Version 1.2.3.of GeeXboX is released. GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a Home Theater PC, or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it's a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.

GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows developers adding easily extra packages and features but that might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded Linux systems.

Changelog

GeeXboX 1.2.3: fix release

As it appeared that a nasty bug with some AC3 audio encoded files slipped through previous 1.2.2 release, here's another minor release. No big changes here except from AC3 playback recovery.

GeeXboX 1.2.2: features enhancement release

A few interesting patches recently having been commited to 2.0 development tree, people on forum asked for backport of these on stable 1.2 release. So did we, adding a new key feature, with multi-threaded video decoding support. Non IT people can see this as a way to finally make use of their brand new multi-core CPU systems providing parallelized treatment. And the results are pretty good, with a 1.8x video decoding speed boost on Core2Duo and 3.0x speedup with Core2Quad. It is now truely possible to actually decode 1080p HDTV streams on Linux.

As exciting as it may be, please however note that this is still an experimental feature (we're probably the one of the first Linux distro to integrate it), that may cause undesired visual artefacts (in some very rare cases). In order to make use of it, you'll have to explicitely enable it through ISO generator.

Detailed Changelog (relative to 1.2.1 release):

• Multi-threaded video decoding for MPEG-1/2/4 and H.264 codecs.
• Support for newly discovered DVD MovieProtect encryption method.
• Extended DVD CSS descrambiling capabilities.
• Removal of GOOM audio visualization (was causing too much troubles).
• Automount daemon enhancements.
• Upgrade of MPlayer and its set of codecs.