The proof of concept was shown off in December but there was no news about when a final release might appear. Today, after two and half months in the making and taking many hours to perfect, the open source media centre, XBMC, is officially available for devices using the iOS platform. This includes the Apple iPad, iPhone 4 and TV2.
Earlier today Neowin spoke with the lead developer for all things Apple on XBMC, Scott Davilla, and asked him what he saw as the main obstacle when developing the new version, "The main issue we ran into was lack of a public hardware decoder APIs but when we discovered how to use the private VideoToolBox APIs, the reality of porting XBMC became certain.". As the new platform runs on the ARM A4 based chips, it was crucial to get it working with a hardware decoder as the CPU isn"t able to decode High Definition video.
Although XBMC has been available for the older Intel x86/OS-X based platform for many months, it had yet to make an appearance on the newer devices. There were previous mentions that the £101 device was not able to support 1080p, but when I asked, Davilla corrected the rumor "it can decode 1080p just fine, currently display is 720p but I also have not looked into display limits.". The future plans for the release are to perfect playback and look at the iPad 2 when its available.
Image Credit: XBMC