The prerelease candidate of the next edition of Media Portal is now available for download from the Media Portal project page here. Note its not the final release: this will be available later in the month. Think beta.

I haven’t had the chance to have a go at this yet, but if it’s half as good as what’s being promised it should be a winner. First and foremost the new version is said to load in 1/3 of the previous start-up time. This has always been a problem for me with Media Portal because it’s really slow to load, this alone should bring in some more users.
Other changes include:
My TV: ATSC support for cards with BDA drivers
My TV: Recording Priorities: better use of priority in recording
Recording Qualities able to be tweaked for each record on Hauppauge cards
My TV: Automatic background EPG & MHW grabbing
My TV: Video statistics
My Programs: Direct MAME Support (can’t wait to try this out)
My Programs: Improved Screens
My TV: Twinhan DVB CI support
My TV: Notify me: Mediaportal can now give you a visual notification when a program is about to start
My TV: Compress: Compress your DVR-MS files to mpg, xvid or WMV
My Music: speedup: Browsing/playing mp3’s has become a lot faster
My Music: All songs: New view showing all your songs
My Music: Itunes: Use iTunes as external media player
My Music: Reorganize: Completely reworked music re-organisation
My Videos: specify the default language for movie subtiles
My Videos: New view : unwatched movies. MP now keeps track which movies you have watched already
My Videos: IMDB actor info: When lookin up IMDB information the actor biography is now also available
General: Remote: added native support for FireDTV and Hauppauge remote controls

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Media Portal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.