Anybody Using Frodo?

[nullPointer]

So I know we've got a good handful of XBMC users around here. On Friday the XBMC released the stable version of their Frodo release (XBMC 12.0). Has anyone already made the jump? I haven't taken the plunge quite yet, but I'm curious to hear thoughts from those that have. I'll undoubtedly be updating my HTPC at some point in the near future. Most importantly are there any issues with the GameEx plug-in? (Last I heard it was working fine with the Frodo Beta releases, but I figured it bears asking)

In the mean time I went ahead and installed the Android edition on my tablet, which seems pretty great.

[celly]

Im still on Eden and im honestly afraid to update and lose my addons. Or find out they arent compatible with Frodo.

Btw NP, which tablet are you running xbmc on? My galaxy tab 2 is on its way and im very anxious to place xbmc on it and ditch my laptop when i go out of town.

[nullPointer]

Funny you should mention it! I'm running a Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0). So far XBMC seems to be running great on it. I just installed last night, but I haven't run into any issues. I'm actually pretty amazed at just how much of the desktop functionality they've managed to pack into the android version.

I totally hear you about the hesitance to upgrade the desktop version. I'm not too much of an early adopter, particularly for apps that I've spent a lot of time configuring already. There's certainly some changes I'm looking forward to in Frodo though!

[hansolo77]

I always thought XBMC stood for Xbox Media Center, and was used as a way to have a media center like interface on the original xbox. After looking at the website though, it looks like I was way wrong. Looks a lot like a media center 'wannabe' like GameEx, and Media Browser. I wish I would have looked into it sooner, since I already bought Media Browser. Oh well. If I ever get a device like a tablet, I'll definately look to putting it on there.

[ehuonder]

I haven't moved to Frodo yet either, but I will soon. I'm ready to drop MS Media Center for my PVR and Live TV. I run it on my main TV, but haven't installed the GameEx plugin yet. I'll have to try it! I also run it on a RaspPi in another room just to stream from the other machine. Works great!

When I do upgrade, I'll let you know.

[nullPointer]

I always thought XBMC stood for Xbox Media Center, and was used as a way to have a media center like interface on the original xbox. After looking at the website though, it looks like I was way wrong. Looks a lot like a media center 'wannabe' like GameEx, and Media Browser. I wish I would have looked into it sooner, since I already bought Media Browser. Oh well. If I ever get a device like a tablet, I'll definately look to putting it on there.

Yeah originally it was a media center which ran on Xbox, so you're right about the acronym. I switched from Media Browser to XBMC last year and I've never looked back. They're both great programs in their own right. It's definitely worth checking out if only to see what all the hub bub is about. It's a fairly light weight installation, and has a large support community. It's also available on a live disc, so there's no huge commitment if you decide it's just not for you.

[DazzleHP]

Looks a lot like a media center 'wannabe' like GameEx, and Media Browser. I wish I would have looked into it sooner

Agree with null - XBMC does what it does very well indeed! But make no mistake XBMC and GameEx are two very different animals indeed. Infact it's XBMC's lack of the gaming side of things that caused me to seek out GE Well, actually i tried a couple other front-ends that we will not mention before coming to the absolute conclusion that GE is the BOB (best of the best).

So it is that time of year again it takes me about a week to get everything back to how i like it what with all the custom menu's and launchers and backgrounds and fanarts... there'll probably be new KB commands too so will have make a new xpadder.profile...

Ever feel like your hobby is a job?

[KRC]

I remember when i dropped XBMC for my PC and XBMC for my original Xbox when I found GameEx, as GameEx does exactly what I wanted and more.

Don't get me wrong XBMC is a great piece of kit but not a patch on GameEx, I felt like XBMC's Rom Collection Browser and Advanced Launcher were lacking some.

[Pojosama]

XBMC Frodo has some freezing issues on a jailbroken IPAD one. It only occurs when you change themes. I haven't tried it on my pc yet though.

