About a month ago XBMC announced the new features for the next version of XBMC. These new features, although very useful and a step forward, might not mean that much for the average XBMC user that just want his home theater system to work. One of the features however will improve the user experience even for these average users. Yesterday the XBMC team announced that the new code for the addons manager and the basis for the PVR frontend will be added to the development branch of XBMC.

Addons manager

Even better than it sounds. Will allow an easy way to manage addons, including among other things, PVR backends. Once finished, though still a ways out, this will add the capability of extending XBMC from the couch. No need to ssh/ftp into your box to add skins, scrapers, plugins, PVR Backends, etc. You will be able to add addons from something like a apps-store. The code for this app-store will be opensource allowing everyone to use it’s capabilities.

PVR frontend

Probably the most requested feature for XBMC. This will provide a unified experience to your choice of PVR backends such as: VDR, MythTV, Tvheadend, and MediaPortal TVserver. Only the basis for this functionality is being added right now.

Because the new code is far from bugfree the XBMC team suggest that users and builders take a break until things have settled. For this reason, official nightly builds have been temporarily suspended.