Movian

General features¶

• Icecast/Shoutcast radio streaming
• Per-file and per-folder settings during video playback. Read more below.
• Support for MPL subtitle format
• Support for TMPlayer subtitles
• Support for DVD Subtitle system (.txt) format
• Improved and more robust parsing of SRT files
• Improved start time when streaming over HTTP
• Add audio test generator in Settings -> Audio. Good for testing that your surround speaker setup is correct.
• Fix problems with various JPEG files.
• Make it possible to turn off video frame linear interpolation. Traditionally Showtime have interpolated video frames to match display output. Some users find that this may blur the video a bit so this feature can now be turned off.
• Store per-file settings directly in file system. Read more below.

Per-file and per-folder settings¶

During video playback the user can adjust per-file specific settings.
These are:

• Audio Volume (New in 4.6)
• Audio/Video sync adjustment
• Subtitle sync adjustment
• Subtitle scaling
• Subtitle alignment
• Subtitle vertical displacement
• Subtitle horizontal displacement
• Video zoom
• Video stretch to widescreen
• Video stretch to full screen
• Video frame interpolation (New in 4.6)

The settings are remembered per file so when you come back the configuration will be resumed. It's now also possible to apply the configuration to the entire folder. This means that any files loaded from that folder (including new ones) will also have these settings. The user can also apply the current settings as new global defaults.

If the files are located on a SMB/Windows share with write access the corresponding settings will be stored on the server. See below.

Store per-file settings directly in file system using Extended Attributes.¶

Up until now, Showtime have stored per-file settings in an Sqlite database. These settings include things such as "Seen", "Resume position", "Selected subtitle", "Selected audio track" plus all the settings that can be configured during video playback (mentioned above).

Starting from 4.6 Showtime will now try to store these settings directly in the filesystem where the file is also located. It does this by storing the information as "Extended Attribute". This works if Showtime have write access to your SMB/Windows shares. This feature is default on and can be disabled in Settings -> General.

The real upside of this is that if you have multiple devices they will all share the "Seen status", "Resume position", and all other settings. Also if you re-install Showtime this information will be intact.

For details about Extended Attributes, please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

Internationalization¶

• Add support for BIG5 character encoding
• Add support for different On Screen Keyboard layouts.

Raspberry Pi specific changes¶

• 8 channel PCM output over HDMI
• Audio output on analog interface (configurable in Settings -> Audio)
• Volume adjust and muting are working now
• Show chip temperature in system menu
• Much improved video playback pipeline on Raspberry Pi.
• Added support for more video codecs. The full list is: h264, h263, MPEG-4, VP6, VP8, MJPEG, Theora, MPEG2 (Require license), VC1/WMV3 (Require license)
• Make system upgrade must more robust. Now it download all files first and write them to disk and then rename over the old ones in one go.

Playstation 3 specific changes¶

• Showtime now uses virtual memory (backed by HDD) on PS3. This should drastically reduce out-of-memory problems.
• Show a notification if h264 profile/level restrictions is violated.
  For example if a 1080p video use more than 4 reference frames.

Linux specific changes¶

• VDPAU (Nvidia accelerated video playback) rewritten from scartch.
  Now uses Nvidia's own VDPAU -> OpenGL texture functions. No more tearing on high resolution displays.

OS X specific changes¶

• Improve VDA (Video Decoding Acceleration) integration. No longer copies decoded video frames back to CPU RAM. All video decoding and presentation now happens on GPU. Reduces power consumption.

Other changes¶

• User interface now only redraws on demand (instead of every frame).
  This greatly reduce CPU/Power consumption when application is idle.
• Upgraded to libav 10
• Over 150 bugs fixed. See https://showtimemediacenter.com/versions/58

Over 750 commits later I've finally decided to release Showtime 4.4

Some of the most prominent features are:

Raspberry Pi support¶

Full SD images are available that turns your RPi into a Showtime powered media center.

