We are proud to present MediaPortal 2.3

MediaPortal 2.3 is a full-blown media center software that addresses the most common user requirements out of the box. Aside from its support for Live TV and Radio, it offers a complete media server for music, movies, and TV shows. Info is automatically downloaded from various sources to provide posters, fanart, album art, and various additional metadata, such as cast, staff, and more. MediaPortal 2.3 also provides access to online video sources such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. Integrated news, weather information and management for your digital images complete this software package.

There is a long list of changes – you can find all details in the end of this news – major changes are:

Skins

Nereus

MediaPortal 2.3 comes with the completely new, fresh and modern skin Nereus supporting varible resolution aspect ratios, so it doesn't matter you are on a traditional 4:3 or on an ultra wide 21:9 screen.
Nereus is based on a vertical main menu, that can be configured to your needs by an easy integrated menu editor with a single button press ("i"/context).

The skin combines elegant grey tones with some color traces. Nereus comes with two themes for the main menu design, cool image tiles (default) or long shadow tiles with symbols (simple).


Home Content
While a main menu item gets focus, the home content slides in from the right and offers quick and comfortable access to media items, filters and further information in home screen. You be able to see instantly the latest added media items continue watching the latest watched movies, see your favourite music, which you were playing frequently. You can also directly select current running TV programs or favourite TV-channels directly from HomeScreen.

If you are a fan of the simple library view also not a problem, just selecting the main menu entry navigates you to it as known from past skins.

Info Screens
New info screens reachable by context menu on focused media items were implemented. Here you see all important information and directly can play the media item.

View Modes

For almost all libraries and plugins (news, online videos, emulators, app launcher, ...) view modes can be switched between list and grid view according to your visual preferrance. 
Additionally you may change the grid mode appearance for series and movies in skin settings between posters, thumbnails and banners.

x64 Support

MediaPortal fully supports 64 bit for the client version now. It improves performance of UI and also video playback (especially with 4k videos).
You are still able to start it in 32 bit, there are two different shortcuts to start MediaPortal 2, the preferred type can be also selected by right click on "MP2-Client Launcher" in task bar.

App Launcher integration

App Launcher was existing as optional plugin and is fully integrated into MediaPortal 2 now also offering Home Content.

The functionality was extended to also allow customized menu tiles for the home menu.

System

Controls: Eject command for CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc media

GUI: Fixed font rendering engine causing random crashes

Audio: 'Artist' and 'Album Artist' filter display same artist multiple times

TV: Fix "Pause" image displayed when changing TV channels

Input: New Wifi remote plugin which can potentially be used with mobile apps as a remote control or with home automation in future

Player: Added optional setting to do instant skips in seconds (instead of relative percents)

Extensions

MediaPortal 2.3's functionality can be further extended through the installation of additional plugins. The choice of extensions, while currently limited, is steadily growing. Discover what else is available in our Featured Plugins section.

WebRadio

The Webradio plugin was overworked for 64 Bit compatibility and also supports HomeContent fpr Nereus skin now

Subtitle downloader

Subtitle downloader is a plugin for downloading subtitles for movies or series episodes. Please be aware that subtitle downloading is illegal in some countries, so check the legal situation in your country before installing this plugin.

DLNA Server

DLNA server is a plugin for browsing/playing media from the media library from other devices like TV's, phones etc. that have a DLNA client. It is currently in testing phase.

Moving from MP1 to MP2

Procedures to install MP2 in parallel to MP1 are described in the Wiki

For all those who would like to move from MP1 to MP2 and preserve their current media organisation, our forum member raffe has created a small tool that will extract information from your MP-TvSeries and MovingPictures databases and picture folders, The tool will leave all your original data untouched, create .nfo files for all your media and copy existing pictures from your MovingPictures and MP-TvSeries to your new MediaPortal 2 media folders. The .nfo files and pictures then allow a smooth and quick import of all your media info into MediaPortal 2. See thee respective forum thread for further details.

Full list of changes

You can review all changes by taking a look at changelog: MediaPortal 2.3
For known issues please check out our Jira and our Bug Reports Forum.

Installation, Upgrade, Download and Feedback

Installation

Download the zip archive and check the "Allow access" box in the context menu. Then extract the archive and execute the MP2 Setup file.The installer will automatically download any missing components and install them.

Windows 10 K and KN editions: You need to manually download and install the additional Microsoft Media feature pack first. This will add the Windows Media Player and related technologies that are required by MediaPortal 2 to work.
Wiki:  http://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal2/Installing+MediaPortal+2

Upgrade

MediaPortal 2.3 has a new media database structure that is not compatible with versions prior to MediaPortal 2.2 Pre Release. The installer will recognize an existing incompatible database and migrate the content to the new version. Please be aware that this might take a while depending on the amount of your media items. The data base migration progress is shown by an indicator in the client.

N.B.: If you upgrade from an earlier version than MediaPortal 2.1 the database is incompatible and cannot be migrated. You will need to redo your server settings including the setup of media sources.

Feedback

Bugs

If you think you found a bug then please first check if it has not already been reported: the Bug Reports Forum contains all active user bug reports with their respective status. For new issues post a detailed report in our Bug Reports Forum. Make sure your report includes all the required information.

