MediaPortal turns your PC and TV into a very advanced home media center. Our software allows you to listen to your favorite music and radio stations; watch and store your videos and DVDs; view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder; and much, much more. MediaPortal is open source software. This means you can help develop MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovative plugins from our great community.
Get your free copy of this outstanding mediacenter now!
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.
During some extensive debug sessions the last weeks/months we developed various test/debug tools.
Some of these tools might be also quite interesting for all users, so we decided to create a new forum section called "MediaPortal Tools".
You can find the new forum section as the last one in the hirarchy.
Currently there are 3 tools (TsPacketChecker, MPTail, MPTvClient).
These tools are already in SVN and the sources can be downloaded via the "SVN URL" in every section's "Introduction & Features" sticky thread.
So we hope some of these tools might be of help for you
Please note that improvement suggestions might take some to be implemented and the main focus is on MP I, MP II and TvServer so it's possible that these tools won't make much progress anymore.
To make this work you need to install SVN release 17664 or later of MediaPortal and TVServer / TVClient plugin.
The TVClient plugin comes with RadScorpion's AAC decoder as part of the install package.
All you have to do is setup the AAC codec via MediaPortal Configuration under Television.
Note: If you have the Monogram AAC decoder already installed I would suggest de-registering it.
Enjoy your TV experience for those users who can now receive the benefits.
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!
Some people wondered why we didnt use WPF for our skinengine. WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) , is a new technology from Microsoft for creating really cool GUIs
Although WPF is a wonderfull piece of technology, it also has some major drawbacks. One of those drawbacks is that there is no way to integrate WPF with DirectX and/or DirectShow. Although WPF contains its own internal video player that player is so limited and unusable for an application like MediaPortal. Some other drawbacks are the focus/input management and offcourse the fact that its closed source
That said, WPF still rocks. Skinners get really nice features like vector graphics, linear& radial gradient brushes, image brushes, panels, storyboards, triggers, animations etc etc etc
So I have started on a new mission:
For MP-II I'm creating my own opensource version of WPF
click here to read more
click here to discuss this post