hopes for Android
I'd love an android port - tegra 2 especially. Bonus points for android as you wont need to jail break.
Open source media centre front end XBMC will now run on the iOS-based second-generation Apple TV. And the iPad. And the iPhone 4. Installing XBMC on any of these gadgets requires them to be jailbroken, of course - as the XBMC team notes, "you won’t be seeing XBMC in the app store any time soon, since it directly competes with …
The trouble with the original apple TV is that it is woefully underpowered as a generalised media PC. Fine for apple's own content, but really struggles to play an avi (for example). That was my experience with the early version of XBMC on apple tv a year or so ago.
I don't know what the new one's like though.
If xbmc discards bonjour in favor of actual networking, it would be very interesting. If it's still using bonjour, less so, as it took me several days to sort-of, kind-of get the ipad working at the house - I run a wifi network on a different lan segment from the nas and handing the bonjour traffic off was, at least for me, not working at all.
Hand in your Geek Card. You need to jailbreak to get VLC these days. The official App Store model is incompatible with the GPL license of the VLC codebase and it was removed. If you already have it installed, then good for you.
I just hope that this kind of tablet+TV architecture will help push XBMC into a more MythTV architecture. I use both media systems for the bits they do best, but much prefer the frontend of XBMC, while loving the backend/PVR capabilities of MythTV. For me the ability to install several frontends for MythTV trumps the fact that XBMC is essentially a standalone architecture. So a shared metadata database and video/music/image-source's for accessing it from any XBMC frontend would be an awesome upshoot from these developments :)
I love XBMC, at least in it's XBOX version - I've got it installed on four of them around the house, indeed, that's all they were bought to run! Would love to have some cheap, quiet, hardware that would allow me to pay 1080p vids, though. (The original Xbox just isn't up to that!) I've a suspicion that anything apple would not fall into the "cheap" category though..