Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The builds 21-22

7.0.22 (10/24/2011)

1. NEW: MC supports Hauppauge Colossus video capture device. Untested. Please test and report problems.
2. Fixed: Auto-import engine better handles ripped Blu-rays (previously it would log too much and unnecessarily analyze movies that were already imported).
3. Faster: Blu-ray anaylzer is about 5x faster (playback starts faster, and import happens faster).
5. NEW: Native MP4 plugin supports local raw AAC files.
6. Changed: Added logging to help troubleshoot UNC files being unreachable on some machines.
7. Fixed: Some previous TV recordings (jtv) would not play in MC17.
8. Fixed: Toggling list styles in Theater View no longer rolls through the TV grid style unless the view contains only television guide items.
9. Changed: Theater View says 'There are no items to display.' when viewing an empty file list.
10. Fixed: When the guide was empty in Theater View, it would draw an orphaned column header with no text.
11. Fixed: Selecting a subtitle for non-DVD playback could crash.
12. NEW: When deleting a video, a sidecar .EDL file with the same name will also be deleted.

17.0.21 (10/21/2011)

1. Changed: Updated to madVR 0.76.
2. Faster: When starting Play Doctor, playback will begin immediately while the prescription is filled in a background thread.
3. Fixed: Pushing to a DLNA device could dead-lock at the end of a track.
4. Fixed: DVD playback over library server had poor video quality on some content.
5. Fixed: When controlling a DLNA device, the UI would not update nicely for playback state changes.
6. NEW: On a Library Server client, dragging will allow dragging files to other programs if the file can be found through a UNC path or mapped drive.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

MC17 released for public beta testing

J. River Media Center 17.0 Beta has been released for public testing today. Link

The builds 17-20

17.0.20 (10/19/2011)

1. Changed: Media Center 17 no longer honors a Media Center 16 license.
2. NEW: Live TV uses custom madVR overlay drawing so the OSD will not change the display from exclusive mode to windowed mode.
3. Changed: Added 'Disk' to the Theater View default image and video views.
4. Changed: MC ignores some MP4/MOV atoms that have names that coincide with Apple iTunes metadata atoms but written in formats different from iTunes data.
5. NEW: Sidecar subtitles are supported when watching a ripped DVD.

17.0.19 (10/15/2011)

1. Fixed: Importing files could crash.
2. Changed: Small change to the Theater View fade-in animation time used in lists.

17.0.18 (10/14/2011)

1. Fixed: Sorting was not working properly in some cases (only applies to the last few builds).
2. Changed: Thumbnailing honors the playback range of a video.
3. Changed: Video thumbnailing uses PNG instead of JPEG for data interchange for slightly better quality.
4. Fixed: Image rotation and edits were not being honored at playback time.
5. Changed: Play Doctor better handles the case where it's seeded with a single song that's an artist's only song in the library.
6. Changed: Windows 7 taskbar button for MC now shows the currently playing track in the tooltip.
7. Fixed: Video thumbnails could grab from the beginning of a file instead of at the configured time.

17.0.17 (10/13/2011)

1. Fixed: When switching from PCM to DSD bitstreaming over ASIO, the first play of DSD could fail with some devices.
2. Fixed: Series category thumbnail views in Standard View were not using series images.
3. Changed: Lists did not intelligently select a thumbnail aspect ratio in artist or series image views.
4. Changed: Merged the Standard View and Theater View thumbnail aspect ratio selection code (should be internal change, but please report any issues).
5. Fixed: The v4+ style blocks would not be parsed for some SSA subtitles.
6. Changed: The Rename, Move, & Copy Files tool will allow files from optical discs to be copied (but still not renamed since optical discs are read-only).
7. Fixed: MC would crash when user cancels time-shifting with analog television devices.
8. Changed: MC no longer requires ArcSoft MPEG Demultiplexer filter for a Hauppauge HD PVR video capture device to work.
9. Changed: MC does a better job of deciding when a DVD disc is a set of TV shows rather than a movie. Blu-ray still needs work.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The builds 14-16

17.0.16 (10/12/2011)

1. NEW: Video playback will load a sidecar commercial skip file in the .edl format and honor skips and mutes.
2. Fixed: The wrong default title was getting chosen for blu-ray discs.
3. Changed: The 'Subtitles' on screen display (OSD) choice no longer appears for videos with no subtitles.
4. Fixed: Right in a details list in Theater View would go to the next item (only applies to build 15).
5. Fixed: Cover Art > Get From Internet was not working properly for television shows that were ripped from a DVD.
6. Fixed: Hulu and Netflix weren't working in Theater View.

