This page contains an archive of all the main news items that have appeared on the home page over time.

Freevo 2 survey - help shape the future of Freevo

The Freevo 2 Development team has made available a short survey, targeted toward existing Freevo users, or those considering Freevo as an HTPC platform. The results will give us a sense of how many current users will be affected by the 2.x architecture, and may influence future design decisions.

Please donate 5 minutes of your time to complete the survey and help shape Freevo's future.

John Molohan

March 2, 2009

New release 1.8.3

Announcing that the new release of Freevo-1.8.3 is available for downloading from sourceforge.net

A full release text will follow but for now you can check out the changelog for an idea of what's been happening for this release

John Molohan

December 14, 2008

User poll

In order to help the developers get a better understanding of the areas that you, the users, feel need improvement a new poll has been created. Please take one minute complete it and ensure that Freevo is going in the right direction. It's available here

New releases 1.7.9 and 1.8.2

Hello all freevoers,

Announcing that the new releases of Freevo-1.7.9 and Freevo-1.8.2 are available for downloading from sourceforge.net

First and foremost a real big thanks to everyone who has contributed to the development of the Freevo 1 series. And a thank you to everyone who has provided feedback on the doodle poll.

A special thanks to:
Gorka for his work with mplayervis and alpha blending between menus.
José his work with rtve.es plug-in and FilmAffinity plug-in and more.
Torsten for his speak plug-in.
Adam for updates to livepause.
Valera for lots of bug reports and fixes.

Now that the kaa.notifier code has proven to be reliable this will be the last release of the 1.7 series. We will now start to concentrate on updating the plug-ins to remove the code that polls for events from the main loop. The effect of the all this polling is that the user interface is much less responsive than it should be and the CPU load is higher than it should be.

What's new in 1.8.2

- New speak plug-in

- New mplayer visualization plug-in for audio

- New video plug-in for streaming programs from rtve.es

- Updated livepause for graphic OSD for vlc

- Updated OSD for alpha blending between screen updates

- Updated mplayer TV and video plug-ins to correct MPLAYER_VO_DEV_OPTS handling

- Updated mplayervis plug-in to be able to set the frame rate

What's new in 1.7.9, these are also in 1.8.2

- New mouse support for Freevo

- New TV plug-in to browse by genre

- New video Spanish information grabber, FilmAffinity for movies

- New video plug-in, fillscreen, to crop, scale and change monitor aspect for video items

- Updated freeboxtv to be in the TV plug-ins

- Updated mplayer audio plug-in to show a pop-up when caching

- Updated mplayer to handle subtitle and audio cycling using the SUBTITLE and LANG events

- Updated recordings manager to improve its performance

There is a lot of additional fixes from lots of people and the full list is available in the changelog

Finally the release statistics: Release 1.7.8 to 1.7.9 there are 7 new items and 87 changes. Release 1.8.1 to 1.8.2 there are 19 new items and 167 changes.

Have fun,
Duncan

John Molohan

August 26, 2008

New releases 1.7.7 and 1.8.0

Hello all freevoers,

Another short announcement that the new releases of Freevo-1.7.7 and Freevo-1.8.0 are available for downloading from sourceforge.net, get them here

In this release, again both the Freevo-1.7 series and the first of the Freevo-1.8 there have been quite a large number of changes. From release 1.7.6.1 to 1.7.7 there have are 188 new items and 205 changes. From release 1.8.0rc2 to 1.8.0 there are 113 new items and 195 changes.

The goal to make release 1.8.0 was to remove the Twisted XML-RPC interface from the TV recording modules and replace it with kaa.rpc. The effect of this seems to be that the TV part of Freevo is faster. You will need kaa.base-0.4.0.

Included in the 1.8.0 release are some RELEASE_NOTES, *do* read them if you are planning to migrate to the 1.8 series as you will need to carry out steps to migrate your favorites or they will be lost.

What's new, well here are a selection:

• atlantice skin from CinPoU
• Polish translation from Grzegorz Patron
• Record while watching (IVTV TV cards) from Richard van Paasen
• UPD remote for those of you with a PDA from Andreas Furtig
• DVDcopy to make DVD images on your hard disk from Adam Charrett
• Florian Demmer has fixed makelircrc to allow includes
• Douglas A. Seifert has fixed cd-backup to record play lists
• Pierre Ossman who has given us placement support for xrandr

There is a lot of changes from lots of people and the full list is detailed in the ChangeLog

A real big thanks to everyone who has contributed to the development of the Freevo 1 series. And all of you who have used Freevo.

Have fun and happy Easter

Duncan

John Molohan

February 4, 2008

New releases 1.7.6.1 and 1.8.0-rc2

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has been busy developing plug-ins, fixing bugs, reporting bugs and using Freevo, that you just about cover everyone ;-)

A quick note about the kaa packages. For release 1.7.6 you can still use the existing kaa modules that are available on SourceForge. For 1.8.0rc2 you will need the latest version that will be released tomorrow.

• Apple trailers by Pierre Ossman has eventually made it's way into the main tree.
• We have a new music player daemon plug-in written by Graham Billiau being pushed be Elizabeth Dodd :)
• We have a lot of enhancements to the encoding tools, reencode and dvdbackup plugins and the encoding server, thanks to Jonathan Isom for this work.
• We have a new Flickr image and youtube video plug-ins from Alberto Gonzalez Rodreiguez
• Michael Beal has provided us with a plug-in to send to DirecTV receivers.
• James Trietsch has been busy enhancing Adam's recordings manager.
• The broken weather plug-in have been removed it's now in the contrib/plugins directory
• In 1.8.0rc we have a new wiimote plug-in from Sebastian Michel.
• A vlc_live_pause plug-in from Jonathan Isom.
• Also in the 1.8.0rc2 release the Tuxntosh skin is available but I'm still waiting for the code changes again SVN for it to work fully.

