MediaPortal 2 progress report

Hi guys and gals,

The last progress report for the MediaPortal 2 system was long ago and since then, many things were done.
This blog entry gives a small overview of work items which were done.

I guess I have to apologize because I didn't write more progress reports although I promised it. I was too much involved in development tasks. But we don't sleep; we're doing heavy development.
In the mean time, the team has decided to change the name of the project from MediaPortal-II to MediaPortal 2.

In the last months, many parts of the system have been developed/revised:

UPnP library
The MediaPortal 2 system uses the UPnP protocol to communicate. Since the only public available UPnP library for .net was the library from Intel and that one was quite old, buggy and not available as source code when we started, we decided to develop our own library. Now, we can proudly present our fully functional, well-designed and stable UPnP library.
In the meantime, Intel has reworked their library to a new version which also supports the UPnP 1.1 protocol, but our library is still better :-)

Importer worker
The importer worker component provides an API to schedule import jobs. Import jobs can run on the client and on the server. Jobs that run at the client are automatically executed when the MediaPortal 2 server is connected and they are automatically suspended when the server connection goes down. The next time when the server connection is established again, suspended client import jobs are continued.

MediaLibrary
The MediaPortal 2 MediaLibrary provides a flexible database to store all kinds of metadata of media items like information from ID3 tags, video metainformation about movies, TV channels and EPG data, for example. It also stores metadata to all shares which are available in the system.

The access to the media library is done on a high-level abstraction layer. We use an abstraction concept called „media item aspects“ throughout the application to flexibly store metadata for videos, music files and other media items.

Database engine
To store the contents of the media library and other data from plugins, the MediaPortal 2 server provides a database interface where each plugin can install its own subschema. The system automatically tracks database schema scripts, schema updates and uninstallation of subschemas. Furthermore, it is possible to exchange the database engine by another one.

SkinEngine
Many improvements were done in the SkinEngine. The code was simplified and the DirectX access code was reworked.

This was a small extract of the work amound which was done the last months.
The development of MediaPortal 2 remains exciting!

Cheers,
Daniel