Movian

Today marks the release of Showtime 3.4. For a list of most of the important bug fixes and features added, see the 3.4 page.

Download the release from github.

Note: It seems Showtime still suffers from out of memory conditions now and then but I've not been able to pinpoint the exact cause of those issues. A few things were implemented just prior to the 3.4 release in order to mitigate the low memory problems.

With that said I though I could write something about what's been done this year and where Showtime is going.

The History¶

About a year ago Showtime had approximately 5 users. When the PS3 jailbreak was announced I quickly bought a PS3 myself and started to port Showtime to it. I had previously ported Showtime to the Wii homebrew SDK so a lot of code was already quite platform independent already. In fact I had something running already a few weeks after I acquired the console. So far I've not used my console for anything else. I've never played a game on it, nor do I own a game. After Showtime was released for the PS3 sometime during March 2011 it gained a userbase of a few thousand users instead. Very encouraging!

During the last year Showtime has received ~1400 commits. Some are just a small typo, some are huge changes.

The major features added are:

Downloadable Plugins

While Showtime used to support Javscript plugins even before 2011 this was the year when I added support for a central repository.
For a full list of available apps, see the official repo
Big thank you to all the plugin developers that are making the Showtime experience a lot more interesting.

Translations

Thanks to the community Showtime is now translated to 21 different languages.

Sqlite

Currently used to drive the metadata cache and video resume support. In the future I hope to use this for a lot of spiffy features such as possibility to search all your indexed media store detailed information about movies.

The Future¶

User interface redesign

Personally I think Showtime's weakest point is its User Interface. I hope to be able to present something new in this area during the spring.
Some people ask for theme/skin support in Showtime. Thing is, Showtime already have that but it's not exposed to the average user in a good way. Nor is it very appealing to skin/theme developers either. Adding a new theme requires that all of the UI is redesigned in one go. I don't think that's very productive or creative. Rather I would like plugins to the UI itself so it's possible to create a plugin that alters the home page. Or the settings view. Or the play control. Or perhaps everything.

Grabbing metadata from external locations

For files stored on users hard drives, or NAS, etc Showtime can only show the metadata contained in the file itself.
My plan is to add support for plugins that based on filenames (or file hashes, etc) downloads metadata, artwork, ratings, etc from various online sources such as http://themoviedb.org, etc

Auto updates

I've almost finished my own autobuild system. This will make sure all commits are built for a all supported target platforms and also auto published on the Showtime download page. On this page three different versions will be available.

• Stable - A known good version
• Testing - Should be OK to use for the average user
• Unstable - Latest checking. Can be broken.

Not only will the build be available on the site itself but it will also be possible to upgrade Showtime from within the application.

And the rest...

And of course there are countless bugs to fix, and important features that should be added as well. In particular an on-screen keyboard would be a welcome addition. UPnP/DLNA renderer support so Showtime can be remote controlled from a UPnP control point.

...

Tomorrow I will be leaving on a six week vacation and during that period I won't do any PS3 related development (as I don't have the console with me). I might do some general Showtime stuff though. I've no idea what that will be though... I guess I'll find out.

So with no further ado,
Thank you for the past year. Talk to you all soon again.

I've made a pre-release of what will soon be Showtime 3.4

It's called 3.3.384 and is available for download here

We had a tiny Showtime Hack Event in Stockholm.

Attendees where Me (andoma), Mattias Wadman (wader) and Mateusz Mojsiejuk (tomodachi)

Mostly worked on porting Showtime to hand held devices and some documentation work.

Thanks to the work of Fábio Canada Showtime now has a plugin for Youtube. To install it just enter the plugin section (the jigsaw puzzle icon on the home screen) and select "Available plugins" and Youtube should be available to you. If it does not show up in the available section you could try again after restarting Showtime.

As you might have seen recently there has not been that much updates to the Showtime source repository. The reason for this is that i'm working on setting up automated builds. In the end this will (hopefully) generate new Showtime builds for all supported platforms and even make it possible for Showtime to autoupdate itself (if enabled by the user). This should reduce the need for unofficial builds of Showtime for the PS3 which most people use today because I'm too lazy to publish new versions on a daily basis.

The complete autobuild system is probably ~1 week away and then comes the additional work of adding support for autoupdating Showtime from itself.

Have faith!

3.2 is finally done. The changes from 3.1.228 is mostly bug fixes for multi-channel audio and video playback.

For a grand total of what was made in 3.2. See here

Or 250 files changed, 19482 insertions(+), 4878 deletions(-) as git diff --stat 3.1...3.2 would have put it.

As usual the official releases are available here.

If any more severe issues will arise in 3.2 I will make a 3.2.X release because the 3.3 will start off with quite a bumpy ride me thinks. Let's see what happens.

/Andreas

Another release.

This build adds support for multichannel audio output on PS3 (AC-3, DTS and 8 channel linear PCM). Note that due to how the PS3 audio frameworks applications can not output raw digital bitstreams. So Showtime still needs to decode the audio and than the PS3 will reencode the audio in the best available encoding mode the user has selected (or don't do any encoding at all if 8 channel PCM is available)

Still this is a major step compared to having just 2 channel stereo.

For all you who roll your own builds of Showtime, please note that you need latest version of my PSL1GHT fork for Showtime to build.

I've also fixed a major memory leak that manifested itself when rendering fonts with outline (which is default for subtitles). So if you watched a movie with subtitles the memory would drain and Showtime would eventually crash.

Another thing is the increase of packet buffer to 40MB in conjunction with some adjustments to socket buffers, etc. This should hopefully make streaming over lousy wireless connections better.

As always the binaries are available here

Have fun!
/Andreas

... Showtime used to look like this

Just found that old picture laying around and wanted to share it.

Happy monday!

This release contains the new online plugin repository. Still there are no other plugins that previously available but we will hopefully see some new plugins coming in shortly.

On top of this the new release also includes translations of Showtime to:

• German
• Italian
• Dutch
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Swedish

As usual Showtime available for download here

Have fun!

Starting from 3.1.126 Showtime now support "real" plugins.

By "real" plugins I mean plugins that can be loaded and installed from an online repository.
This allows third party plugin developers to rapidly develop plugins and make them available to the general public.

It's also possible to copy a plugin (which is just a .zip-file) onto a filesystem that Showtime can access and then just install the plugin from Showtime itself.

I've also started to write some documentation for how to develop plugins.