Hey folks.

Right. Big news - Triode has been burning the midnight oil, and we're
finally in a position to (rather tentatively) release the first version
of AlienBBC which has support for our Windows brethren.

It's actually quite a major departure for AlienBBC - the transcoder has
been removed altogether, and AlienBBC now adds proper rtsp:// protocol
handling to slimserver. Even better - Triode has managed to make it work
without having to patch mplayer, which is a pretty neat trick.

So... we're not totally sure that this will be a bloodless coup - and
it's a much more pervasive change that we've made in a long time, so
we're releasing a preliminary beta to you lot, to play with if you're
brave enough. But... take this as a warning - If you can't get out going
in the morning without the Bedroom Squeezebox playing Radio 2 at you, or
the wife is going to give you grief if she can't listen to The Archers
tomorrow evening - then for heavens sake stay in the shallow end with
the ole' reliable V0.12. If you fancy seeing how the reckless half live
- then step up and see if you can break it.

OS/X support should also be in this release, although the install
instructions are woefully lacking, and we genuinely haven't tried it at
all (if somebody wants to donate me one of them new fangled Mac Mini
jobs, I could probably write some better docs *grin*). Oh... and mplayer
is now a mandatory choice - v0.90 doesn't support alienstream as a
helper application any more. In just about every other way, though -
it's vastly superior.

AlienBBC is available, as ever from:
http://www.mrtickle.org/alienbbc.html . Look for the 'Beta Releases'
menu item to find it in all it's rough-and-ready glory!


Cheers folks.

-- Jules