MediaTomb News

Well, that was really a bad timing… A week after the 0.12.0 release YouTube changed their pages and our new feature, that allows to play YT videos on UPnP devices did not work anymore.

So here is the updated version that enables this feature.

There are also a few minor fixes (see changelog), but nothing really exciting.

The next version will focus on the patches that are submitted in the tracker, I’d expect it within a month or so, let’s see… :)

I’ll also add the transcoding profile based on IP/MAC solution which could not make it into this release.

Now, a few notes on the sponsorship thing: it was interesting to hear your feedback, I really did not know what to expect from this experiment.

The overall outcome is: this is not going to work. Actually, I did not receive any negative feedback, the few mails that I did get were reassuring. But the number of people who responded is very, very low, it seems there is wide no interest to such a proposal.

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and participated in the discussions.

We’ll continue just as before (and hopefully better ;) so stay tuned for more features….

Over a year behind schedule, but better late than never – 0.12.0 is finally released.

We had to take out a couple of features that are present in SVN, namely Weborama and Apple Trailers – both did not work correctly anymore due to sudden changes on the remote side. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of new stuff available and there is still more to come.

Let’s see when we will have the next one ready…

Happy New Year everyone!

Same question: where is 0.12? Same answer: soon!

No, honestly, things are being worked on, however with some delay. Leo is currently away on holidays, he’ll get back to bug fixing soon. There are about 8 open bugs left, some assigned to me, some to Leo, we still have to evaluate if some of them are only minor and could be postponed. Main goal is to release 0.12 as soon as possible.

In the meantime I was approached by Greg, one of the numerous MediaTomb users, with an interesting idea.

In summary: would you want to have certain features developed faster by sponsoring them?

Please read and respond in this thread on SourceForge.

I won’t duplicate my message here, please read my view of this in the forum. And please do tell us what you think, preferably by posting in the above thread or by sending a mail to: contact@mediatomb.cc

We want to know your opinion, is the idea good or is it nonsense, does it look like a benefit to everyone or does it make a “they sold out” impression? It’s up to you – our decision to try or to ignore this idea will be based on your feedback. Thank you!

Finally we found time for a coding session and had a look at what’s going on.

As already mentioned, our goal is to release 0.12 as soon as possible and leave all unfinished features for 0.13. We hope that we can get the new version out in January.

Some of you may have noticed movement in the bug tracker, a few words on how we deal with it:
we have already fixed some issues, but there are still a few left. We will release once all open bugs with a priority >= 6 are fixed or turn out to be invalid. You can see that the resolution status of those bugs is set to “Accepted”, which means that we are looking at them. Once a bug is fixed we will give it a priority of 1 and set the resolution to “Fixed”, however the bug will stay open and get closed only after the new version has been released.

For the last two months I’ve been restoring the UAZ, this was quite an adventure and although it was quite exhausting I really had a lot of fun and learned a lot about cars.

Now I’m back and we plan to sit down with Leo and get an overview about the current MediaTomb status, check the bug tracker and finally make a release. We plan to disable unfinished features, make sure that stuff that is finished works and finally get the new version out.

Let’s see how that goes…

Sorry, but I bought a car :)

You might ask: “Huh? How’s that related to MediaTomb?”

It’s a УАЗ-469Б (UAZ) from Russia, it’s 33 years old, not in the best condition and currently requires a lot of attention. Basically it consumes all my spare time and I will not rest until it shines like at the day when it rolled out of the factory doors in Ulyanovsk in the year 1976.

So what does this mean for MediaTomb?

There will probably be no updates till end of this year, sorry. Once the car restoration is finished we will hopefully pick up coding :)

Well… we tried. Really. So what went wrong?

Basically there were two things that delayed everything: first – we were swamped with work and did not have much time to work on the project, second – the DVD feature knocked me out. :)

We desperately wanted to finish it for 0.12, but it turned out to be much more complicated than originally assumed. We will have another go at this, if it does not work out the feature will be postponed for 0.13.

Apart from that there are the usual things for a new release – config.xml migration, testing, documentation… ok, you probably want to know: when?

All I can say is – this year :)

...and for the inpatient – SVN is actually quite stable.

The free SurveyMonkey account allows only 100 answers, so now it’s time to look at the results:

Clearly, tree view is the winner!

Thanks to all participants!

Hi everyone,

currently we are evaluating possible future changes in MediaTombs Web UI. One major question is, if we should change the way of browsing the database and the filesystem.

We would like to know your opinion!

Please participate in this survey!

Thanks for your feedback :)

I’m back from holidays, time to look at the current status.

As always we made the mistake of starting to work on too many features at once, finishing one new feature and releasing just does not seem to work :) This is the reason for the long delay of 0.12, however we are confident that we can release it this year.

So what can you expect?

We fixed a number of various bugs, added generation of video thumbnails using the ffmpegthumbnailer library (tested on the DSM-510 and PS3), added libmp4v2 support for extracting metadata from mp4 files, improved the import speed (don’t expect too much, but it should be noticeable), added options to allow playback of PCM streams in combination with transcoding (this enables transcoding of OGG and FLAC media for the PS3), implemented support for the YouTube serivice, allowing to use the UPnP player to watch YouTube content (in combination with transcoding), added a feature for parsing DVD images with the help of libdvdread (this allows to select playback by title/chapter/language/audio format, depending on the DVD). We can’t promise that we will finish SopCast support for 0.12 and there’s also has been work on supporting the Weborama service.

Now we just have to put together the missing bits and pieces and finish the parts that are not yet ready.

We’ll try to hurry :)