29-April-2007: Freevo-1.7.1 has been released, there has been a quite a bit of activity since freevo-1.7.0 with yet more exciting new features.
The statistics show 91 additions and 109 changes since 1.7.0.
Some of the new features that have been added in 1.7.1 are:
- TV recording manager, which groups episodes together and shows which have been watched.
- Anamorphic wide screen "Panorama" skin, for those of you with 16x9 TVs
- MusicIP Mixer plug-in.
- Native ALSA mixer plug-in, requires PyAlsaAudio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyalsaaudio/)
- Program active/running idle-bar plug-in.
- New event type to send specific commands to xine.
- Selection of audio, subtitles and chapters should now work correctly.
- IMDB information should now be correct for films and it is possible to get TV episodes info.
- X-Video motion compensation can be turned off for specific videos.
- IVTV codec settins have been corrected to work correctly with the V4L2 interface.
- RSS feed server has been improved and should get more podcasts.
- Weather plug-in should now work again, after msnbc.com dropped their url.
- Weather has some languages available, such as FR, NL, ES.
Some of the translations that have been updated, but more need doing. Feel free to send in new translations or patches for the translations. The trick here is to look for lines with 'fuzzy' and 'msgstr ""'
You will also need to download the latest kaa.base-0.1.3, kaa.metadata-0.6.1 and kaa.imlib2-0.2.1 packages from the sourceforge pages.
The complete list of changes as it is really quite long, you can see them all from the wiki pages: here
16-Mar-2007: Sneak peak at the possibilites for Freevo2
Have a look at this video on youtube for a sneak peak at what freevo2 is capable of :)
16-Mar-2007: Freevo accepted for Google's summer of code. UPDATE: Closing date for student registration this Saturday - 24th March.
UPDATE: The closing date for students to register for Google's Summer of Code is this Saturday the 24th March. If you haven't registered already go to Google's page and register as a student in the Freevo project.
Good news, Freevo was accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2007. Students can register in the next two weeks. Freevo is split into three different areas for the SoC: Kaa - the python multimedia framework used by freevo, GeeXboX - a live CD based HTPC distro which will use Freevo2 and finally Freevo itself.
If you have an idea what you want to do as a student or if you want to be a mentor please subscribe to the freevo devel mailing list so we can disscuss this. Our ideas page is located in the 2.0 wiki. Feel free to add ideas to this page and tell us if you want to help.
Please contact us at freevo-devel if you want to be part of it.
Dischi
25-Feb-2007: Freevo 1.7.0 has been released - with support for the Sony PlayStation 3
Freevo 1.7.0 is the new stable bramch from the freevo 1 branch. It brings with it important developments including the use of some of the kaa modules from freevo v2.
Some of the new features that have been added since RC2
- New Music Player Daemon (mpd) plug-in
- New record server commercial detection and removal
- New record server duplicate recording detection
- New PS3 support on Yellow Dog Linux
- New buttonbar plug-in that displays buttons on the bottom of the screen
- New screensaver plug-in that allows easy writing of screen savers
It's a cracking release and and futher tribute to the work done by Duncan and all the contributers. For more info on the release see the changelog and the wiki entry
19-Feb-2007: Freevo 1.6.3 released
Freevo 1.6 series is the stable branch of Freevo and only contains bug fixes.Check out the changelog on the wiki page, it links to the tracker where a more detailed description of the bugs is available.
Also Added is a contrib/plugins directory for plug-ins that people have contributed which are of special interest. Please check them out and report bugs or better still send patches.
Just a couple of dependencies that don't work at the moment. Python-2.5.0 doesn't seem to work on 64-bit systems but works fine on 32-bit systems. Twisted-2.5.0 has some changes that are not compatible with Freevo, stick to 2.4.0.
04-Jan-2007: GeeXboX teams up with freevo for LiveCD/distro
The developers of the free embedded HTPC distro GeeXboX have decided to use Freevo v2 and the kaa multimedia framework for their forthcoming GeeXboX v2. GeeXboX v2 will essentially become and office Freevo v2 LiveCD. The GeeXboX developers bring a wealth of experience on board including Mplayer developers and it is hoped that both projects will greatly benifit from their work together. Check out the announcement on their site for more details including a technological preview already available for download.
02-Jan-2007: New year - new release
Freevo-1.7.0-rc2 has been released, there has been a great deal of activity since freevo-1.7.0-rc1 with still more exciting new features.
