Version 0.8 is here

It has been a little over two months and version 0.8.0.1 is finally here. The previous post covers pretty well the highlight of this release (a complete rewrite of the media library database that can handle up to 100,000 items and more) so we won’t repeat it again. We will say however that we added thousands of radio stations from all over the world, which are accessible by name, region, genre or language. We also added support for many new file formats including Quicktime (mov), Real media (rm, rv, ra, rmvb), Matroska, FLAC and more. Each of these will require some directshow decoding filters to be installed or else the media server will not be able to transcode them. These filters are not distributed with the media server since their license does not allow that. We will however add to the FAQ some links that will make it easier to find them.
Another new feature is related to the management of the disk space consumed by the cache area. Unlike previous versions where the cache area could grow indefinitely, in this release one can configure the minimum and maximum disk space to be allocated for the cache and the media server will manage it automatically.
Finally, many bug fixes, support for some new media hubs, and more configuration parameters also made it into this release.

Before we finish we would like to share some information about the next release, which will be the first to feature automatically updatable online content. Initially we will add support for RSS and for Media RSS. This will allow one to subscribe to vlogs and podcasts and have the media server take care of everything from downloading the audio/video to making it available for playback on the TV/Stereo. Later on we will add new channels that do not have an RSS file readily available on the web, but rather TVersity will create one for them, using its web crawler. These RSS files will not feature only downloadable content (as is the case for vlogs and podcasts) but also streaming media content. Consider for example a CNET news channel, or a FoodTV short video channel, which will feature their videos as an updatable channel on your TV.

This is it for now, please drop us a note and tell us what you think about the current release and about our plans for the next one. As always we would like to thank our users for providing great encouragement and very helpful feedback. Special thanks for all those that showed their support for the project and made a generous donation, without you we might not make it to this point.