little tool that does it for you.

In short quit moaning!

Digging the skin, very much so. 720p looks uber crispy. The new display modes are really slick as well. I am having some problems with it glitching out while I'm trying to look at my TV eps in library mode. It could possibly be that my library just needs a good cleaning.

And seeing as how the site is down ATM, I just wanted to post this suggestion here. I'd really like for the backgrounds/fanart to be easier to set up. A lot of my movies are in .RAR's, which means that I can't have a custom background when I'm in a specific folder, right? What if you made it so that the skin just looks for a "background.bmp" file in a specific folder?

Otherwise, I love this skin. It's very sleek, and definitely a step up from Clearity. I cannot wait until the finished version is ready. Nice work.

Who cares about this on xbox1 since xbox1 can't play any hd media content? Hd is 720p and up and it's far far far too slow to play any 720p-1080p content. So i have to wonder who in the world cares.

Raises hand.

Just because the media doesn't play in HD doesn't mean I don't want the crispiest browsing experience possible. And some x264 content will play properly on the X1 without problem. Personally, I'm happy using "standard-definition" content for all of my shyte. I don't have the HD space to keep everything in HD.

You do realise that XBMC upscales all SD content to 720p/1080i don't you?

No..... they dont. Nobody bothers to research it. They just slam the xbox now cause its old tech.

"Linux build this"....."Mac build that"......."Xbox cant"......."Xbox is outdated".

And when you try to explain it to them, they get pissy cause they are wrong. (Like MrFish did.)

I feel like the people in these forums should switch over to XBMC.org if they feel like Xbox is to "outdated" to be a great XBMC. Take their crap over there and talk about the great ports of XBMC to OS's like Linux and Mac.

This is XBOX-Scene. Meaning a scene that is meant to discuss all things XBOX.......not XBMC.

There would be no XBMC without the Xbox.........people need to remember that.

Very true. After a little research I "upgraded" to hd using ms hd pack etc on a 1080p tv (set at 720p) and the quality is amazing. SD stuff looks even better than the 360 and ps3 going thru hdmi! Notably because in xbmc you can turn off interlacing which causes severe jaggies on 360, and the ps3 uses way too much sharpening and filtering causing fringing effects and changing the deblocking options etc doesnt seem to improve it.

Not bad for a £40 console to £300 ones.

So I say, bring on the Aeon skin and silence the naysayers.

HI I have a few questions not sure if I’m is the wrong area

1) How do I set up Movies and TV to look at different dir:?...When I go to a folder in Movies section then Hit back to home and click on TV its now in the same directory.

2) I have multi dir: for the Movies section to look @ but when I tie them all together I no longer am able to "Set Content" to get the Info from IMDB.
MOVIES
|-------1TB/Movies
|---------300GB/Movies
|------------250GB/Movies
|---------------1TBa/Movies
That’s the Dir: setup but if I only use one then I can "Set Content"

3) For the "Wall" view of the covers Is it possible to make the Images smaller so I can fir more on there I would Like to see it 50% smaller

4) Is it possible to have the "Background" picture chance with the Title of Movie you have highlighted in "Showcase" view?

5) Is it possible to make a New Section on the home page IE: "New Movies"

Thnks for any and all help.

PS... Love this skin!!!!

1. Make the folders on your F or G partition. edit the settings.xml ( in XBMC/Userdata) to to look for those folders by default. (ie: Create TV folder on drive F. Edit sources.xml to look for TV Shows in F:/TV as the Default)

2. If you wanna add a SMB source to ,the already established, Xbox HDD source......do this.

Go to the source panel ( the screen with "add source" buttons) highlight the source you wanna edit(ie: Videos), press white button. go to "edit source".....and add your SMB source to the exsisting source. This tells XBMC to look at both places for media

After restart, when you click the button, it will show everything in both the xbox's drive(F:/Videos) and the SMB drive(Computer1/Blah Bla/Videos).

When you "set content" to build or add your library, this will scan media both xbox and SMB sources.

3.You can make a AdvanceSettings.xml to change default thumb size or edit the skin to display them smaller. I personally haven't messed with AEON, so I cant tell you which xml to edit.

4. You would have to again, edit an xml to have that, or hope someone else, who can script it, wants that too.

5. If there is a selection that you dont use....(ie: Music) open the home.xml and change it to what you want. Like if you dont want music and would like a TV selection......Change it to look for videos rather than music. It is a little more complicated than that, but nothing that couldnt be figured out in a day or so. Or you could use a skin that already supports the features you need.

everything on xbox looks like crud compared to my ps3 and 360 because it's SD only. Since the xbox can't play HD content I couldn't care less about an HD UI until it's easy to get and use bug free. This will be an amazingly long time for this new UI.

ps3 and 360 anything content are awesome looking. anyone who thinks differently is having bad eyes i think. unless the material itself is crud.

besides, i never was bitching or anything, i wasn't and am not bashing xbox. so theres no need to get on my case like you guys did.

i have an xbox using the buggy as hell XBMC and it's ok I guess. doesn't look good as it's only SD and it for sure doesn't have nearly enough power to play any HD content as I've tried and it doesn't play it. so there's no need at all for me to EVER get an HD cable for the xbox when it can't even pl;ay hd content. even if the UI is HD I still don't care.

@buggs1a....

1. People who obviously know more about this than you have confirmed that XBMC WILL upscale to 720p (which IS Hi-Def). The Xbox DOES support Hi-Def......and XBMC DOES support H264( which is a HD codec) if the bitrate is set correctly during the coding process.

2. If you are so content with your 360 and your PS3........start posting in the 360 Forum, and at PS3-Scene.

You seem to me like one of those people who thinks that your opinion counts, and you can keep thinking what you want.......but take your opinion to people who wanna hear it. Especially when your opinion is WRONG!

But you were right about one thing.....you aren't "bashing the Xbox"......you ARE bashing XBMC, and you ARE trying to start shyt by doing so.......and you know you are.

So FAH-Q and your WRONG information!!!!

Here is the link to XBMC.org Forums......This thread explains H264 on XBMC for Xbox. This is an 11 page thread so read up or shut up!!!!!

More trolls. IMHO trolls should just be warned once, then banned if they continue trolling.

XBMC does indeed by default do linear upscalingling of all videos to the set output resolution. So yes, XBMC on the 'old' Xbox does too upscale all standard-definitions videos to 720p and 1080i if you have component cables and that is your video output setting in XBMC.

As for XBMC being "buggy as hell" on the Xbox, that is your personal opinion, but I bet that I can find more people who think XBMC is stable and mature enough for daily use then you can find people who moved away from XBMC on the Xbox because it was "buggy as hell". The people I know of who moved away from XBMC on the Xbox was not because XBMC being unstable, it was because of three completly other reasons; they either wanted native 720p or 1080p playback of H.264 videos and therefor got a device capable of that, or they wanted TV-recording capabilties, or they got a Xbox360 or PS3 and didn't want two game-consoles connected to the same TV.

FYI
The site has been moved due to some DNS issues.

AEON: A new interface for XBMC