Happy new year

We've had a steady increase in interest over the year but when 1.0 was released it exceeded our every expectation. For example, while we had a respectable 1000 visitors a day (or thereabouts) in May, that steadily grew to 3000 by September and then when we released 1.0 it shot up to 9000 visitors a day! We're now sitting at around 6000 visitors a day - about a five-fold increase from May, which we're pretty pleased with! In fact, over the last year we've had more than 850,000 visits (including three from Greenland!) and nearly 40% of our visitors this year have been new to the site which is a good way to measure how popular OpenELEC is becoming.

We've managed to pick up some partners this year including Zotac, Xtreamer and Pulse-Eight. This is excellent news for us as it means more promotion and better support for the hardware those manufacturers produce. For owners of the Xtreamer Ultra it means even more as there's a dedicated build for the platform!

What else has happened? Well, we've donated (with help from our generous users) some hardware to some of our 3rd party developers who have improved functions like our LIRC support, VAAPI support and now XVBA support for using AMD GPUs with OpenELEC. We've been mentioned on many technology websites including Lifehacker, MissingRemote, Phoronix and many more.

Also, we’ve had over 200 donations this year. That’s a big thing for us as it’s where all of the funding for the project comes from. We rely on donations to pay for our web hosting (downloads of OpenELEC alone are responsible for over 7TB of bandwidth for some months!).

Some Thanks...

Firstly, we want to thank FernetMenta and everybody that donated money to buy him a Fusion-box. Some of you have already seen the results of the early development of XVBA and everything looks very promising. Without him, progress on the ATI-based platforms would be much slower and we probably wouldn’t had the good results we now have. So a big thank you for FernetMenta, as he deserves some spotlight! (and off-course all donators, that made it possible for him). Also on a side note, he is also working on perfecting VDPAU!

We'd like to thank Zotac and Xtreamer, they donated us several free boxes and boards for testing. As we depend on donations, help from manufacturers is highly appreciated. Each box has it's own specifications and through testing with the hardware we can make builds that get the most out of these boxes.

We'd like to thank Pulse-eight for their support and donations.

None of this would be possible without Team XBMC and their developers, so we'd like to thank them for all the time and support we've had from them - this includes Amet, Dushmaniac and vdrfan for their help.

Last (but not least) everyone who has helped and/or donated to us in any way. You're all appreciated!

What is there to look forward to this coming year?

Good question!

Well, there's version 2.0 - based on XBMC's Eden release which comes with new features of it's own. Some of these features are actually already available in OpenELEC 1.0 as our developers have back-ported them!

There will be new releases (both minor and major) that will bring new hardware support and new features to the underlying OpenELEC system.

As always, OpenELEC is about the user experience - from helping our users on the forums and chat to taking their ideas / bug reports and fixing or implementing them so others can use them. OpenELEC is all about getting your media center working as quickly and as easy as possible. We still need your help moving forward to ensure we’re getting all your hardware working out of the box where we can.

And Finally...

As we say goodbye to the year 2011, we'd like to send out our most sincere good wishes to all of our fantastic users, dedicated developers and generous partners.

We hope the new year brings you all new dreams, visions, resolutions and a new (better!) way of living - Genuinely, have a very happy, healthy, positive and peaceful new year!

Happy New Year!!