[celly]

I installed Frodo to my Galaxy Tab 2 (im in love with this thing btw) with no issues. I cheated and used that XBMCHubWizard. It installed fine but was buggy and froze all over the place and a few of the addons didnt work so i uninstalled everything and did it the old fashioned way. One addon at a time from zip. Works great on the tablet, just like Eden so i may update my other computers to reflect.

[nullPointer]

So after spending a bit of time fiddling with my HDHomeRun, I finally made the jump to Frodo last night on my HTPC, due to the super-cool PVR enhancements. I can happily report that it's absolutely awesome, and easily as good as has been reported elsewhere (with one huge caveat that I'll get to in a moment).

Installation is a breeze. Simply do an in place installation and call it a day. When you start up Frodo, XBMC needs to rescan a lot of your meta-data which is to be expected, and a few plugins that were working fine in Eden have now been marked as non-functional in Frodo. That is also to be expected. At first I wasn't too sure about the new Confluence skin, but it's growing on me. It's very subdued, but as I mentioned I'm learning to like it. It's certainly nice that it maintains a consistent look and feel throughout the interface. I really like the fact that 'recently added' icons for the various media libraries are enabled by default, and show up right in the main GUI. Particularly where I'll be recording live TV, that's a very handy feature indeed!

Maybe it's just me, but the interface seems smoother some how. That may just be the 'shiny new toy' effect in action.

So ... what's the caveat? Well it's the music library ... I have a rather extensive music library. In Eden I had spent a significant amount of time setting up custom artist thumbs and fan art for my music library. It's not like it was a Herculean effort, but I worked on it periodically over the course of a couple of months. Frodo did not import any of that artwork into the Music library. All of it is still on my hard drive, but apparently Frodo no longer maps custom art in the music library in the same way that Eden did. So while the artwork is technically present within my system the file names are not exceedingly helpful insofar as disaster recovery for the purposes of determining what's what (An AC/DC thumb might be called Z0X12N.jpg whereas a Grandmaster Flash thumb might be called A0X148.jpg - and it's all spread out across 35 separate directories). It's a bit of a mess, and it looks like I'll be doing the whole manual process over again. It's worth mentioning that this is not an isolated incident, so if you're looking to update but haven't yet, it's certainly something to bear in mind. The good news is that the development team has stated that the new artwork mapping system is an improvement over the old system, and this will not happen again as a result of an update.

Even having said that, I really have to give this release an enthusiastic thumbs up. So that's my broad overview. I can't wait to dig into the nuts and bolts of the thing.

[Tempest]

There must be some way that XBMC knew which thumb went with what album. If you can figure that out, I would take a look at scripting something to fix the problem.

[nullPointer]

There must be some way that XBMC knew which thumb went with what album. If you can figure that out, I would take a look at scripting something to fix the problem.

I sort of wondered the same thing. I think if I were able to rollback the database to the "Eden version" I might be able to figure out what thumbnails go where (I imagine the naming convention for the artist thumbs most likely correlates to a database identifier of some sort), but at this point I'm honestly not sure if it's too late to rollback the DB. It may be worth investigating.

This quote from one of the XBMC developers doesn't seem particularly encouraging though

You assigned all your album/artist art manually previously? If so, your only option is to do it again I'm afraid. The reason is there was no storage as to where the images came from in Eden or before. In Frodo we now store this information, so if it's any compensation, it won't happen again - just make sure you keep the images around!

So my album art is in good shape (it's all in the ID3 tags) but in terms of the artist artwork (and fanart) I'm not holding my breath. Ah well, the reward means nothing without the journey (as they say)

[Draco1962]

Would be cool to have a program like PerfectMatch to organize/match these, eh?

[Tempest]

Apparently there is no information from which to work.

[fRequEnCy]

I use Frodo and like it very much. Although I don't have comparison to earlier versions as I came from using Windows 7 Media Center along with Mediabrowser.

[rockyrocket]

Using Frodo on my HTPC with no issues at all but upstairs on a raspberrypi I can not import my library over a samba share without a greyscreen.

So I just browse the files without adding a media type.

Maybe using nfs instead of samba may fix it, but my server is running drivebender with no nfs support natively.

Apparently hanewin will work but thats just one more software level on top my data - not keen to try that.