What's New

Here are some of the new features introduced in Media Center version 11. Items in italics are new in v11.1.

Views & Display Panes

• Playlist/Smartlist View Header in Display Pane, where notes can be added to a Playlist/Smartlist.

• Library Browser view replaced by View drop-down menus at top of content pane.

• Improvements to Theater Mode

• Split View. View up to three different panes at once.

• New view customization system with more flexibility for thumbnail size, text, etc.

• Pane auto-sizing

New Supported File Types and Devices

• Podcasts (feed.itpc.pcast.podcast), Podcasts RSS (rss) and Podcast XML (xml).

• MicroSoft Media Center Recorded Television File (.dvr-ms)

• DTS and AC3 audio (see Supported File Types for details)

• Video support for iPods.

• Adobe files (pdf)

• MS Office files (doc, xls, csv, ppt, mde and mdb)

• Text files (txt, rtf)

• Web Files (html, htm, mht)

• Programs (exe)

• CUE file playback support with sample-accurate MP3 seeking

• MKV and OGM (requires DirectX filters to be installed)

• Support for ATI HDTV card

• Support for Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150

• Full Support for the Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2 Device

• Full support for the Audible Store as a Service Plug-in

• Support for Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable)

• Support for some UPnP Devices

• Support for RIO 500

General

• Improvements to the logging function (for troubleshooting)

• Improvements to thumbnail storage and loading engine (much faster now).

• Automatic library backup every three days

• New database engine capable of handling 100,000's of files and large amounts of metadata (lyrics, bios, etc.). Now 5 times faster.

• Several memory and speed enhancements -- like database and skin unloading when minimizing MC

• Much of MC's interface can be translated to other languages

• MC can run with guest permissions on Windows 2000 / Windows XP

• Multi-zone synchronization

Interface and Menu Items

• Podcast menu in the tree

• New Spectrum Analyzer in Player Window

• Media Center now supports user-created language files that translate the interface into another languages.

• Webpages inside Media Center accept drag-and-frop of other webpages.

• New Library Header Bar appears at the top of the Content Pane when displaying View Schemes.

• Dropping files onto a Media Center shortcut begins playback

• New Library Browser view

• Many Theater View enhancements

• Online Shopping Services – integrated on-line shopping (see Service Manager).

TV, TiVo and Video

• Support of Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2 device.

• When resuming normal play from FF/REW, TV backtracks to compensate for reaction time.

• Supports TiVo 7.1

Playback

• Podcasting Support with OneClick Podcast subscription.

• RealAudio files play natively in Media Center (requires applicable DirectShow filters)

• Play WM Profesionnal content as a bitstream (for S/PDIF or ASIO output)

• Play WavPack audio format (requires DirectShow filters)

• Native playback of m4a files (requires filters)

• Dropping files onto a Media Center shortcut begins playback

• Preview mode to play the intro of songs

• Video CD playback support

Import

• Import Podcasts (manually or through scheduled automatic downloads)

• Integrated database import and update with smart broken linking repairing, and other nice features

• Import of new files types (see New Supported File Types and Devices

Search & Smartlists

• New search syntax for date elapsed, using suffixes s,m,h,d,y (seconds, minutes, hours, days, years). Example: files less than 3 hours old: [Date Imported]=<3h.

• New ~fill search modifier automatically detects and fills space left on Handheld/Portable device

• Searching inside txt, html, source code files, and rtf documents using [Text]=

• Document support with full text searching / indexing

Tagging

• Improved Real Audio tag importing

• File tagging happens in a background thread so MC can continue to be used while it's saving tags

Images

• Photo Album support for the iPod

• Photos uploaded to an iPod now support NTSC output to a TV

• Basic image editing

• Enhanced album grouping for pictures so pictures taken together get grouped without any user intervention

Misc

• UpnP Server can specify a fixed TCP port to use.

• UpnP Server no longer requires IP address configuration.

• Album Gain support.

• Audio resampling uses Shibatch's high-quality SSRC filters

Handhelds/Portables

• OS-level eject on devices like the iPod

• Image support for iPod

• Album Art support for iPod Video

• Number of simultaneous conversions for handheld uploading is configurable

• Ipod Shuffle support (will not shuffle Podcasts)

• Improved support and performance for Creative Zen Touch and other "All Content" style WMDM devices

History