Yesterday the final version of LinuxMCE 0710 was released. Basically, it’s exactly the same as RC1 except just two thing. The first one is adding a few packages into debian cach to speedup installation. And the second one is updated version of ZWave interface. So, if you have installed RC1 there is no reason to upgrade it.
I have to find time to upgrade my 0710 Beta 4 and play with VDR 1.6. And waiting for the first version of 0804.
As many of you may know Kubuntu 8.04 was released at 24/04/08. So, LinuxMCE developers started thinking about 0804 version. You can find a list of goals for LinuxMCE 0804 here. Some interesting ideas are: adding JavaMO and MAME, improving Z-Wave, MythTV and INSTEON integration, allowing to create a custom themes for Orbiter.
Personally, I’m very interested to have a better VDR integration. The RC1 already contains the latest stable VDR version (1.6.0). Thanks to that I’ll able to see Russian EPG and play with SoftCAM. But to use VDR with more than one media director the proper integration should be done. I understand the problem with VDR. Unlike MythTV it doesn’t have a strict client-server architecture. So, this is a main difficulty with providing a full-featured functionality for media director. But I’m sure that LinuxMCE developers will find a way to implement that. Hope it’ll be in the 0804 release.
It seems that LinuxMCE development team is ready to release 0710. The first (and last) release candidate was announced today. I didn’t find the distribution anywhere yet. But when RC will be available for downloading I won’t be able to test it. Because tomorrow me and my wife Maria go to London for four days. So, I’ll install the stable version I hope when we return back.
You can see the full change log between 0704 and 0710 here. The most important things are support for amd64, support for 1080p, adding the latest MythTV packages, integration with VDR 1.6.0, Telecom refactoring, upgrading Xine and nVidia drivers.
To monitor the LinuxMCE 0710 RC news check that forum topic.
A web/telephone based workshop, which will be held on the 29th of March, at 12:00 noon, Eastern Daylight Time was announced on the LinuxMCE site. It is scheduled for two hours. It’ll cover following topics:
covered:
To be productive, please, setup HADesigner according to this wiki article and read that forum topic to configure audio and video from the workshop on your PC.
Yesterday I heard a good news. LinuxMCE development team decided to use the latest stable release of VDR instead of 1.4.7. Right decision indeed. VDR 1.6.0 includes a lot of improvements like support of UTF-8, better integration with CAM, better implementation of functionality to decode HD signal. With support of UTF-8 it shouldn’t be any problems with displaying of Russian EPG on the on-screen menu and showing correctly Russian names in the recorded file names. Which is not possible with version 1.4.7 without UTF-8 patch. Improvement of HDTV support is also important because many people want to watch HD on their wide screen TVs.
The first version of LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 (maybe it’ll be Beta 5) with VDR 1.6.0 will be available in the beginning of April. Hope it’ll include some improvement for VDR on media director as well.