You will need to download the latest kaa.base-0.1.2, kaa.metadata-0.6.0 and kaa.imlib2-0.2.0 packages from the sourceforge pages. If you have already installed the kaa modules from the previous release please delete site-packages/kaa before installing the new packages.
I don't want to bore you with a long list of changes but you can see them all from the wiki pages: http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/doc/SVN_ChangeLogs and http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/doc/ChangeLog
A really big thank you to all of you who have contributed and it is thanks to these contributions that freevo has been moving so quickly over the last few months, just in case your interested the "ever growing" list is in the Docs/CREDITS.
Before the actual release of freevo-1.7.0 comes out there are still a few things to improve, change and fix. See the feature requests and the bug reports on the sourceforge tracker pages for a list: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46652&atid=446898 and http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46652&atid=446895.
21-Dec-2006: Freevo 1.6.2 released.
Today Freevo-1.6.2 has been released.
As you know the Freevo 1.6 series is the stable branch of Freevo and only contains bug fixes
The bug fixes include, from the ChangeLog
* Fixed audio track name formatting (B#1605570,B#1605042)
* Fixed autoshutdown unicode error (B#1612257)
* Fixed cdbackup plug-in to correctly execute lame (B#1615970)
* Fixed mplayer to correctly handle Matroska audio ids (B#1619058)
* Fixed weather unicode problem (B#1612617)
* Updated autoshutdown to react to the return code and removed unused vars (B#1612257)
* Updated osd forced fonts variables and freevo_config and local_conf (B#1608393)
* Updated Spanish translation (B#1612612)
* Added the Russian translation (F#1602678)
Check out the ChangeLog on the wiki page (http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/doc/ChangeLog), it links to the tracker where a more detailed description of the bugs is available.
For all you Freevo-1.5.x users, Christmas is a good time for upgrading to the latest version, but it will be easier on a day *not* after "the night before". For you who are not the fluent in English, it means when you are clear headed and sober. :D
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone.
Duncan
29-Nov-2006: New releases: Freevo 1.6.1 and 1.7.0rc1
Plently of work going on in the last month results in two new releases. Freevo 1.6.1 is a bugfix release, have a look at the changelog for a full list. Download from here
For the brave and wild at heart there is a release candidate for Freevo-1.7.0, this contains many new features, and most importantly mmpython has been replaced by kaa.base and kaa.metadata. These are both part of the Freevo v2 codebase and 1.7.x will help with testing this code. There's lots of other nice features too that might convince you to try it out.
o Reworked webserver library: This is really cool, it allows playing/listening to music and video on both the local machine and the freevo host machine. Your pictures are also now shown on the web page.
o The encoding server: The encoding server now allows users to encode their DVDs and reencode recorded TV from IVTV cards (in fact it can reencode any mpeg file) allowing users to archive material they want to keep while saving on disk space.
o New RSS server: The new rssserver grabs rss feed files, such as podcasts, in the background.
o Lots more goodies, some of them are mentioned here
Freevo-1.7.0-rc1 does require Python-2.4.x, but this will be fixed in the actual release. The kaa packages have also been released and are available from the freevo download pages
You will also need to get BeautifulSoup, which is a HTML and XML parser, get this from: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ and install it, in the normal way.
28-Oct-2006: Freevo 1.6.0 is released
Not just on time but ahead of schedule the new 1.6 release is now available for download. You can get it here and don't forget you'll need the new version of mmpython (get that here). Two of the big new features of this release are the support for pausing live tv and the support for multiple tuners for watching and recording tv simultaneously. Of course they are just two of many new features and bug fixes included, check out the release notes and changelog for a detailed list of developments.
22-Oct-2006: New mmpython release for Freevo 1.6
One of Freevo 1.6's new dependencies will be mmpython-0.4.10. This release brings extra features including reading the audio and subtitle language names instead of codes from a DVD, image orientation is now set from the JPEG EXIF data to allow Freevo to auto set the correct rotation. It's currently available in svn and will be released with 1.6
22-Oct-2006: Freevo v2 progress update
If you are brave, feel free to try freevo 2.0 from svn and report bugs. Some plugins don't work and the tv code is still buggy. But video, audio and image should work.
TODO:
o Finish kaa.popcorn (Dischi)
o Finish kaa.candy (tack)
o Integrate kaa.candy (Dischi)
o Change the config code to kaa.config (Dischi)
o Rewrite kaa.record (Soenke)
22-Oct-2006: Testing Freevo - where to send your bug reports
Please note if you are testing the new 1.x releases we ask that you use the Sourceforge bug tracker and feature request tracker.
