After months of hard development work and testing, XBMC version 13.0, codenamed ‘GOTHAM’, has finally been released. Since the last version 12.0, there has been over 500 code changes by more than 50 developers.

For those who don’t know what XBMC is, it’s a free open-source digital media center software that allows you to stream and play videos, music and various media content from either a local storage or remotely from the Internet of local network.

The program is highly customizable and very useful for those with tons of media files who want to stream across multiple devices, include Android, Windows, Raspberry Pi and IOS devices.

This version added more features, fixes bugs which were discovered from the previous versions, and most importantly, improved GUI and skins in many areas.

For a complete changelog of this version, please check it out at this location.

Below are some of the changes that were added:

  • Improved PVR/EPG and live TV interface in its GUI skinning engine
  • Added, updated, and improved PVR backend clients addons for many popular third-party external PVR backend platforms
  • Added new Built-In function to control state of attached HDMI CEC device via Add-ons API
  • Added support for H.264 (including Hi10P) multi-threaded video decoding when software decoder on CPU is used
  • Added support for video playback of SageTV recordings
  • Added PulseAudio sink for ActiveAE for Linux Desktop
  • Added support for Pixel Shader based HQ (High Quality) scalers for DXVA renderer on Windows

Besides some of the changes above, it also added improved touch screen and UPnP support, Android hardware decoding, Raspberry Pi and Android speed improvement, and many more.

To install XBCM in Windows, Android and IOS devices is pretty easy. To install GOTHAM on these devices, visit its download page and download the correct version for your platform.

Remember GOTHAM only works on Android 4.0 and up. You must also temporarily allow installation of apps from unknown sources in Android under security.

For Ubuntu devices, run the commands below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

 

Next, run the commands below to update your system and install XBMC

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install xbmc

 

That’s it!

 

xbmc-gotham-13_0

 

If you wish to completely remove it from Ubuntu, run the commands below to get rid of its PPA archive repository.

sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

 

Then run the commands below to uninstall XBMC

sudo apt-get purge xbmc && sudo apt-get autoremove

 

Enjoy!