Some pertinent questions have emerged following Moovida 2.0’s announcement, enough to dedicate a whole post explaining in more detail Moovida 2.0’s stance on open source and licensing.

The Moovida Core UI is basically Banshee with some tweaks and arrangements. It will use the same license as Banshee, however it is important to understand that Banshee is not only a UI, but also a framework with a lot of extensions. Each extension can have its own license. So it is correct to say that the Moovida Core UI will use the MIT licenses, and some extensions and services inside it will be proprietary.

Extensions, services and the whole Banshee framework is made accessible to the Moovida Immersed UI through XML-RPC data exchange. So MIT or Proprietary extensions in the Moovida Core UI will be available to the 3D UI through that communication channel.

The whole project can be contributed to by either writing Moovida/Banshee extensions or by adding LUA code to extend the 3D UI, accessing the services through XML-RPC.

Just consider the Diesel engine as a rendering platform, like a web browser, and you develop the UI with the LUA language and the artwork we are providing.

The Diesel engine will support OpenGL ES on some platforms. We are not going to maintain Moovida 1.0’s Python framework for long, but hey it’s free software, if someone wants to make something out of it, help yourself!

Moovida’s beta tester program is kicking into full swing by making the Justin.tv plugin available for testing. You heard right, one of the most important live video sites on the web with over 500,000 channels broadcasting live content will be going through rigorous testing before it’s available to all Moovida users. Beta testers, this is your time to shine! If you’re a first timer to this blog and wondering what the heck a beta tester is, find out here.

Justin.tv’s got a large variety of content in 20 languages, in plenty of categories ranging from Entertainment to Animals. There’s even a channel entitled Chicken Coop Living where you can follow the exciting life of chickens in an enclosure… If you already followed the link, I apologize for taking part in wasting 5 seconds of your life you’ll never get back. If you follow the link after this warning, well you asked for it.

Besides useless chicken streaming, there actually is cool content. For a humorous stroll down memory lane by outspoken and slightly nutty commentator ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, check out the Nostalgic Critic. He’s worth it!

Arte, the award winning plugin (as in Moovida’s developer contest award), has been recently upgraded to support videos from the site in German. The plugin reserved for French and Germans will automatically detect in which region users are located to play the corresponding language. If you’re in bizarro world and wish to view videos in the other language, for example a French person living in Germany (crazy!), you can simply change the option in the plugin’s configuration file.

Big thanks to community developer Guillaume Desmottes for this latest plugin release.

Moovida is a great open source Media Center, simple and free to download on Linux or Windows . But what’s even sweeter is when it’s packaged by your open source operating system…

Now Ubuntu and Mandriva users can have the Moovida installed faster that you can say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (ok maybe this is only true for heavy stutterers) by checking the software center for Ubuntu, or by editing the package manager. Find details on how Moovida is packaged on all other Linux distributions here.

To update Moovida to the latest version, there are automated and transparent updates in the plugin repository, and Ubuntu users can also use the packages in our PPA .
 
Fear not Windows users, we understand that it might sound like Chinese to you, this post is for Linux aficionados

Remember the Moovida-Mandriva dev contest we announced a while back? Well you have two weeks to submit your contributions for the chance to win some sweet prizes. We’ve already received great plugin submissions, but there are still so many possibilities out there we don’t even know where to begin… ok well actually we do, just make sure not to duplicate your efforts with existing Moovida plugins.

So what fruits have the dev contest brought so far? So far Vimeo, Arte and CNN will be available soon. Here’s a sneak peek of what type of content awaits on your Moovida Media Center:

• With Vimeo, you don’t need to search through thousands of crap videos before finding something worth watching. They’ve got gems of all kinds like this 5 second film:

• Arte offers audacious and artsy content in French & German, not to say weird. They also stream great live concerts.

• Dude, if you don’t know CNN, you need this plugin badly. It’s a little something we like to call news. Here’s a prime example of their high standards in reporting:

I’m pumped, are you?