Changelog: Media Browser 2.5 (Hydra)

This topic highlights some of the most important new features and bug fixes. These are the release notes for:



Hydra represents a complete re-structuring of some of the internals of Media Browser. It also contains some key bug fixes and performance improvements. See details below.

Highlights:

  • The biggest change in Hydra is something that should be completely transparent to the user but should yield performance improvements and provides us with some great capabilities going forward. It is that we now use a SQL database for our cache. This means the old “ExperimentalSQLite” option in the config is now defunct as all systems will use SQL.
  • Several other internal improvements have been made that should mean MB is more responsive and reliable for everyone.
  • MB can now recover from your network shares not being available without causing all your metadata to “disappear”. It is still basically designed to operate on available media but you should no longer have the issue of your whole library being deleted and re-added just because you brought it up when your server was not available.
  • The context menu system can now support sub-menus. This will allow plug-ins to better organize their options within the context menu.
  • MB now has screen saver functionality. There is a built-in default saver and more can be added via plug-ins.
  • The recent added/watched lists now “roll-up” TV episodes into series groupings so, if you add 30 episodes from a single series at once, it won’t take over the whole list.
  • Showing the splash screen before an external player has been split as a separate option from the minimize one. Also, you can define your own splash by putting the appropriate image in the IBN/General folder as “splash.png” (only png supported).
  • Media Info now supports showing the number of audio channels in a separate icon and for all audio types. Look here for the new sets if you wish to use custom media info icons.
  • The US MPAA rating icons in core have been replaced with a higher definition set. They will also appear in other themes that use the set from core.
  • A number of issues with backdrops not being properly inherited for TV on the recent lists and in index views have been addressed.
  • The imagecache should shrink in size as we have changed how we are handling it as well.

Important Notes:

  • The upgrade process should be fairly painless and quick this time. You do NOT need to run a complete refresh of your library after upgrade. A quicker migration routine will run at install time to move your library over to the new cache system.
  • In some rare instances we have had the migration process hang at the very last step with it saying ‘Finishing Up..’. If this happens to you, just right click the icon for the migration window in the task bar and select ‘close’. The installation should then complete.

Complete Changelog:

To see a full list of the tracker topics for these changes, have a look here.

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