XBMC 13 Will Introduce Video Hardware Decoding for Android

The XBMC development team, through Nathan Betzen, announced a few days ago that the seventh Alpha release of the upcoming XBMC 13 media center application was made available for download and testing.

Finally, hardware decoding of video has arrived on the XBMC app for Android devices powered by Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or higher. However, Allwinner and AmLogic chipsets will not be supported, but the XBMC developers assure us that Google's Nexus 7 and 10 tables are fully supported.

Stereoscopic 3D rendering is another major feature that will be part of the final release of XBMC 13, dubbed Gotham, which will probably be released later this year, in order to support viewing of 3D movies encoded in the following formats: anaglyph, interlaced, SBS, and TAB.

XBMC 13 Alpha 7 also brings fixes for the Music Database, font processing, Raspberry Pi, EPG no longer crashes when there is no EPG data, and support for Windows XP has been removed. More details can be found in the official release announcement.

Download XBMC 13 Alpha 7 for Linux, XBMC 13 Alpha 7 for Mac OS X and XBMC 13 Alpha 7 for Windows right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.

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