Software update: MediaPortal 1.6.0

While MediaPortal 2.0 is also being worked hard, the final release of version 1.6.0 has appeared. With this program, a Windows machine can be used as the heart of the multimedia hardware in the living room. This makes it easy to listen to radio and music, as well as watch videos and DVDs. TV programs can also be recorded. By means of plug-ins and extensions, the functionality can be expanded and the look & feel of the program can be adjusted. Here are the main changes in this release:

Update to MySQL 5.6 to increase stability
Due to performance and stability improvements we decided to switch from MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.6 which comes with InnoDB as default database engine. It is more reliable than MyISAM which was the default database engine in MySQL 5.1 and the cause of many TV database crashes.

MySQL 5.6 gets only installed if you do a clean installation. If you perform an update, MySQL 5.1 will be kept. This is because users might still want to use MySQL 5.1 for other purposes than just MediaPortal.

Enhanced TV experience
There were quite some improvements like fix stuttering/dropped frame problems with H.264 video streams which use mixed field/frame (interlaced/progressive) encoding eg UK Freeview HDTV channels as well as handle some NZ Freeview channels which were causing problems. Recognition of DolbyDigital+ streams was added and a deadlock was fixed which leads to TV Server crashes or can cause a BSOD quite frequently on some setups.

Music improvements
A lot of things have been fixed and worked on in the Music section since our last release. Below you find the most important enhancements. Hopefully you will enjoy them!

• Last.FM rework
  Because Last.FM changed their API, the Last.fm Radio & scrobbling functions (Last.fm account needed for both!) are rewritten. As a bonus an awesome new AutoDJ function is added, which will attempt to play music forever, and you don’t even need a Last.fm account for it!
• Music Visualizations
  Music Visualizations got fixed and are now correctly listening to the beat. Furthermore while on the NowPlaying screen, you can now switch to (fullscreen) visualizations by pressing X on your keyboard. PageUp/PageDown are used to cycle through the available visualisations. To make the visualizations work you need to download and install them first. It is highly recommended to only use the visualizations provided by our visualization package.
• Allmusic.com scraper update
  As you might have noticed, the Album/Artist scraping was broken in MediaPortal 1.5 because allmusic.com changed their layout. For your convenience, this has been fixed now.
• gapless playback
  Gapless playback is working now and can be enabled through MediaPortal configuration.

MyVideos scraper rework for better maintainability
Not only Album/Artist scraping was broken in MediaPortal 1.5 but also Fanart/Poster scraping in MyVideos because of the TMDB API change. This has been completely fixed and was improved in a way that the MyVideos scraper can now be updated outside the MediaPortal release cycle which means we are more flexible when it comes to fix scraper issues.

Other small improvements
Besides the switch to .NET4 we also modified our core to support plugins like the amazing Auto3D plugin or the great Atmolight plugin. Furthermore we fixed a DPI scaling issue for Win 8.1 users and RefreshRate changing on multi monitor setups was fixed too.