17.0.15 (10/11/2011)

1. NEW: MC handles audio video format change (MPEG-2, H.264, AC3, AAC etc.) during channel changes so DVB-T2 channels can be played.
2. Fixed: Configuring television tuner (clicking Configure button with selected tuner device) would cause MC to hang.
3. Fixed: Certain blu-ray titles could stall out with a black screen when starting playback (title scanning bug).
4. Changed: Carnac won't change capitalization when a value already uses title case.
5. Changed: Carnac better understands series ranges like "Curb Your Enthusiasm S4E1-6".
6. Changed: Carnac does a better job with miniseries that have episode values but no season.
7. Fixed: The new option to show a search at the file level in Theater View didn't work properly with nested views.
8. Changed: Tuned Theater View thumbnail aspect ratio and sizing.
9. Changed: Television series images are stored like artist images so that per-episode thumbnails can still be used.
10. Changed: Revised the message shown when registering / testing a Library Server.
11. Changed: Media subtype on ripped movies is set to "TV Show" rather than "Movie" if there are several shorter titles.
12. Fixed: Each database load would unnecessarily resave mediafiles.jmd (harmless but slow).
13. Changed: Expressions support &DataType=[Integer] to specify that the output should be treated as an integer.
14. Changed: Pushing right on the right-most thumbnail in a list in Theater View goes to the first thumbnail on the next row.

17.0.14 (10/10/2011)

1. Fixed: Theater View could crash when navigating around.
2. Changed: Carnac improvements.
3. Fixed: In certains cases, the user could remove files from the library but they would show up again at next program startup.
4. Changed: Cover Art > Get From Internet for a television program uses TheTVDB.com.
5. Changed: Cover Art for telelvision shows will assume that there's one image per series (like music tracks assume there is one image per album).
6. Changed: Theater View uses a thumbnail aspect ratio designed for poster aspect ratios for movie and television show views.
7. Changed: When arrowing around a television program view, backdrops load as the selection changes instead of only after entering a series.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

The builds 12-13

17.0.13 (10/7/2011)

1. Changed: Improved Carnac's date parsing system so that it can better detect dates in image and video filenames like "20100901113923.mpg" or "My Camera 2010-03-01 Dump.avi".
2. Fixed: Years could display with a decimal point.
3. Changed: At completion of playback of a blu-ray title, a dialog is shown allowing user to pick another title to play.
4. Fixed: If a cover art folder was set to a missing UNC path, it could lead to a hang.

17.0.12 (10/7/2011)

1. Changed: IsMissing(...) expression will handle special-case filenames like Blu-ray, DVD, etc. when used without a parameter like IsMissing(). When used like IsMissing(some value), the exact value specified be tested.
2. Fixed: Library Server client could have incorrect thumbnails in certain cases.
3. Fixed: Selecting "Delete" on a blu-ray title in the library now actually deletes the blu-ray files as well as the database entry if requested.
4. Fixed: The file system manager could fail to detect an optical drive.
5. Fixed: Playback of DVD on Android using Gizmo was not working properly in some cases.
6. Changed: Added extra logging to help troubleshoot a startup freeze issue.

Friday, October 7, 2011

The builds 1-11

17.0.11 (10/6/2011)

1. Changed: "Get Movie Info" searches all sources and presents the results in a shared list instead of requiring the user to pick a single source.
2. Changed: When Media Center 17 runs, if a copy of Media Center 16 is running, it silently closes it and clears the flag to run on Windows startup.
3. Changed: Bitstreaming of DSD over ASIO honors the DSD bitstreaming setting in Options > Video > Bitstreaming.

17.0.10 (10/6/2011)

1. NEW: Carnac auto-tagging engine that fills in missing tag information from the filename and other known information about media (used on import, Fill Properties From Filename, and Update Library (from tags)).
2. Fixed: The television program guide in Standard View could incorrectly be empty.
3. Fixed: A Library Server client machine would not auto-upgrade settings when coming from v16.
4. Fixed: The upgrade from v16 could auto-upgrade the library if it was in a non-default location (instead of making a separate copy).
5. Changed: The option to install a quick launch icon is no longer offered on Vista and newer.
6. Changed: Removed MediaSubType(...) expression. Instead, use the standard [Media Sub Type] field which is filled by Carnac.
7. Changed: Blu-ray title selection now works right away instead of having to restart playback. OSD title switching also works.
8. Fixed: Blu-ray title selection menu now filters out titles that were simple loops with a static graphic image.
9. Changed: Red October uses the latest LAV filters (v0.37).
10. Fixed: Virtual Box container shares could think that mapped drives were unavailable.
11. Fixed: The AMG link on the link bar was not searching artists properly.
12. Fixed: Wikipedia movie lookup would not get the image in some cases.
13. Changed: Media Center 17 will show an error message and not run if Media Center 16 is running.
14. Changed: When Media Center 17 enters server mode, it removes the setting to run on Windows startup from v16.