If you are testing out the new Freevo 2.0 svn or Kaa please send all bug reports and feature request to the mailing lists. Please prefix the subject line with [BUG] and [PATCH].
17-Oct-2006: Release date of 31st Oct set for 1.6
The planned release date for freevo version 1.6 has been set at the 31st October. Work is progressing really well. Pausing live TV, multi tuner support and new skins have already been added along with roughly 50 other additions and fixes. Have a look here for a full list of developments so far. We'd like to ask again for anyone who can to test out the svn version and report any bugs you find using the bug tracker. For info on the latest svn structure and how to download the different branches go here
28-Sept-2006: Freevo 1.6 now testing in svn!
Freevo v1.6
Lots of work going on now. The 1.x branch has a new maintainer in Duncan Webb and we'd like to ask all users to test out the svn trunk for 1.5 where you can get a copy of what will soon be the new 1.6 release. Please test it fully and report any bugs on the bugtracker here.
Here a hint at what we hope to see in 1.6: Live TV pause, multi tuner support for watching and recording at the same time, new skins and dozens of bugfixes and other improvements. 1.6 is shaping up to be a great release but we need your help so get testing!
Freevo v2.0pre1
Dischi and Jason are still hard at work on the 2 trunk and hope to have a pre1 release out this year. Being a pre release this wont be as stable as the 1.6 release but as mentioned this trunk is almost a complete rewrite and is the future of freevo so take your pick depending on which suits you and join in.
02-Aug-2006: Get paid to work on Freevo!
In order to ensure that freevo v2 is released sooner rather than later and with all the great features we're looking for we are now looking to recruit programmers to complete specific parts of the framework to speed things along. If you're a developer with python or C++ knowledge check out this page in the wiki for more information. If you're an end user and don't have an programming skills you can still help, click on the 'Support this project' link on the left and leave whatever donation you can afford. We'll put this fund towards paying for more code and take some of the stress off our overworked developers :) There is also some other non coding work that needs to be done, wiki, docs, answering mailing list questions, skin design, click here for a list of that kind of stuff.
01-Aug-2006: New website maintainer
Today I'm (John Molohan) taking over as maintainer of www.freevo.org. I will be updating the site over the coming weeks with some info on the current status of Freevo. There's no rewrite of the site planned though so don't get your hopes up but at least there may be a bit more life to it now. I you want to get involved in the maintenance of the site and in particular have good design skills drop me a mail on the users list.
John.
06-Mar-2006: Freevo at the CeBIT in Hannover
The current Freevo SVN snapshot will be shown at the CeBIT in Hannover It is part of the Bremen stand in H9 S21. The University of Bremen / TZI (the people who feed me) will show Freevo as platform for our (TZI) future visions of home entertainment. It's very small (about two square meters) but Freevo is there. I will be there on the first and the last day, co-workers of mine on the other days.
Thanks to everyone helping me the last weeks to create the demonstrator.
Dischi
15-Nov-2005: Freevo 1.5.4 bugfix release for Python 2.4
I forgot to update the website, sorry for this. I released Freevo 1.5.4 some weeks ago. It is only a bugfix release to work with Python 2.4. All the new stuff will be in Freevo 2.0, but it will take a while until a pre release of this will be out. Too much to do and not enough developers. But Freevo is not dead and the Freevo 2.0 will be a huge improvement.
Dischi
12-Jun-2005: mmpython 0.4.9
I just released mmpython 0.4.9. The image parser works better now, the last release had some problems detecting images. The exif parser is also updated. The major update in this release is an update to the lsdvd parser to make it work with the latest version of lsdvd.
If you have problems with freevo not detecting your discs, please update mmpython or downgrade your lsdvd.
There will be also a new Freevo release soon. It will not be based on cvs head, too much to do there. It will be a short update to the 1.5 release branch to work with Python 2.4. I will post some status informations about cvs head a.k.a. Freevo 2.0 the next weeks.
Dischi
04-Apr-2005: Freevo is ONLamp Project of the Week
Freevo is highlighted on ONLamp as the Open Source Project of the Week. Included is a short description and a small interview. The actual article is on OSDir, both sites are part of the O'Reilly Network.
Rob
30-Jan-2005: Freevo in the news
Howard Wen did an interview with the main freevo developers and it's is published at Linuxdevcenter.com. Other sides like slashdot and LinuxToday report about this interview. In case you read about Freevo the first time in the interview, welcome to Freevo, I hope you like it.
We are busy with the upcoming 2.0 release, please check the HelpNeeded page in the 2.0 if you have some free time to help us.
