Dharma Beta 2

Just over two weeks after beta1, the next pre-release version of Dharma is ready for testing. We have closed many bugs, touched up some translations, and updated a substantial number of addons. With beta2, we also made the last-minute decision to include web-interfaces as addons. This means that we will be able to keep the new interface (still a work in progress, should be ready by final) up to date, and also developers may submit their interfaces to the official repository. There are several in development already: some for file management, some for editing metadata, and some to simply control XBMC remotely.

A note on versioning. In the past, we have used a year.month scheme to denote the stable versions. This has proven problematic because it forced us to estimate the release date, and to bump the version number if we fell behind schedule. In addition, this complicated the work of packagers on various platforms who were having to keep up with our version changes. Therefore we have decided to call Dharma 10.0, and the next stable (codenamed “Eden”) will be 11.0. Simple.

The same warnings from beta1 still apply. Dharma is quite stable already, but don’t forget that it is still in beta. Builds for all platforms are uploaded and ready to go. Download the latest in mediacenter goodness right here. Ubuntu users may use the svn ppa repository for pre-release builds.

Feel like helping? There are several recent reports of hard-freezes while browsing movies in the library. This is likely due to our thumbnail generator and we need samples to reproduce the issue. If you are running into this while using Beta1 or Beta2, please file trac ticket and be prepared to send us the sample file that we request. Without samples, we can’t reproduce and fix the problem.