Appearance and functionality

We invite you to make suggestions for improvement with special focus on menu layout, menu content explanatory texts and translations. Please post your comments in a new thread in the General section.

Requests for missing/new features should be made in the Feature Request Forum. As for bugs we would appreciate if you first verified that your request has not already been raised before. Also if possible please make only one request per thread.

Download

We hope that you took the time to read this release news as it includes vital information about the major changes. Get your own copy of the new MediaPortal 2.3 by selecting the download link.

  If you would like to support MediaPortal, we would be happy to receive a small donation!

The MP2 team wishes you a lot of fun with this new release!

.::. Download - MediaPortal 2.3 .::.

 
:: Post a Comment ::

Pre Releases are provided as a way for the community to test and give feedback on all the exciting things we have lined up for the next release. We allocate about one month for Pre Release testing. In that time we will only fix bugs, after which comes the final release!

Highlights of this release 

Bugfixes:

• [MP1-5031] - Fix Invalid File Handle in Setup
• [MP1-5032] - Wrong font scale in splashscreen on 4K
• [MP1-5034] - Tiled images corrupted after video is played.
• [MP1-5035] - ZoomPixels in a thumbnail list
• [MP1-5036] - Configuration crashes when clicking Plugins

New:

• [MP1-5012] - Start current music track from the beginning in NowPlaying window

Improvement / Rework:

• [MP1-5015] - Improving the MP1 installer (DeployTools), providing nicer GUI :)
• [MP1-5023] - Update metadata-extractor, add Samsung lens support
• [MP1-5030] - Add UHD Thumb size to TV Server
• [MP1-5037] - Update IRTrans remote mapping file
• [MP1-5038] - Update MediaInfo.Wrapper to 20.8.0 & MediaInfo to 20.8.1
• [MP1-5039] - Update SharplibHID to 1.4.4 & SharpLibWin32 to 0.2.2
• [MP1-5040] - Update NAudio to 1.10.0
• [MP1-5041] - Update FFmpeg win32 to 4.1.1
• [MP1-5042] - Update sqlite to 3.33
• Update France.Leucate DVBT Tuning parameters
• Update DefaultWideHD skin

Notes:

For use Bluray with BD-J support, please read the Wiki

Full list of changes

You can review the complete change log for this Pre Release by using the link below:
Changelog: MediaPortal 1.26 Pre Release

Documentation of new features will be added to: Wiki - What's New

Installation, Upgrade, Download and Feedback

Installation

Since we switched to .NET4 you need to make sure you have.NET4 installed on your computer (not needed if you are on Windows 8 because it comes with .NET4, but you NEED the .NET 3.5 features enabled!). Otherwise you are not able to install MediaPortal and the installer just quits.

Download-Link: Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Standalone Installer)

Aside from that when doing a clean installation of the this Pre Release there is nothing else to worry about.

Microsoft SQL Server

If you plan to use MSSQL server for TV it is necessary to install it yourself before installing Mediaportal with TV Server. Instructions for previous versions are on the wiki, note that new versions were not checked for 100% compatibility.

For Windows XP, Vista - MSSQL 2005 - SQL Server 2005

For Windows 7 or later - MSSQL 2008 - SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 Express

For Windows 7 or later - MSSQL versions above 2008, there's no official documentation from Mediaportal but you can install and configure it based on the articles above, google or documentation from Microsoft. Compatibility has not been tested.

Upgrade

Upgrading from MP 1.2.0 Beta or later to 1.26 Pre Release

All MediaPortal 1.2.0 Beta installations can be upgraded to this Pre Release without losing your settings.

Plugins:

If you are running MediaPortal 1.6.0 or earlier, then it is possible that some of your previously installed plugins will be shown as incompatible after the upgrade to this Pre Release! Whether or not a plugin is incompatible depends on the MediaPortal subsystems the plugin uses.
All plugins that work for the 1.7.1 HotFix release, should also work with the this Pre Release.

Upgrading Extensions:

The easiest way to upgrade your extensions is by launching the MediaPortal Extension Installer, and let it check for updated versions. However this only works for extensions that use our MPEI system. If the author of the extension releases it as a stand alone installer, you must contact them for an updated version.

General note about Upgrades

Manually stop TV-Service!

On some systems our installer is not able to update the TV-Server installation because its files are locked or the service can not be stopped.
For upgrades to this Pre Release we recommend that you manually stop the TV-Service and make sure, via Windows Task Manager (enable the "all users" option), that the TvService.exe process is really gone before starting to upgrade.

Custom TV-Service properties

If you manually changed the properties of the TV-Service (like restart on error options), then you must redo these changes after the upgrade. The installer is not able to save and restore your custom service properties when it installs the new version of the TV-Service.

Feedback

Bugs

If you think you found a bug then please post a detailed report in our Bug Reports Forum.

Make sure your report includes all the required information. Incomplete reports will be removed to keep the forum clean.

 Download

Finally - the download. We hope that you took the time to read this release news entirely because it includes vital information about the major changes.

  If you would like to support MediaPortal, we would be happy to receive a donation!

The Team wishes you a lot of fun with this new release!

.::. Download - MediaPortal 1.26 Pre Release .::.

:: Post a Comment ::