Showtime 3.6 released

It's old new by now but I released Showtime 3.6 a while ago.

Details about all bugs fixed and features added are available here

So what happens now?

I've changed the current version tagging of master to 3.99. That means that the next release will be 4.0.
4.0 will support automatic upgrades from within showtime itself and a lot of other goodies such as TMDB integration and hopefully a new theme.

Stay tuned.
#showtime on efnet

Showtime now also has an IRC channel on efnet. just /join #showtime
Navi-X plugin looking for beta testers

The Navi-X plugin for Showtime is near completion.

For more info see this thread. Reply on that to get an account for the beta project page.
Showtime 3.4 released
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.
Showtime 3.4 release candidate

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