I managed to get a psa based on the below post on a popular xbmc website
http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p=381958#28


And I have created this forum topic for people that are interested in coming on board on how to do so:
http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=55906

This is in response to the talk I've had with a Team-XBMC member who has said "Generally speaking xbox1 is a dead platform and the few who work on it now are growing weary of working on it" Its been mentioned that Native Tagging will probably be the last big feature to be implemented.

I interpret that to mean that the old-blood will be leaving soon and unless they are re-energized or new-blood comes in this branch of the project is dead.

If nothing else check out his page that a developer has recommend for people interested in helping out:
" http://xbmc.org/trac/report/14 this should be good for any developer wanting to get involved"

I thank you for your time and assistance. If you believe that XMBC for XBOX has been good to you and want to syndicate/edit this post for a mainstream xbox scene website or your personal xbox website, please do so.

What exactly is Native Tagging?

From my experience the May 21, 2009 build from T3CH appears to be pretty stable and had fixed some issues I personally was having. I too would love to see some continued improvements in the Xbox version but accept that the world in general and power in particular have moved on and above the XBox ability and thus we are on borrowed time. It has been a great ride for me, just wish I had discovered it 2 years earlier. I will stay with it as long as my old machines (5 of them around the house) work. When that day comes, I will start looking for a replacement along the lines of Kaleidescape without that extreme price tag.

"Native Flagging" is XBMC's built-in ability to scrape from the file, and display, Codec information for your video files and music files.

While XBMC for Xbox has been able to "read meta-data from music files" for awhile now, a patched build for Xbox allows the same for video files and the ability to show that info through "Media Flags" that are a part of the skin you use.

For more information(noticed FourTwentySmiles answer right after I posted)

"XBMC now supports the extraction of media information such as video resolution, codec, aspect ratio, audio codec, audio channels as well as subtitle and audio language and exposing them to the skins."

More information about the implementation of media tagging and skins/settings needed to support it can be found here: http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=52581

For more information on a highly experimental patch that requires a few workarounds on your part to keep from crashing that has been made for the xbox port check out the following link http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=53618 , also be on guard for dataloss which is always a possibility on the frontier.


As for the continuing efforts on the xbox it is possible to go forward, much more so, though the biggest problem is creativity, time, and developers to get past real and artificial ceilings. For example there are other nice features that will be coming out in the linux port such as webkit for the next generation of web based media. This is in response to sits like hulu that has implemented a way that breaks compatibility to how it was streamed. This support would require craftiness to implement on the xbox or some other technology or extension for next generation webbased multimedia & streaming.

I am not saying that the xbox won't have its time come, but lets hope it still has a few years left and a few more things are implemented.

Which hardware platform is XBMC most popular currently? Never imagined that interest in the old xbox has run so low.

From a popular nightly build website these are cumulative totals (Site created April 15, 2008)


XBMC Nightly Builds
XBMC for OSX - Downloaded 5789 Times
XBMC For Linux - Downloaded 2190 Times
XBMC for Windows - Downloaded 6472 Times
XBMC for Win32 Installer - Downloaded 596 enlarge.
XBMC for Xbox - Downloaded 10181 Times
Total Hits: 86628 | Today's Hits: 788

The interests of the developers of course is distributed differently, unless we do something to change that.

Surveys at XBMC.org, here at Xbox-Scene and at the forementioned site above ALL show that the Xbox platform is STILL the most popular and most widely used.

BUT also stated in the post above........Team XBMC has NO further intrest in developing for our favorite platform and I have been told by one team member (I won't mention names) that unless "we", the community, find coders to help in this, we will no longer have development on the Xbox platform after "Native Media Flagging" is implemented into the Xbox build.

So this is our ONLY chance. We have already laid witness to the apparent fall of T3CH, who once released weekly.....then monthly........and now "whenever".

Are we gonna let the next few months be the last we see for the Xbox? The Xbox that has been so good to us. Not the "MS" Xbox...........OUR XBOX!! Help Team XBMC remember what the "XB" in XBMC stood for!

you got to be kidding me thye should so keep working on the xbox version of xbmc

I can see their reasoning: you can't keep cramming features into the X-Box builds forever, for the simple reason that the hardware just can't take the strain. So cram 'em somewhere that'll get results - the other ports. Given that most of the devs aren't using their X-Boxes any more, it makes sense that they'd do little work on those builds.

Now, call it conjecture if you will, but it seems to me that with each passing month it becomes harder and harder to get the more "demanding" video files to play. Every now and then something changes that causes XBMC to use more RAM while "idling", and unlike pretty much all the other platforms out there, X-Boxes do not have RAM to spare. It's not so bad for those of us who still use SD (eg me), but some high-def users are apparently having real problems, and the only solutions seem to be either downgrading their install or leaving HD.

So I'm not sure how many more features can be thrown in before the negative impacts become really noticeable. And given the whole 64mb thing, I suspect that'll be sooner rather then later.

I'd be happy if development for the system stopped dead forever, so long as bug fixes continued (well, maybe a little more codec support would be nice, but it'd still be more then fair if we were left with the bugs).

At the present time no one is even reporting problems in the X-Box builds. The most you'll see is the occasional thread pop up somewhere, usually without debug logs, and very seldom with another person coming along and corroborating it.