17.0.9 (10/5/2011)

1. NEW: Theater View offers a nicer television guide browsing experience (grid-style view, search, etc.).
2. Faster: Numerous improvements to help the speed of dealing with television program guides (sorting, searching, etc.).
3. NEW: Television program guide views in Theater View show backdrops (from TheTVDB, etc.) for television shows.
4. NEW: It's possible to subscribe to television programs from Theater View.
5. NEW: Added baseline support for image/mpo (3d) files. Should allow them to be sent over DLNA.
6. Changed: cue/bin audio files over DLNA are now supported. Conversion is required (always or when necessary).
7. NEW: Added ability to say "Show search at file level" to any Theater View library view.
8. NEW: Blu-ray movies now show a "Title" option on the menu which allows selecting from different titles on the disc. Currently playback must be restarted after selecing a title.
9. Changed: Theater View file image no longer appears with a default image when a file has no artwork.

17.0.8 (9/30/2011)

1. Fixed: Directory creation could fail.

17.0.7 (9/30/2011)

1. NEW: Scanning DVB-T digital channels will correctly find HD (DVB-T2) channels.
2. NEW: Added support for iTunSMPB for gapless playback of MP3 files encoded with iTunes (iTunSMPB was already supported for AAC files).
3. NEW: Added expression function IfElse(...) for performing a sequence of tests. Allows rewriting If(t1, r1, If(t2, r2, If(t3, r3))) as IfElse(t1, r1, t2, r2, t3, r3).
4. Fixed: Parametric Equalizer could fail to save changes in some cases.
5. NEW: Added expression function TVInfo(Channel) to display the channel name for a television program.
6. Changed: Default sorting for television guide programs in a library view uses time and then channel name.
7. NEW: Added a view category type called 'Special' to allow special-case groupings (currently used by television views).
8. Changed: Search language supports date ranges better, including something like [Date]=1980-10y that means "1980 to 1980 plus 10 years".
9. Changed: The search language considers #TVGuideStartDate a number equal to the current time rounded down to the nearest half-hour.
10. Changed: Expression fields that specify a data type with "&DateType=[...]" at the end of the expression work more nicely.
11. Changed: Added search field [TVTime]= that looks at both the start and end time of a program so filtering programs by date only requires one search rule ( ie. [TVTime]=#TVGuideStartDate-24h ).

17.0.6 (9/27/2011)

1. Changed: In digital television the generic Network Provider filter is tried before trying network specific Network Provider filter. Should be an internal change only but please report any problems you notice.
2. Changed: DVB-T digital TV channel scanning will use scanning frequency if the frequency parsed out of the transport stream differs too much from the scanning frequency.
3. Changed: Switched ListCombine(...) to default to "; " for the output delimiter so that combined lists use a space by default to better match other parts of the program.
4. Fixed: VOB playback with no accompanying IFO was not working properly.
5. NEW: DVD playback works over Library Server (plays only the main title, without menus or trailers).
6. Changed: Action Window > Camera provides better user messaging when searching for cameras, and finds and displays cameras more quickly.
7. Fixed: VOB subtitle streams that were resized independently of the movie could appear in the wrong location.
8. Fixed: JRSS downmixing could have too high of an output level.
9. NEW: File system manager that better handles missing drives and network files, so that files that are temporarily unavailable won't slow the program (the Windows API gets very slow with missing network files).

17.0.5 (9/19/2011)

1. NEW: Added default calculated field 'Orientation' that's filled with Lanscape, Portrait, or Square for image files.
2. Changed: Added expression function Orientation() (used by #1).
3. NEW: Added expression function Compare(...) (example: Compare([Bitrate], >, 256))
4. Changed: Panes don't show a forced scrollbar when not needed when using Left or Right alignment.
5. Changed: Expanded decade search support to include 90's (so these work: '90s 90s 90's).
6. Changed: Tuned the sizing of movie tooltips to be less aggressive.
7. NEW: The library view option to disable tree selection works nicely with child views.
8. Changed: Tree auto-expand automatically expands a library view that has child library views.
9. Changed: Changed a lot of branding and artwork from J. River to JRiver.

