MediaPortal 1.1 Alpha / 1.0.2

Major Features:

1. General
   • Create your own skins, or choose one of the available skins!
   • MediaPortal can easily be extended with extra plugins
   • You decide which keys you want to use for which actions
   • Internal support for several remote control (streamzap, MCE, redeye, winlirc, hauppauge, FireDTV)
   • Windowed and fullscreen support
2. My TV
   • Supports analog TV, DVB-C, DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC
   • HDTV and AC3 support
   • Support for multiple tuners
   • Record, watch, and timeshift Live TV
   • Advanced recording scheduler:
   • • Record once
     • Record now
     • Daily o Weekly
     • Weekdays (Mon-Fri)
     • Every time a program appears on this TV channel
   • Timeshifting,Watch, Pause, Rewind, FF, RW Live TV
   • Advanced recording management:
   • • Handle conflicts
     • Set recording priorities
     • Quality settings / recording
     • Transcode to WMD, XVID or MPG
     • Diskmanagement auto deletes old and/or watched recordings
   • TVGuide:
   • • Grab DVB-EPG & MHW-EPG directly for DVB
     • Supports XMLTV
     • Colors for genres
   • TV Guide search
   • TV Channel grouping
   • Supports over > 10000 channels
   • Auto channel tuning
   • Normal OSD (On Screen Display during movies/tv)
   • Special ZAP OSD (Shows description of what is playing currently on TV)
   • Support for Teletext
   • Standby control to put your HTPC sleeping. It will awake when there a recording needs to start
3. My Video / MyDVD
   • Play any movie your PC has a codec for (divx, mpeg, matroska,...)
   • All your movies will be stored in MediaPortal's video database
   • View your movies by actors, genres, year, title
   • Sort your movies by actors, genres, year, rating
   • Automatically retrieves video art & info from IMDB
   • Stacking/unstacking if your movie consists of multiple files
   • Internal DVD player with menu's (you can also use an external DVD player)
   • On Screen Display (OSD) for: Pause, Rewind, FastForward, Stop, Mute, Bookmarks, Switching Audio Streams/Subtitle languages...
   • Resume from playback on next play
4. My Pictures
   • Watch your pictures/photos
   • Slideshow support with nice transitions
   • Zoom in/out, rotate pictures (rotation is remembered next time)
   • Pause, previous/next picture
   • Delete picture(s)
   • Background music, either songs from my music, or radio from my radio
   • Auto thumbnail generation
   • Sort in Name, Date, Size
   • View in List, Icon or Big Icon display
   • Ken Burns effect slideshow
   • Filmstrip view
   • My Music
   • View your music by artists, albums, genres, top100 or plain songs
   • Sort your music in many ways like tracks, genre, filesize, artists, album,...
   • Use visualizations from Windows ?Media Player 10
   • Load, create & save playlists (.m3u, .pls, .b4u)
   • Automatically gets album art & info for all your albums
   • Automatically gets artist art & info for all your artists
   • View by list, icons, and big icons
   • Shuffle, repeat, FF, RW, pause,...
   • Music ratings
   • Favorites
   • Party shuffle mode
   • Search music for specific songs
   • Display all your favorite songs in one screen
   • Utilize Winamp, Foobar or iTunes plugins for music playback
5. My Radio
   • Listen to your favorite radio stations (FM, DVB or internet stream)
   • Auto tuning (FM)
   • Logo's for each radio station (manual process)
   • Supply a friendly name for each radio station
   • Internet radio station streaming (ASX or Shoutcast)
   • Support for external radio tuner applications
   • Auto start listening to your selected radio station when MediaPortal starts
     
6. My weather
   • Show the latest weather information
   • Support for multiple cities
   • Current temperature, 3 Day Forecast
   • Temperature (in degrees C/F)
   • UV Index, Humity (%), Wind (mph/kph), etc
   • Support for live images from internet, like:
   • • Satellite images
     • Temperature images
     • UV Index images
     • Winds images
     • Humidity images
     • Precipitation images
7. More features!
   • Launching external programs like:
   • • Games
     • Emulators
     • Email application
     • Internet Browser
     • IRC client
   • Burner let's you burn all type of files and folders directly to CD-DVD from within the MediaPortal interface
   • Showing RSS news feeds
   • Read and send mail within MediaPortal
   • Monitor computer hardware:
   • • CPU temperature
     • Motherboard Temperature
     • Hard disk Temperature
     • Used Memory
     • Used Virtual Memory
   • Allow the PC automatically go to standby/hibernation and wakes it when there is a scheduled recording! Just like a real VCR!
   • Has different alarm features
   • You can even play included games like Tetris or Sudoku!