Take the broken seek bar in MPlayer, for example. It's been broken for five months. Since it broke, Babylon has been and gone. Why on earth there aren't people ranting all over the place about it I really dunno. We get the occasional thread, maybe once every couple of weeks, and that's it.

Heck, I remember once when the savegame icons broke - there were complaints going on for weeks until it was fixed. It later broke again (sometime last year, I think), is still broken, and I can only recall seeing one single comment on the matter.

And as for when the X-Link client was removed, well, we all know how that went - the devs said "Sure, you want it, but do you want it enough to maintain it yourself?". No one did, apparently, and so it's still gone.

I'm not complaining about these things (not a privilege I consider myself worthy of), my point is they indicate that anyone with the interest (let alone ability) to work on the X-Box side of XBMC is probably already an official dev. The fact that we're running out of such devs is probably the best indicator of interest in the project.

However, even if development does "stop"... So what? Chances are the source'll stay up, and people will still be able to add patches for it (which would, I'm sure, be merged to the main SVN trunk on occasion if they actually did something cool).

Even if Team XBMC decided to strike it off SourceForge altogether (something I strongly doubt), there are still lots of people around the world with their own complete copies of the source who could put it up again: Those who wanted to continue work on it would be able to do so.

On a side note: I'm also having this problem, but as its already been reported, and a ticket filed...I figure...whats the point in creating another post...pretty sure there are otheres that feel the same.....

My point is, that I am not asking for every feature to be "crammed" into the Xbox. I just want things that the xbox would be able to handle.

Example: There is now a patch being made to have "Video Fanart". This would be like, instead of a still picture, when you select a TV show the intro to that show would play as "FanArt", instead. The Xbox could not handle this.....BUT.......Whay can't Xbox users have a version of this same thing where the still picture stays, but the theme song to the show plays? An "Audio version" of the same concept.

I understand the reasons for focusing harder on other platforms..( like HD content). I think they shouldn't try to add things to the Xbox that it can't handle, like HD content, but should still focus on adding things to it that ARE compatible. I do not understand just dumping the platform that gave this project its start. That would be like there being no more "land line" phones, ever, just because we now have cell phones.

The Xbox sould still be an important part of XBMC. If I could maintain the Xbox portion, I would. But I don't know the first thing about compiling for Xbox or about writing code. I'm lucky that I can edit skins and make themes. I just think it is a sad day when the most popular platform, not to mention the "original" platform, for this great project becomes a faded memory.

In my post on xbmc about things that can be done to help out I put the following:

* The XBMC for XBOX has always been running to the extreme and there is talk about reducing the features. The alternative of course is to find a better way to implement them.

Yes, the devs are really talking about removing more features, and that is fine, they know whats best considering their and the xbox's resources. Of course if they had more dev resource more alternative routes would open up.

If it can not be better implemented, one of the many ways of getting around it such as:
Virtual memory has around for decades to work around memory problems, you might not of even realized it was being used, it has been used since dos and its meg(s) of ram and called an overlay, win 3.1/9x ect implemented it differently and called it virtual memory, I don't remember what apples called it but it was supported on the 68xxx processors early on also. Of course it can slow things down, significantly if used inappropriately, but it and other loading/unloading techniques would allow extensions. Whether it contributes to a noticeable slowdown depends on how/what for/where its implemented.

And there is a path on the other extreme, every feature but bare bones taken out, a highly optimized/lite/stripped build that serves just one purpose, aka play video, or watch webcontent, ect...

But even that path requires time, and a person to do it. Support a project like that if you don't think new features need to be added. As long as your trying to find people to do it.



Its true that no one showed interest, but where did the energy of the community go when things went that happened. Did it go into complaining and begging or into /dev/nul ect., or did it go into finding and advertising for new developers, and even if some people looked, how many participated?

I'm more interested in finding the answer of whether there are still devs out there interested. As far as I know the best way to get an definitive answer is to make sure as many people who might be interested but might not realize it yet have a path. I don't want to burden the current developers(other then the minimum that happens when new devs come on board)

For everybody:

Just to know that what wide kinds of efforts is being put into this to help find out if there is anybody left into developing for the xbox, the author of the T3CH upgrading script will be adding PSA support. Of course if somebody was really interested in helping out instead out, somebody who really enjoyed the xbox, and wanted to ensure bug fixes were implemented, that patches from other ports were applied, that xbmc for xbox remained compatible with how things are done in the future, and they were not able to implement such work themselves, they would make sure their website(or if they didn't have one some other creative or basic way) had a road somewhere that helped guide a nomadic developer to xbmc xbox dev land.

I guess it's inevitable given the age of the old Xbox.

But I love my Xbox. It's still used more now than the 360, and more than it ever was for gaming. It's mostly used these days in my house for playing kids films so we don't have to have 100's of DVD's to hunt through.

I'll be sad when it all stops. I'm pretty sure I'll be using it until the day it goes 'pop'.

I doubt the 360 will get so much use when all is said and done.

The point I wanted to make was that I'm very grateful for all the hard work of others to turn what was supposed to be a games machine into the best media center I've seen. Especially considering how inexpensive it is/was.