Download MediaPortal 1.8.0

While work on MediaPortal 2.0 is progressing steadily, a new stable release from the 1.x series has appeared. With this program, a Windows machine can be used as the heart of the multimedia hardware in the living room. This makes it easy to listen to radio and music, as well as watch videos and DVDs. TV programs can also be recorded. By means of plug-ins and extensions, the functionality can be expanded and the look & feel of the program can be adjusted. Here are the main changes in this release:

Enhanced TV experience
The default protocol for LiveTV streaming on a multi-seat setup is RTSP. MediaPortal has an option to change this to UNC for those that experience problems with RTSP, but we’ve had a long long lasting issue with UNC paths, because of a Microsoft problem with the SMB2/3 cache. After a lot of work on the TsReader filter from our developer Owlsroost, we can now say that this ‘known issue’ is solved, and the issues related to UNC paths should be fixed!

A while ago, we updated the default MySQL install to 5.6, which uses InnoDB as its default database engine. However, the database was not updated to use InnoDB for update installs. It has been updated in this release. A few other SQL related bugs have also been fixed.

Music improvements
A number of things have been fixed in the Music section since our last release. We’ve reduced the CPU load coming from the AutoDJ function, fixed incorrect channel mappings for 3.0 and 4.0 music files, possible flickering visualizations and a sound loop when you have music playing in the background of a pictures slideshow.

Unfortunately Last.fm has now completely removed their Radio function (more info about this on the last.fm forum). Because of this change, the team has removed this function completely.

Full list of changes
You can review the complete change log for 1.8.0 by using this link.