Dischi
23-Jan-2005: Freevo 1.5.3 Bugfix release is out
A new bugfix release for the 1.5.x branch. The release includes some unicode fixes again and contains an update to the IMDb webside changes. All packages except the Debian packages are up to date. There is also a mmpython update with fixes for mpeg parsing.
Download:
Check the new wiki for Installation instructions.
Dischi
08-Dec-2004: New Freevo Wiki
the Freevo Wiki is filled with spam and the old MoinMoin doesn't support access restrictions. Because SF made a hardware and software update on the Webserver, I installed the current version of MoinMoin. Since the old Wiki has spam and outdated informations, the documents are not copied to the new Wiki. Please help us copying the old docs.
- New Wiki: http://freevo.sf.net/cgi-bin/doc
- Old Wiki http://freevo.sf.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi (deactivated now)
To add something to the new Wiki you must login. Without login you can only read the pages. After login please do the following:
- Find a page you want to port to the new Wiki. Or even a part of a page. Better use more smaller pages and not one big page. E.g. the old DocumentationPage is too big. I ported the tv part to a tv configuration page.
- Copy the content from the old page to the new one. Check the content:
- remove spam
- check if the doc is about Freevo 1.5.x or cvs, nothing older. Remove old stuff.
- add something if you like
- Replace the old page (or part of the page) with a link to the page in the new Wiki.
I hope to get a nice documentation wiki in the near future, but I need help. Someone also made a tikiwiki version of our homepage and the wiki, but even the new webserver on sf can't handle this. So it is still MoinMoin.
There is also a second new Wiki for the upcoming 2.0 release at http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/freevo-2.0
Dischi
31-Oct-2004: Freevo 1.5.2 is out
Again this is a bugfix release of the 1.5 branch. No new features, only some smaller bugfixes. There is also a new release of mmpython adding ac3 audio file detection.
ChangeLog for 1.5.2
- Fix memory leak when running image viewer in slideshow mode
- Fix recordserver favorite handling for a specific day of week
- Fix video aspect handling in skin
- Smaller unicode fixes
Files:
Official Gentoo ebuilds are out already, so the rsync script makes no sense anymore and is deleted. Debian packages are available from the APT source.
SuSE and RedHat packages should follow shortly.
And while you're here, please fill out the Freevo Survey.
Dischi
09-Oct-2004: Freevo Survey
We want to know something about how you use Freevo, which hardware you have and so on. If you have some free time right now, please fill out the Freevo Survey.
You can also add some feature wishes there, so help us improving Freevo by filling out the survey. Thanks to Fons von der Beek and all helping him for setting this up.
Dischi
11-Sep-2004: Freevo 1.5.1 Bugfix release is out
This is a small bugfix release for 1.5.0. If you have problems with 1.5.0, you should update. There is also an updated mmpython, but you don't need that for Freevo 1.5.1.
Here the small ChangeLog for 1.5.1
- Better support for multi file videos
- Improved DVD detection
- Faster web-server TV guide
- Games snes header caching
- Imageviewer slideshow enhancements
- Bugfixes
Packages for Gentoo (official portage tree), Debian and Redhat are out, too.
Files:
Dischi
17-Jul-2004: Freevo 1.5.0 is out
This release is stable, but there are some plugins know to cause problems. For a crash-free usage, you shouldn't activate them.
The cvs will be in code freeze for another week. After that, we start developing again and it's hard to make an update release. So if you find a bug or update a translation file, please try to do so before 2004-07-24. We will release 1.5.1 if necessary then.
For a complete list of changes, read the ChangLog file.
Plugins with problems:
- video.mplayer-vis: There seems to be a problem in pygoom resulting in a pygame segfault.
- video.bmovl: This plugin is experimental, it may crash
- video.details: It won't crash Freevo, but maybe it doesn't work as expected
Files:
Distributions:
We will also support Fedora Core 2 updates using yum when the RPM is build. If you package Freevo for SuSE or Mandrake, please drop us a note.
Dischi
06-Jun-2004: New release candidate: Freevo 1.5.0-rc3
On the road to 1.5.0, here is a new pre-release. It's a bugfix release with only a few new features. The complete changelog:
- Make it possible to move inside a zoom in image viewer
- Main loop rewrite
- Auto detect movies with more than one file
- Chapter support for video files
- Improved pot file generation (i18n)
I hope this to be the last release canditate before 1.5.0. So please report all bugs you find in this release. If you reported a bug before and it's still in this release, please report it again. And if you have some free time, please update the translations for your language.
Files:
Gentoo users can use the reactivated rsync-freevo script to update the local portage tree.
