During the last days I have been adding a few quite important new documents to our wiki .
Video Zoom Modes
MediaPortal offers quite many options to manipulate the displayed video in order to fit your screen. But how some of them are supposed to work, remained a mystery to many users.
I have now created a small page in the wiki which explains how each view mode is working.
Getting your skin 1.0.1 compatible
From time to time, it is necessary to make changes to our code, which also demand that skinfiles get changed to maintain functionality.
These changes also have to be done in all community skins.
Now tracking these changes always was a nightmare challenge for our community skinners.
In order to make life easier for our community skinners, I have now forced asked our developers to collect every change since 1.0 release, which I will add to a page in the wiki .
So, if you want to get your skin 1.0.1 compatible you only have to monitor this wiki page for updates.
Monitoring a page in the wiki is very easy. All you have to do is click the subscribe link at the page . You will then get an e-mail notification, as soon as a change is made.
At the end of this blog entry I would like to remind everyone that the wiki is "OpenSource" as well.
So if you find a link which ends up on a empty page, or you find a typo, or outdated info and you know what to write in there then please press the "edit" button.
Everyone is able to contribute to the MediaPortal Project!
During the next weeks and months, we want to improve the MediaPortal Extensions Installer (MPE) , which allows you to easily install and update MediaPortal Extensions (Plugins, Skins, Tools, etc.).
One of the MPE key features is that you can browse and download extensions from our online repository, without visiting the website.
But we want to improve this feature, to enhance the useability.
Adding the required changes to the MPE itself is no problem, because we do have the necessary C# developers in our team.
The problem is that we also need to make changes to the open source repository we use on our homepage. Therefore we need skilled web developers who are willing to join our team and help out on this project.
With our new installer, the DeployTool, it is now very easy to install all kind of MediaPortal setups.
But there was still one small problem.
When you run the MediaPortal TV-Server on one PC and want to watch TV with MediaPortal from another one, then you have to install the MediaPortal client on this PC.
The installation is very easy, but because of firewalls it is possible that your client will not be able to connect to the MediaPortal TV-Server.
In our next release version, we now have an error analysis.
As soon as you enter MyTV on the Client PC, MediaPortal will ask you for the hostname of the Server PC.
After you entered the name, MediaPortal will test the connection to the Server PC.
If this test detects that some ports are blocked, then MediaPortal will show you a dialog window containing a list of these ports.
(click image)
Now that you know why your client installation is not able to connect to the server, it is much easier to find the cause of this problem (mostlikely a firewall which is running on the client, and/or the server pc).
I would like to thank gemx for this great configuration enhancement.
Until now, we used icons in TV-Guide to mark that an entry is scheduled to get recorded.
If the show was quite "short", then this icon overlayed the text and just did not look good.
So we thought about a different approach and came up with the following solution.
Instead of adding a icon, we just use a different background graphic now, which will make scheduled recordings to appear like this in the TV-Guide.
(click image)
This change will be part of our RC4 release and it will not "break" existing community skins.
If someone would like to incorporate this useability enhancement into his skin, then he simply has to add the following files into the "Media" folder.
tvguide_recButton_Focus_left.png
tvguide_recButton_Focus_middle.png
tvguide_recButton_Focus_right.png
tvguide_recButton_noFocus_left.png
tvguide_recButton_noFocus_middle.png
tvguide_recButton_noFocus_right.png
As you can see, each button consits out of 3 elements to avoid distortions when it gets stretched to the length of the entry in TV Guide.
If these files are not present, then the TV-Guide will just use the icons as it did before.
I would like to thank bavarian and harley for the creation of this nice useability enhancement.
Until today, Plugins for the TV-Server, developed by our community members were stored in the "Development" Section.
Now we have a "Community Plugins" Sub-Forum for them.
I have allready moved a few threads into this sub-forum, if i missed one please send me a pm in the forums.
2. Jobs & Tasks for the Community
MediaPortal is OpenSource, and because of that everyone is able to contribute.
Now that the MediaPortal 1.0 final release is imminent, we would like to do some final polishing.
So if you have an udpated localization file for MediaPortal or the DeployTool, or if have a new web-epg script, or updated tuning details you want to see included in MediaPortal 1.0 final, then please share it in the newly created sub-forums.
Our Team Members will review and include them into the next release version.
I wish everyone a nice weekend!
And keep an eye on the main page, for news about MediaPortal 1.0.
Many people complained about the Stop button which is ignored while watching TV in fullscreen.
This behaviour has been on purpose to safe the timeshift buffer in case you press the Stop button on remote by accident (notice the Vista MCE remote's swapped Pause and Stop buttons).
