Some details about the upcoming release

Thursday, August 4, 2005

We decided to share some details about the upcoming release in order to satisfy the curiosity of all those that keep asking about it. Version 0.8.0.1 should be out before the end of the month and will feature a complete rewrite of the media library database. Unlike the current implementation the database will no longer reside in memory but rather come from the disk. Also it won’t be an XML file but a lightweight RDBMS (based on an open source project called SQLite). The main advantages of this implementation are:

The new implementation will be able to handle libraries with up to 100,000 items (and more) very efficiently. Both browsing and sharing have been optimized with that size libraraies to outperform the previous version.
The media server will have a much smaller memory footprint and more importantly the memory consumption will no longer grow as one shares more and more files/folders.
It will become easy to support automatic updating of the media library (unlike the previous implementation) and this feature will indeed be apart of this release and so is the ability to remove a folder/file from the shares.
As one shares files/folders they become immediately available to the media server, meaning that it is no longer necessary to wait till the end of the sharing process in order to start using your media. This also means that it is no longer required to restart the service after sharing media. In addition to the rewrite of the media library the release will include many bug fixes, up to date online content and other features. These are not yet set and will be anounced when the release is made.

Finally we would like to thank one of our users for digging TVersity. Carlos posted TVersity to digg.com. For those unfamiliar with digg, it is a technology site where users post news and other users digg them to the surface. That way the story goes to the front page and crawls up to the top list. If it stays in the top list for long it gets discused in diggnation a top ten podcast at iTunes. So for all of those that wanted to help TVersity, please go to the following link http://www.digg.com/diggall, look for the story titled Best media server out there! and digg it (you will be required to register), or go directly to http://digg.com/technology/Best_media_server_out_there_.