17.0.4 (9/16/2011)

1. Changed: After tagging Media Center explicitly sets the last modified time of the tagged file instead of assuming the file system will do it automatically (because network file systems are sometimes slow to update automatically).
2. Changed: Using mc2xml for television guide data is easier.
3. Fixed: When a file previously marked as bad was later imported, it would not have its name filled automatically.
4. Fixed: Having the auto-import option to 'Update for external changes' disabled could (still) lead to problems with files that were marked as bad.
5. NEW: High definition DSD audio can be bitstreamed using ASIO to outboard DACs that support DSD.
6. Changed: Updated the ASIO engine to use the latest ASIO SDK (the latest, v2.2).
7. Changed: When bitstreaming, the audio engine circumvents any conversion to and from 64-bit (which is lossless but still takes processing resources).
8. Fixed: Random-type smartlists were not refreshing properly when browsing with DLNA.
9. Fixed: The option "Keep only x episodes" of television subscription recordings did not work (no recordings were ever deleted).
10. Changed: Red October uses LAV CUVID 0.13.
11. Changed: Removed the 'No Results' item that shows in the search suggestion box when there are no suggestions.
12. Changed: Improvements to search suggestion engine (better number handling, tuning to suggestions, etc.).
13. Changed: Added support for typing a decade in the search box like '90s or 90s.
14. Changed: Year-only dates will have an empty day and month instead of 'January' and '1' as the values.
15. Faster: Optimized how searches that don't specify a field work so that they better ignore fields that are not used by the library, not applicable to the media type of files in the view, etc.
16. Changed: More stock fields are default search fields (most all text fields are now searched by default).
17. Changed: Stock fields don't use the 'Default search field' option, but instead rely on rules in the source code.

17.0.3 (9/13/2011)

1. Changed: Red October uses LAV 0.35 filters.
2. Fixed: Zooming into the selected thumbnail would not work properly if the scroll position was at the top of the list.
3. Fixed: The Theater View file info panel option to hide empty values did not work properly for the rating field.
4. Changed: Improved DVB-T channel scanning for UK and other European countries.
5. Changed: Auto-import works better with removed and bad files when the options to 'Update for external changes' and 'Fix broken links' are disabled.
6. Changed: Doing 'Update Library (from tags)' on a file in the bad database will move the file out of the bad location into the main database if it succeeds.
7. Fixed: Screen grabbing of videos wouldn't work properly for some types.

17.0.2 (9/13/2011)

1. Faster: Improved performance of core database engine (string searches about 15% faster for example).
2. Faster: Revised storage format used in mediafiles.jmd to be more efficient, resulting in faster database loading (it's not uncommon for mediafiles.jmd to be over 50x smaller).
3. Fixed: Closing the Smartlist editor while a drop box was open showing its content could lead to a crash.
4. Fixed: Rotten Tomatoes JSON parsing could hang when it encountered escaped quotation marks.
5. Fixed: Movies weren't showing up under genre categories for Netflix in Theater View (Netflix had changed their genres).
6. Fixed: DVD bookmark loading wasn't working in some cases.
7. Fixed: List style customization could present the wrong choices when using tree navigation of library views.
8. Changed: Red October will use EVR as the default renderer when it is available on XP (instead of VMR 9).
9. Changed: Software deinterlacing is disabled when using EVR in favor of the hardware-based deinterlacing that EVR provides.
10. Fixed: Some WMV videos (for example the Windows 7 sample video Wildlife.wmv) wouldn't play on Android.
11. Changed: The choice to rip a dvd as well as play the dvd is now presented when a DVD disc is inserted in the drive.
12. Changed: Separate entries for "Other Video", "Ripped BD Video", and "Ripped DVD Video" file locations.
13. NEW: Blu-ray disc ripping. Same requirements as for disc playback: must have Blu-ray reader software installed.
14. Changed: Media subtype of "Movie" is automatically set on all DVD/BD rips.
15. Fixed: When DVD and BD discs were swapped in and out of the drive several times, a Media Center crash could occur.
16. Changed: Nicer view header info when viewing BD & DVD discs.
17. Changed: DVD/BD rips bring up "Get Movie Info" dialog after clicking the Rip button if no meta-data has been entered for the movie.
18. Changed: When the media insertion dialog pops up for a DVD/BD and "Rip" is chosen, the rip action window appears and user can modify the movie name instead of the rip starting up immediately.
19. Fixed: Files that got imported while they were in the process of downloading or copying could get stuck in the 'bad database' location.
20. Changed: Media Center is better at automatically selecting forced subtitle streams in videos.
21. Fixed: DLNA. A change made in 16.0.111 caused MC to return a slightly different URL in status calls than was originally provided by MC's DLNA server (when the same instance of MC was being used as the server and renderer). This caused undesirable behavior for some control points (i.e. PlugPlayer).
22. Changed: Red October nicely handles the case where video acceleration with DXVA or LAV CUVID is supported by the decoder but not the renderer (previously playback would fail in this case).
23. Changed: Internal change on how the television time-shifting player graph is created.
24. Changed: Some experimental code and additional logging for DVB-T television channel scanning.

17.0.1 (8/31/2011)

1. NEW: First build of v17.