This does not cover all the fixed and updates, it is just a selection.I hope that you will enjoy the released as much as I have had preparing them.

Happy Freevoing

Duncan

John Molohan

February 4, 2008

Freevo 1.7.5 and 1.8.0-rc1 releases are out

Hoi Zame,

As promised the Freevo-1.7.5 and Freevo-1.8.0rc1 releases are out and can be downloaded from sourceforge

Freevo-1.7.5 has been released about seven weeks after 1.7.4 this release has new still more new features, please see the Change Log for full details. And as usual there are many people to thank for their efforts fixing and improving freevo. This time there seem to be even more people who have contributed for the first time including Sylvain Fabre for the new French movie plug-ins and Thorsten Pferdekaemper for the new gphoto plug-in. Even those one-liner fixes are greatly appreciated, Matthias Reichl for the audioitem fix, Michel Lespinasse for the evdev not working on 64bit machines, Andreas Dick for hiding hidden directories, Hans Meine for merging the mplayervbr into audio.mplayer.

Freevo-1.8.0rc1 has been released with the kaa.notifier and kaa.rpc code from Freevo-2. This is a major change and so deserves a version bump, and a release candidate. When all the Twisted client calls in the recordserver have been ported to kaa.rpc then this will become release 1.8.0. I would like give a special thank you to John Molohan for all his work on the slimbox webserver library, his testing and updating the Freevo website to it new look and feel.

For Freevo-1.8.0 series you will need an up-to-date kaa release, I personally use the kaa subversion revision which is quite stable.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Freevoing New Year, Duncan

Duncan Webb

December 22, 2007

Freevo 1.7.4 release is out

Hi all,

This is a very quick note to let you know that Freevo-1.7.4 has been released today.

First I would very much like to thank everyone that has helped out with this release it is a very big release with tar ball reaching 20MB, from 12MB for 1.7.3. Special thanks to Tanja who has been busy fixing tricky bugs, Don for his work on the webserver configuration tools, Adam for his DVB streamer, Richard for his ivtv xine tv plug-in, Krasimir for the Audio and Video podcast plug-ins, John for his Geebox skin, Gorka and Frank, Pascal, Tanja, Lonyai, Razvan and Michel for their translations, hope I've not left any one out of this long list and if I have then I'm sorry that I've done so.

Following the link on the ChangeLog wiki page gives all the information, somehow I suspect that the change log may be missing a couple of items but hopefully not too many.

It's important that you take a quick look over the release notes as there are some configuration changes that you have to make when upgrading

Thanks too to everyone helping out be testing, answering questions on the lists and updates to the wiki.

Hope you all enjoy this release Duncan

Duncan Webb

November 15, 2007

Freevo 1.7.3 has been released

Hello all,

Today, Swiss National Day, freevo-1.7.3 has been released and as usual there are a lot of additions, changes and fixes in this release.

First, a big thank you to you for using Freevo! A good choice, if I may say so, :-) and without your support there would be no Freevo.

A special thanks to all that have contributed since the release of 1.7.2 by sending in translations, patches for new features and bug fixes, testing, reporting problems, updating the wiki pages and for helping others with problems on the lists. All of this helps keep Freevo alive and well.

A particular thank to: Adam Charrett for his great recordings manager a button bar plug-ins. Wout Clymans for his audio scrobbler plug-in. Pierre Ossman for updating the Apple trailers plug-in. Ringj Cn for the new Chinese translation. Lefteris F. Sarakinos for the new Greek translation. Pascal Schirrmann for the French translation updates. Gorka Olaizola for the Spanish translation updates. Valera Koval for the work on mplayer field dominance and interlacing and there are many more names see the change log for a full list and, if I've forgotten you, your efforts are greatly appreciated.

As well as those items listed above there are other changes that are worthy mentioning, you can now link you personal web pages to the Freevo web pages, you can start freevo in the full-screen mode and pass settings to the x-server and you can have pops and clicks as you move about the menu. The logging is now done with the Python logger which gives accurate timestamps. The child process are now run with Python's subprocess module.

If you haven't contributed anything, no problem, using Freevo is what it is all about. Please do feel free to help out by adding and updating wiki pages, the wiki is very important for exchanging information. There are also translations to be written and maintained. And if you have a bit of programming inclination your very welcome to provide patches and fixes, I don't bite... much :)

The complete change log is here

Download Freevo-1.7.3

Duncan Webb

August 1, 2007

Freevo 1.7.2 bugfix release is out

Today, freevo-1.7.2 has been released, there has been a quite a bit of bug fixing since freevo-1.7.1. The statistics show 4 additions, 1 deletion and 272 changes since 1.7.1 but these statistics are misleading, caused by running the code through the reindent.py tool. This release has been intended as a bug fix release and there have been 16 reported bugs that have been fixed. The bug fix of most significance for people who record from the TV are the fixes to the recordserver to allow consecutive recording to record correctly. The complete list of changes is in the changelog

Duncan Webb

May 27, 2007

Older news

We keep an archive of even older news items here. Please feel free to browse over it.

John Molohan

May 27, 2007