We are working hard to get Media Center 18 ready for public beta. We're still a little bit away, but we thought you might like an update about how it's going.
For anyone not familiar with our development model, we spend about one year building each version. v17 is our stable, state-of-the-art player and will remain the recommended download for many months. During that time, we will be working on v18. We are now 40 builds into v18 (by comparison, there have been 185 builds of v17).
Remember that if you purchase or upgrade to v17 now, you receive a free license to v18. And thanks to everyone that has already taken advantage of this offer! More on upgrading here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=73515.0Some of the early work on v18 was
The Source. This was work to get ready for the Mac release coming later this year. The hard part of this work is behind us, and the result is a framework that's faster on all platforms.
Noteworthy improvements already coded into v18 include:
- Car Radio, a simple way to save and play your favorite music.
- Improved video playback on Android using Gizmo (MP4 format, selectable quality, lower bandwidth requirements, no Flash required).
- Native AIFF encoding. ALAC coming next.
- Improved on screen display (OSD) used to select languages, subtitles, and more during playback.
- Playback of live television on clients.
- Better video playback on DLNA devices that support time-based seeking (PS3, Sony TVs, etc.).
- Core performance improvements, including smoother scrolling lists, faster text drawing, and faster user interface rendering in general.
- Improved audio loopback playback that supports more hardware and any DSP, including convolution.
- Improvements to online metadata, including better TheMovieDB support, World Weather Online, and more.
- Adaptive volume for video playback (for nighttime listening, or getting more volume from laptop speakers).
Some of the improvements that will be coming soon:
- The ability to save and load DSP and other playback settings, and apply them based on what you play.
- Theater View will optionally fade away some text to prevent plasma burn-in.
- Media Center will be able to automatically change your desktop background periodically using images of your choosing.
And many more feature requests for things that should come next are here (your feedback welcome):
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=73519.0Thanks everyone for all your continued support.
Now to get back to work on v18!