Software update: Media Portal 0.2.1.0

Yesterday the developers behind Media Portal released a new development version, or a Feature Release as they call it, in the form of version 0.2.1.0. With Media Portal, a Windows XP machine can be used as the heart of the home’s multimedia hardware. This makes it easy to listen to radio and music or watch videos and DVDs. Furthermore, TV programs can be recorded and the appearance of the program can be adjusted. What has changed in this version can be found in the release notes, a full changelog will follow soon:

Finally it’s there! 0.2.1.0 released on Oct 21th! We couldn’t let you wait until Helloween, so here it is!

Integrating the last plugins like “My MusicVideos”, “WikiPedia” and the totally revamped “Playing now” screen into the next stable patch I came to a point where a major re-sync with svn was needed. This is why we needed to test more thoroughly and call this a “feature release” and not a stable update.

Working on this release was a nice team experience as we decided to include a widescreen mod of BlueTwo – and got it ready in just 2 weeks! Special thanks go to:

• mPod for doing so much “under the hood work”; he eg wrote a skin converter to change all skin xml files to a desired resolution.
• Inker for upscaling most gfx to 1366×768.
• mofux for his sexy new OSD files and all those mockups
• Harley for helping with TV skin files
• Boilermaker who has done all this work on his own for the former B2 16:9 skin!
• This skin is 100% identical to B2 4:3 and therefore fully supported with every new feature. “Dark lovers” should check out Harley’s Project Mayhem 3 skin which is also up to date for this release.

There are looots of other changes and fixes of people who deserve a big “thank you” but I don’t want to bore you – just drop by on IRC or the forums and remember we’re doing this in our spare time.

Please note: This release does not contain a new skin engine nor the new TV engine. Those will follow in later releases.

A changelog will follow.

This release also contains the new, fast “BASS” audio engine offering great features like cross-fading and out-of-the-box playback of eg flac and musepack files.

Please note that this might not be 100% stable on every machine. If you get memory leaks or high cpu usage issues please try switching to the internal dshow player.[break]