Debian users can use the apt source here to update.
Dischi
11-May-2004: Freevo 1.5.0-rc2 and mmpython 0.4.2 bugfix release
This is a major bugfix release to remove a race condition to make mp3 playback working again. Also mmpython 0.4.2 fixes a bug to detect DVDs on harddisc using lsdvd.
Please update: Freevo 1.5.0-rc2 and mmpython 0.4.2.
Dischi
07-May-2004: Freevo 1.5.0-rc1 Birthday Release is out
2 years ago Krister released the first version of Freevo. I'm proud to announce the first release candidate for 1.5.0 today. Much changed between Freevo 1.0 and the current release -- but not so much between pre1 and rc1 of 1.5.0.
Most of the changes are bug fixes. The only bigger new thing is pygoom support for the mplayer audio plugin. Since pygoom has no real homepage, you can find the package at http://freevo.sf.net/pygoom. Just run configure, make and make install to install it. After that, activate the plugin audio.mplayervis. This won't work with the runtime, expect a new runtime with pygoom support soon. There is also a new version of mmpython, enhancing Matroska support and fixing a strange DVD bug by using the external program lsdvd.
If you find a bug, please send a bug report to the freevo users or devel list with [BUG] in the subject. You need to be subscribed to the list to do so. If you aren't on the list, send the bug report to freevo@dischi-home.de with [Freevo-Bug] in the subject (if you don't add this string, the mail will be deleted by procmail). We don't accept bug reports for older versions anymore. And if you sent a bug report before with a bug still in rc1, please send it again, it may have been lost.
Also send patches and translation updates to the mailing lists to help Freevo move on to 1.5.0 final.
Now, download Freevo and test it:
Freevo 1.5.0-rc1 and mmpython 0.4.1.
Dischi
21-Mar-2004: Freevo 1.5.0-pre1 is out
After a long time a new release is out. Since we made many internal changes like converting to Unicode the release is only a pre release. There is no new runtime right now and the installer also downloads the latest stable version (1.4.1), but I guess there will be distribution specific packages out soon.
Besides the new Freevo tarball, you need to update your mmpython to version 0.4. But this version of mmpython won't work with older versions of Freevo. We also renamed most config variables. There is a transformation script, but I suggest you check the complete config because some variables have now more features.
And now the long (and maybe incomplete) Changelog:
- Add MimetypePlugin
- New fxd parser and better fxd item handling
- Rename most config variables (!)
- Add "cross fading"-style blending in the image viewer
- Fxd file support for <playlist> and <slideshow> (see share/fxd/examples)
- Replaced webradio plugin with a fxd file (share/fxd)
- New, reworked bluetooth plugin for controlling Freevo
- detachbar plugin to see what Freevo is playing when detaching the audio player
- Support for Rendezvous/Zeroconf based service announcement
- Freevoscreensaver plugin. loop your favorite movie or slideshow to be your screensaver. And it only will show when in menus so no annoying savers popup while watching movies.
- Update command plugin to allow for X users to run X based apps (Mozilla etc) via a FXD file.
- big speed enhancement:
- better caching of files/attributes
- including mmpython cache inside Freevo
- storage of item variables of Freevo sessions
- VirtualFileSystem to store metadata
- Skin enhancements
- Support for DVD Mirrors (full lossless versions of DVDs played from the hard drive)
- Reworked the web interface into XHTML with most design and layout in the style sheet. Removed proprietary HTML attributes.
- Metadata generation during runtime and by cache helper
- Unicode support
- Better automounter support for network shares
- many many other things
Enough text, download now: Freevo 1.5.0-pre1 and mmpython 0.4. Also check the add-ons page for plugins that are not in the distribution.
Dischi
8-Feb-2004: Freevo 1.5 Preview
A preview of some of the new stuff you can expect in the next release of Freevo is available here.
You can also take a look at a new diagram of a possible configuration that shows some of the new features at this link.
18-Dec-2003: Freevo 1.4.1 bugfix release
Nothing important. If Freevo crashes for some discs, download 1.4.1. RPMs, and DEBs for all major distros are also out.
(Note that this release does not depend on anything in CVS)
20-Nov-2003: Finally: Freevo 1.4 is out
Only some small bugfixes between rc4 and this release. Please read the new installation help site how to install Freevo.
And we now also have a plugin and skin download page. Feel free to upload your own plugins and skins here (big thanks to Jan Grewe for setting this up). Please make sure you have permission to upload the skin/plugin if you use images and something else from other people.
Dischi