Enhancements: 

• 0002299: [My Music] WMP Visualizations were not working (hwahrmann) resolved.
• 0002235: [general] MiniDisplay: code cleanup for iMON driver (chemelli) resolved.
• 0002294: [general] language folder is moved to config dir (chefkoch) resolved.
• 0002293: [general] skin folder is moved to config dir (chefkoch) resolved.
• 0002290: [Skin Engine] GUIPlayListButtonControl creates own images and save to skin media folder (morpheus_xx) resolved.
• 0002289: [My Alarm] Remove MyAlarm plugin (chefkoch) resolved.
• 0002284: [My TV / Home] Record icon sometimes shows in OSD when no recording is taking place (arion_p) resolved.
• 0002286: [Audio player] MediaPortal fails to submit scrobbled tracks (rtv) resolved.
• 0002156: [My Videos] MP prevents autoplay of Blu-Ray/HD-DVD images due to a workaround for a bug (-Manfred-) resolved.
• 0002110: [general] fontEngine.dll crashes when logging folder is not accessible (Tourettes) resolved.
• 0002152: [general] Allow MP to run "on top" in window mode.

Requirements:

• Supported operating systems
• • Windows XP 32-bit Edition with service pack 3
  • Windows Media Center Edition 2005 with update rollup 2
  • Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit with service pack 1
• Required updates and hotfixes
• • Common to all operating systems
  • • Run Windows Update to install all available updates
  • Only for XP / MCE2005
  • • BDA/DVB hotfix: This hotfix is essential for viewing digital TV broadcasts. It is already included in roll up 2 of Windows MCE 2005, for Windows XP you have to install it manually. [Updated psisdecd.dll]
    • Firewire hotfix: This hotfix is necessary if you have upgraded to Windows XP SP2 and use FireWire devices. It is already included in Windows XP SP3.
    • videoplayback flicker hotfix: This hotfix resolves a problem with flickering video playback. [Updated quartz.dll] It is already included in Windows XP SP3.
• Filesystem
• • Depending on the bit rate of the transmission recordings TV can take up lots of hard disk space. Recording one channel for one hour you get a file size peaking from around 4GB for SDTV to about 8GB for HDTV.
  • • FAT16: maximum recording length is ~ 15 (HDTV) to 30 (SDTV) minutes
    • FAT32: maximum recording lenght is ~ 30 (HDTV) to 60 (SDTV) minutes
    • NTFS: maximum recording length is ~ 2000 (HDTV) to 4000 (SDTV) hours
  • Obiviously choosing the NTFS filesystem is highly recommended.
• Drivers and Codecs
• • Always use the most recent drivers for your video and audio card
  • For information on video codecs, see the Codecs user guide
  • MPEG-2 codec: The opensource MPV and MPA codecs are bundled with MediaPortal allowing you to watch movies and TV out of the box.
  • H.264 codec: If you plan to watch HD content, then you need to intall a 3rd party h.264 codec. Popular ones are from Cyberlink's PowerDVD, CoreAVC or ffdshow which is available for free.
• Hardware Requirements
• • Requirements for running MediaPortal and/or the TV-Server
  • • CPU: Intel P4 with 2.0 GHz / AMD XP-2000+ or above
    • Memory: 1024 MB
    • HDD: 600 MB for MediaPortal
    • HDD: 50 GB for TV recordings and timeshifting
    • Video card: DirectX 9 compatible video card with at least 128 MB of video memory such as:
    • • ATI Radeon series (9600 and above or X300 and above)
      • NVIDIA GeForce, GeForce FX (5200 or above) and NForce series
      • Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (integrated i865G)
      • Matrox Parhelia
      • SiS Xabre series
    • TV card:
    • • Necessary if you want to watch and record TV with MediaPortal (?Supported TV cards)
      • MediaPortal TV-Server out of the box supports all analog TV cards with hardware MPEG-2 encoder and all digital TV cards which use BDA-drivers.
  • Requirements for watching HDTV, Blue-ray or HD DVD content
  • • CPU: Dual-core CPU with 2,0 GHz or above
    • Memory: 1024 MB
    • Video card:
    • • AMD: all cards that include the Universal Video Decoder
      • Nvidia: all cards that include PureVideo HD
      • Intel: boards that include the X 4500
      •  Codecs: all codecs that support the hardware decoding capabilities of the above mentioned video cards
      • this includes codecs from latest Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra, ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre, Corel WinDVD 9 and MediaPlayer Classic Home Cinema
    • To check if the performance of your PC is sufficient for HD content, have a look a these trailers.
    • • DVD HD test films
      • BlueRay test films
• TV-Server specific requirements
• • MicroSoft SQL Server
  • • Microsoft SQL Server 2005
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
    • Additional (but recommended) SQL Server Management Studio Express
  • Sun MySQL 5
  • • MySQL 5
    • MySQL GUI Tools.