On Settings

XBMC has long been criticized and at the same time hailed for its multitude of settings. Depending on your point of view, it is either highly configurable or overwhelmingly confusing. In a sense, both are true.

Like many other open-source programs, we suffer occasionally from the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem. Many developers are often adding cool new features and tacking on options for them, but it’s less frequent that we step back and evaluate those options and how they are presented to the user. We are taking this time (while we’re overhauling the rest of the codebase and preparing for feature-freeze) to do exactly that.

Today marked the first round of the big cleanup. It started with simply setting some Good Defaults ™ and throwing out some rarely used or even non-functional settings. The more difficult part comes next, when we reorganize, regroup, and rename things in an effort to make configuration of XBMC a breeze.

Stay tuned for more. This is going to be an eventful week…