MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community.
Get your free copy of this outstanding media center now!
Although the team is very glad that many people test current svn releases we still want to point out that nightly svn builds are NOT updates or bugfixes of any kind.
Knowing that you are all anxious about new features or to see bugfixes for the last remaining showstoppers we've decided to integrate the most important fixes into the stable 0.2 release to make it even better.
I'll still try to collect important fixes and "little feature updates" which should not break anything to provide the HTPC users which need to watch the WAF with further "appoved" updates. Please keep in mind that 0.3 development has highest priority and this update is not a new release of MP - just a little present for you ;-)
This update is for clean 0.2 installations only and highly recommended. Update instructions are here.
The changelog grow to big? You just want the major changes? Here they are:
MyTV:
"No signal" message does not disturb your TV sessions any longer
Lowered zapping delay almost down to the driver's capabilities
A new "Mini-EPG" has been mapped to the "OK" button which is very
nice for zapping. You can also switch channel groups quickly with the
"left/right" buttons
Zap to last channel now uses "0" button
EPG for channels which share the same frequency can now be merged
MyDVD:
"DVD menu" button directly jumps to DVD playback now
Navigator issues fixed
MyMusic:
MyMusic has better Various Artist handling
Audio player supports fast forward
Inbuilt support for CD importing
Plugins:
MyWeather plugin has been polished
Every plugin can be disabled now
TV movie (german guide data) direct DB support
Cutting plugin for dvr-ms and mpeg (even via remote)
General:
The brandnew, high quality MPV/MPA codecs are included now.
Although not using HW-Acceleration they often achieve amazing results
while de-interlacing fast movement scenes. Being rock stable these
should be your defaults if any problem occurs.
MCE remote buttons can be mapped individually now
Skip steps (jumping in timeshift/video files) can be configured now
Green Button can be used to switch between "Home" and "Basic Home"
The GUI can be calibrated to solve overscan issues
With the announcement of the final version 0.2 dman already mentioned that i'm working on the new tv engine.
So.. what can we expect from this new engine? here's a list:
seperate front/backend
supports multiple frontends
analog/atsc/dvb-c/dvb-s/dvb-t support
true mpeg-2 program stream timeshifting and recording
multi tuner support of course
epg / mhw grabbing right from the DVB stream
network streaming via rtsp
teletext grabbing
ci / cam support for firedtv, twinhan and technotrend
placeshifting
Some things are worth mentioning in more detail. For example the front/backend story. The new tvengine will run as a windows-service in the background. This means that it will keep running even if mp is stopped or when you are not logged in at all!!
But... thats not all. You can install the service on any machine you like. it does not need to run on the same pc as mediaportal. So for example you can have 3 htpc's with mediaportal on it and 1 pc which has 6 tuner cards. All 3 htpc's will be able to see & timeshift live tv over the network, do recordings etc etc and that all in true .mpg format
Another thing which is very nice is that the new engine auto-discovers new cards and is able to use them. There is no need anymore for an up-2-date capturecards.xml
So whats the timeline for this great stuff? Right now we released an internal beta for testing. Depending on how the tests go i hope to have a sneak-preview ready within lets say 1 month
Well, we thought it was about time we released 0.2.0.0, don't you think? Unfortunately not all major bugs could have been squashed to our likeing but I'm sure you'll agree this release will be very stable and satisfactory to most.
Please check Mantis to see if your issue is already listed.
To be honest - it's been so long since we did a feature list I have forgotten what half of the improvements were. One major feature we wanted to have done for 0.2.0.0 didn't make it which was moving away from DVR-MS recording however master Frodo is working diligently on a new TV engine as we speak and things are progressing well.
Special thanks go out to some new developers that have joined the team recently. Broceliande in particular has done some great work on improving zapping times and getting rid of that nasty 'no signal error'.
I hope you enjoy the release - it's been a long time coming.
SVN users: Expect some major changes is the next few weeks and the
development team bombarding SVN with new code and nasty bugs :)
Please don't ask when what feature will come in, we can't tell you as we all do this in our spare time.
The biggest swiss PC magazine "Online PC Zeitung" has tested 6 mediacenter applications in their June 2006 edition.
MediaPortal had to compete with Sceneo TV Central, Nero Premium, Showshifter, Cyberlink Power Cinema and Intervideo Home Theater Platinum and has left them all behind in almost all categories.
Best thing is: The magazine tested version 0.2 RC2, so they have missed the best fixes in stability and many other enhancements.
MediaPortal achieved the following ranking in the various categories:
38 out of 45 points in features and usability (1st position)
28 out of 30 points in compatibility (1st position)
3 out of 10 points in installation, configuration and support (3rd position)
15 out of 15 points in stability and licencing (1st position)
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