XBMC Media Center, a free, open source digital media hub and HTPC (Home theatre PC) software has reached version 12.0 beta 1.  

XBMC is a free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media for for Linux, OSX, Windows, and the original Xbox.

XBMC 10.0 "Dharma" has been released yesterday. Most of the work in the new version has been done to the addons framework. Until XBMC 10, you had to search for new skins and addons through the forums, manually download and install it and so on - starting with version 10, installing new skins and addons got a lot easier: in XBMC 10, installing a new skin or addon is done from the XBMC interface (the Addons section).

I must say I'm loving the Grooveshark addon! There was an issue with it not playing for some reason but after chaging the playback core to "DVDPlayer" under the Grooveshark plugin settings it finally worked.

As you probably know, the c-korn/vlc PPA has been removed so Ubuntu users must search for a new PPA to upgrade to the latest VLC versions (currently 1.1.4). I didn't recommend PPAs with multiple packages for this because most users just want VLC and some of them come with experimental packages. But Roberto @ LFFL created a PPA dedicated to VLC (so the PPA only has the latest VLC packages).