The upcoming SVN build on friday is going to show you a new dialog (which can be confirmed by either the Stop or Play button) to quickly stop fullscreen live TV.
All skinners need to update their skin to include also a dialogPlayStop.xml in order to be compatible.
There is a bug in the current divx codec Version 6.8.x which causes that MediaPortal and other applications like gb-pvr minimize to the tray, as soon as you start to play an avi, which uses the divx codec.
This issue only occurs if you comply the following criterias:
The easiest solution is to enable the "EVR" instead of the "VMR9".
To do that go to "MediaPortal Configuration", switch to "expert mode" and then select "DirectShow Filter Control" where you will find the "Video Renderer Settings".
If you do not want to use the Vista's EVR, then you can also uninstall the divx codec and use an other codec like xvid instead.
Note:
Issues like this one, which are caused by 3rd party software, can be found in our Knowledge Base
I just implemented a patch mcraenz has submitted to the sourceforge patches page. He has given a quite good description so i just quote him
"In New Zealand (I suspect other countries too) we have a DVB-S service that
has no CAM so we have to use analog+blaster+STB; which is fine, however
what we have found is that the EPG is not encrypted and since many of us
have a DVB-S card pointing at the same sat for our FTA stuff we scan in the
encrypted channels, combine them with the STB analog channels, set the
analog card with higher priority than the DVB-S card and enjoy reliable EPG
data from the sat while watching the channel via analog from the STB.
This works very well however it poses a problem with scheduling /
conflicts; since the channel must be mapped to both analog and DVB-S TVE3
naturally assumes that it can play the channel from DVB-S which is not the
case."
I did only a small addition to his patch.
You can also toggle the "EPG only" flag by double clicking on the right (card) column in the channel->card mapping.
Recently Version 1.6.5.0 of CoreAVC has been released.
I have been testing it yesterday evening and it works very well. If you have used 1.6.0.0 then you will notice some nice improvements.
http://www.coreavc.com
Changelog CoreAVC H.264 Video Codec - Version 1.6.5.0
(20080129)
- Add: Ignore past display order frame when
invalid
- Add: Disable deblocking option for slower computers
- Add:
Support for MV out of specs (fix artifacts for buggy files)
- Fix: Green
frames display with incomplete frames
- Fix: Some minor improvements with
DVB Viewer
- Fix: Deinterlacing fixes with internal bob
- Fix: Settings
dialog glitchs
- Fix: Renamed Weave deinterlacing to "None (Weave)" to avoid
confusion
- Fix: Others internal fixes
As some of you probably know i am currently trying to find a good way
to fix the pcr/pts/dts patching in TsWriter, if some of these values
suddenly "jump".
While trying to completely understand what IS going on and what SHOULD
be going on, i wrote some test programs which deal with
decoding/encoding of pcr,pts,dts...
As a side effect of these testing i discovered that one these small
apps could be used to cut ts files with only small additions.
So i made them and added the classes to the VideoEditor plugin which is now able to cut .ts files
Although we stated out not to introduce new features i nevertheless decided to put this code in SVN because:
- it can't break anything existing. It's only executed if you choose to cut a .ts file which was not working at all before
- it was nearly finished and helped to understand how to fix some other bugs - so, no extra work.
I think that was quite missing in VideoEditor since most users who use TVEngine3 record in .ts format, so now you are able to cut those recordings too directly from inside MP
MediaPortal TV Server offers some nice features for series handling. One of those features is called episode management.
This feature was dissabled for quite some time because a bug caused that users lost recorded shows. Now this issue has been fixed and the feature is enabled again.
It allows you to keep always the latest x episodes of a series you scheduled for recording on your hard disk (of course this feature does not work with recordings of type "once").
Example scenario: let's say you want to record "The Simpsons" which airs every weekday in the evening. You first set up an appropriate schedule (type "weekdays") and set the number of episodes to keep to "3". The first episode is recorded on Monday, the 2nd on Tuesday and the 3rd on Wednesday. This means you have 3 files on your hdd on Thursday morning. In the evening the 4th spisode airs and as you selected to keep 3 episodes, Monday's episode will get deleted before the recording starts. On Thursday evening you still have 3 files on your disk (Tuesday's, Wednesday's and Thursday's episodes).
This feature is very handy if you have a small hard disk and you don't want to keep all old episodes. Unfortunately it was activated by default and people not knowing about episode management lost recordings. With today's SVN episode management is fixed and will now only delete files if it is set up to do so.
Please notice:
recordings (series) that were scheduled with a TV Server
version from before 2008-01-03 might get deleted due to the old behavior. Read more to see how to prevent that by updating your schedules!
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