Download XBMC 12 Beta Try out New Live TV and PVR Support

If you are a big home media center guy, XBMC’s latest beta Frodo is a welcome edition. It added support for Live TV playback as well as PVR support, with the departure of Window Media Center XMBC is a perfect alternative to fill the gap.

New Feature in XBMC 12 Frodo

One of the biggest feature for XBMC 12 is the live TV playback and PVR recording. That said, in order to play Live TV you need to have a TV tuner installed on your PC. Follow the instruction here from XBMC’s wiki, essentially you will need 2 parts to get this working.

1. The Live TV backend server, which communicates with a TV tuner adaptor to create a video or audio stream, and
2. The PVR client – an XBMC Add-on which controls the presentation of that content

Some other new feature also included:

• HD audio support, including DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD, via the new XBMC AudioEngine.
• h.264 10bit (aka Hi10P) video software decoding for anime
• Improved Airplay support
• Advanced UPnP sharing

The advanced UPnP sharing is very neat, check out the video demo below to see how it works. Essentially if you have a decent XBMC library at your home you can share your library to a newly setup XBMC with nothing on it and would be still able to play all the videos from your home.

XBMC 12 beta is available for PC, Mac, Jailbreak Apple TV 2, Linux and many more. Download the Windows XMBC 12 beta 1 here.