Overview

The Spring-16 Release was published on 31/03/2016 and brings a lot of new features.

Changes

• Skin engine:
  • Added feature to prevent focus stealing during startup phase
  • Updated freetype library to fix occasional crashes
  • Switched texture loading back to GDI (with fallback to FreeImage) to improve decoding performance
  • Added new feature to specify Texture alignment in images sources
  • Extended IScreenControl to allow temporary disabling "TopMost" behavior of MP2 main form (used for OnlineVideos)
  • Try to fix NullReferenceException in font handling in seldom cases
  • Fixed logging of shader load errors
  • Added MultiTrigger support
  • New sleep timer feature

• Fanart-Service
  • Made FanartService more flexible for extensions (used for Emulators plugin

• Media Library:
  • Added new shortcuts to video fullscreen: "Yellow" to toggle subs, "Blue" to toggle audio streams
  • Extended SeriesMetadataExtractor to support user defined regular expressions and pre- and post-match text replacements (to clean up filenames)
  • Fixed possible NRE in MKV tag handling
  • New filter for audio "Album Artist" (thanks to external patch by xMarkos)
  • Major improvements to audio and image playback: now we use automatical created playlist to play all items from current view
  • Major improvements to Image Player: player starts in "still" mode, allows skipping forward/backward through images. "Play" starts the known slide show.
  • Extended support for IMDB-id detection of non-xml .nfo files
  • Extended online lookup support at TheMovieDb by using tmdb ids
  • Fixed potential crash for imports of UNC locations when checking for IsVirtualSource
  • Improved memory caching logic to avoid "out of memory" for large imports

• Plugins:
  • OnlineVideos 2 plugin is now contained in the installer!
    • Added support for placing BrowserPlayer above the MP2 GUI
    • Added BrowserPlayer support for MP2, sites like Amazon Prime and Netflix should be working fine
  • Added UPnP renderer plugin
  • Emuators
  • Input Manager
• Installer:
  • Fixed detection of x86 VC redistributables on x64 systems.
  • Removed license link from initial dialog

• MCE remote support:
  • Fixed duplicated "next" / "previous" key handling
  • Reduced logging to log unmapped keys only once

• Updates and fixes for SlimTV / TVE 3:
  • Added option to hide "All Channels" group
  • Fixed occasional synchronisation issue of channels when switching groups
  • Fixed page up/down, home/end navigation inside EPG view
  • Updated core to MP1.14 version
    • included TBS CI support
    • included support for Hauppauge HD-PVR 2
    • fixed tuning details filenames due to wrong zip encoding
  • Internal changes to use ILocalFsResourceAccessor for files, while rtsp streams still use INetworkResourceAccessor
  • Extended recordings screen to show more details (channel, recording times)
  • Changes to UPnP system (removed IP affiinity in some calls to improve device detection, sending UPnP "update configuration" after resume from standby to improve reconnection)
  • Fixed user priorities (solves conflicts with EPG grabber and tuning requests)
  • Improved schedules management: added scheduled programs list / series view
  • Fixed recording/canceling of programs of series schedules
  • Reworked group / channel / zap handling to use correct group and channel indexes
  • Added new feature to show episode information in TV guide and recording planning
  • Updated core to MP1.12 version
  • Disabled redundant TV Thumbnail creation (done by MP2)
  • Fixed endless loop in recording management if folder is missing
  • Fixed storing/reading of some settings due to case-sensitive DB storage. This works only for new created databases or requires manual changes in SQLite DB (see here).

• Refresh Rate Changer:
  • Extended configuration options to allow custom refresh rate mappings (i.e. 25 fps -> 50 Hz, or 23 fps -> 24 Hz)

• BlueVision skin:
  • Implemented animated page transitions and seamless navigation between home pages
  • Fixed help label overlapping
  • Fixed flickering of "currently playing" group button and changed the icon
  • More fine tuning and bug fixing in all themes
  • Using new ImageSourceWrapper for smooth transitions of fanart images
  • Moved player controls into new "currently playing" screen (right button in top group menu), so they don't overlap footer contents
  • Added help texts for menu items to make features clearer to new users
  • Complete design update of TV section
  • New "Windows 10" theme
  • New "Titanium Extended" theme
    • Improved Navigation: Simplified slide-out menus that work also with mouse
    • Menu button specific backgrounds
    • Improved design of Titanium skin

• New window mode, toggle between them by "ALT-Enter":
  • "Windowed always on top" (also known as MiniTV mode in MP1)
  • Windowed (normal)
  • Fullscreen

• Windows modes keep aspect ratio of Skin and position/size will be restored after restart
• Fixed wrong MP2 window size after sleep/resume cycle due to resolution changes (see here)
• Fixed Resource Server that could return wrong url in some cases (fixes loading of fanart / channel logos)
• Changed streaming parameters for remote resource bridge (trying to fix interruption of media playback in multiseat)
• Support for external subtitles by xy-VSfilter (auto loading version)