In February 2004 Erwin Beckers (aka. Frodo) left the X-Box Media Center project to start a new project, now known as MediaPortal, that would run on the Microsoft Windows platform and not suffer from the limitations of the X-Box hardware. Initially, existing code was reused from the XBMC-project but after several releases and innumerable feature enhancements there has been almost a complete redesign.
So, after a 5 year journey the Team MediaPortal is more than proud to announce the release of MediaPortal 1.0!
Installation notes:
If you have already installed a former release candidate of MediaPortal 1.0, you have to manually uninstall MediaPortal and TV-Server, before you launch the 1.0 final installer.
Please be aware that the MediaPortal 1.0 installer is a .NET Framework application. Because of that you must run it from your local hard disk and not from a network share.
If you want to keep your current settings, then please take a look at the related wiki article.
Please do not use community skins or plugins which are outdated, because this will cause problems.
TV-Server database:
As 1.0 is a milestone release inlcuding lots of changes, we would like to encourage everyone to do a clean installation.
You can export your current recording schedules, TV and radio channels by pressing the "export" button inside the TV-Server Configuration -> TV Channels.
Having finished the installation you can use the "import" button in the very same section to restore the exported data.
What happens next?:
Now that we have released MediaPortal 1.0, we will start to shift our attention more and more towards MediaPortal 2.
Besides, we will of course work on further updates for MediaPortal 1.
If you take a look at the roadmaps for MediaPortal 1 (links are at the end of this news), then you will see that we are already working on versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 which will mainly address issues that couldn't be fixed for the 1.0 release.
We will also continue to release scheduled SVN builds, but because of the rather big changes we will have to make for 1.0.1 and 1.0.2, they will no longer be as stable as they were in the past, untill the feature freeze stage for 1.0.1 is reached.
This should just remind you that applying SVN builds is risky and meant for testing purpose only. You should not apply them on your production system, unless you really know what you are doing.
I tried Mediaportal a few years ago and back then it wasn't stable, but it had a really good potential to become a real good windows media center or mythtv alternative.
I'm glad it really worked out that way, so I'm running Mediaportal for about 3 months now and tonight I'm going to switch from RC4 to the final.