SD Card images can be downloaded at: https://showtimemediacenter.com/downloads/stos

The STOS (Showtime OS) have built-in upgrades of both the Showtime application itself and the whole system (including the Linux kernel)

PS3 specific changes¶

• NTFS support. Both Read and Write (Finally!)
• Ability to turn off system when video playback is completed
• Use X button for Play/Pause

General new features¶

• Built-in FTP Server
• Automatic code page detection. Showtime will guess the code page used for SRT files, etc based on language heuristics.
• FTP client support (Stream content directly from FTP servers)
• Ability to delete file and folders where applicable
• Custom background (via plugin)
• .sub (Microdvd) support
• Much improved support for loading subtitles from different locations
• Ability to activate/devative automatic metadata lookup per-folder
• Mark all items in folder seen/unseen
• On Screen Keyboard on systems other than PS3
• Subtitle position can be configured per movie

Plus a lot more bug fixes. For the full list of issues closed see: https://showtimemediacenter.com/versions/56

Have fun! /Andreas

The Raspberry Pi port of Showtime is starting to come together so I though it's time to give a quick status update.

First off, what works.¶

• User interface runs (albeit a bit slow)
• h264 and MPEG-2 accelerated decoding. Tested with up to 1080p Bluray remuxes peaking at 30Mbps.
• Stereo audio including downmix from multi channel audio
• HDMI CEC - Controlling the UI using your TV's remote. So far only tested against Samsung TVs
• All plugins including Spotify.

What does not work so good.¶

• There are no auto generated or published builds.
• Multi channel audio.
• It's still a bit unstable.

A list of things that I will fix in the near future.¶

• Improve user interface speed. I have a lot of ideas in the bag in order to speed things up. So I have a lot of faith here.
• Multi channel audio support. Just need to buy a new A/V receiver first...
• Hook up Showtime's auto build system so I can start generating continuous builds.
• Create a Showtime distribution for the Raspberry Pi. This will allow users to just download a single SD image and get automatic updates of Showtime when new releases are published.

- Ok, great. But I want to test it now.

Sure, just read the section about building for Raspberry Pi in Showtime's README in the source repository.

Showtime 4.2 released.

Download it here. The list of changes are also available on that page.

Some highlights:

• Virtual keyboard
• Integration with thetvdb.com
• Chapter support for movies
• Support for subtitle plugins

And as usual, a lot of bugs squashed

Showtime 4.0 is finally released.

Download it here. The list of changes are also available on that page.

Some highlights:

• New UI design
• Self upgrade of both Showtime itself (only on PS3) and all plugins (all platforms)
• Automatically load metadata from themoviedb.org
• Improved support for subtitles (in particular external ASS/SSA files and vobsub files)
• Support for on screen keyboard on PS3
• Buttons on PS3 dual shock controller have changed their meaning a bit: See PS3 usage guide for details
• Each focusable item have a dedicated popup menu (Use □ button on dual shock controller for this)
• File browsing will sort folders first and then files. Sorting can be adjusted in the per page menu (△ on dual shock controller)
• Lots of bug fixes
• ... + more stuff I've forgotten

Try it out!

See you soon

Showtime 4.0 is coming up and we could use a new XMB icon.

See this thread for more info!

I recently wrote a guide how to setup Showtime on a HTPC. See the Ubuntu HTPC wiki page.

It's old new by now but I released Showtime 3.6 a while ago.

Details about all bugs fixed and features added are available here

So what happens now?

I've changed the current version tagging of master to 3.99. That means that the next release will be 4.0.
4.0 will support automatic upgrades from within showtime itself and a lot of other goodies such as TMDB integration and hopefully a new theme.

Stay tuned.

Showtime now also has an IRC channel on efnet. just /join #showtime

The Navi-X plugin for Showtime is near completion.

For more info see this thread. Reply on that to get an account for the beta project page.