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We are very excited to introduce you to the new iPad app that we have been working on for the last few months. We wanted to create an app that goes beyond just basic functionality and also has a great user experience. The central theme that we focused on for this application was speed, speed, speed. Media Caching All media information is cached using a combination of both disk and memory caches. On startup we prime our memory caches with our disk cached media list information for a given server. This allows lightening fast loading of our media lists across tabs. Scrolling This makes or breaks the app; we have users with 1000s of movies and scrolling through them should be lighting fast. Jaggedness or choppiness will kill the user experience. Besides caching the media list we also aggressively cache all images into memory mapped files for the fastest retrieval was can possibly achieve. This results in a silky smooth scrolling experience. Navigation This is a subtle thing that can make for awful experience: opening a page and being stuck at a spinner. When you navigate between pages in our app we try avoid blocking the user. If data is required for a given view we try really hard to show what data we have available and then load the additional data in the background. Search and Sort The client has all the metadata that are required to sort or filter you list so we eliminate the need to make server calls and perform them locally. This results in almost instantaneous searching and sorting. Usability (UI/UX): Raw performance isn't the only way to create a faster experience. We worked with our designer, developers and testers to find ways we can make typical actions with the app fast. Here are some examples: Shallow Navigation: We want you to get to you media with minimum number of taps. To do this we designed a new "detail" screen for TV Shows. The user used to have to tap on tv shows > series > seasons > episodes > episodes detail before he can play his media. This can become tedious if you have to do it often. So we created a solution where you go from TV Shows > Detail page and everything that you need to access your TV Shows is designed into a single page. Perspective Design: We also wanted the main pages to be in focus all the time -- we have found excessive navigation can become tiring for a user. Example: You are checking out the movie Star Trek into the Darkness and you wanted to read about Chris Pine and check out what other movies he is in. We don't want to show a detail page, a cast page, related movie page. We wanted to keep you in the movie detail page while you access all the information that you are looking for. Trailers: Chapters: Same design applies to remote as well, the idea is to keep the key item in perspective. Home page is both stylish and functional. Just take a look. (Oh man, simulator and gif don't do just to home design) Solid Core Features: We know that Media Browser is a very feature rich server. We had to make a decision to either launch sooner or delay launching so we could continue to build out this long tail of features. We have decided to focus on a core set of features we think will be most used and do them as well as we can. We will re-evaluate this set of features after the app has been released for awhile and we collect feedback from our users. Some of the features that won't make it into our release: music playback, ebooks, internationalization, etc. We are very excited about this app and I hope you feel the same way when you get to try this app. We are targeting end of next week (before 5/10/2014) for the App Store submission and it will be available in all countries once we get through the approval process. Our Team: Simucal - Developer Darwindeeds - Developer ErgoProxy - Design Ninja I also wanted to give a special shout out to our beta testers sfnetwork, cheesegeezer, spaceboy and im85288. They have really helped us iron out a lot of bugs and design issues in our beta.

To celebrate this slew of releases and announcements today, for one week all of our apps can be purchased for $.99: Android @ Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GVH9O0I Android @ Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mb.android&hl=en Windows 8.1: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/media-browser/ad55a2f0-9897-47bd-8944-bed3aefd5d06 Windows Phone: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/media-browser/f4971ed9-f651-4bf6-84bb-94fd98613b86 Participating Plugins: Cover Art, MB Intros (Thanks Ebr!) Please support us by purchasing these great apps! And don't forget, if you haven't done already, please remember to rate/review the app on their respective store.

Highlights: New translations DLNA Play To improvements New DLNA Server Enhanced DLNA profile editing New server notification system New transcoding audio boost setting New collection grouping setting Improved mobile layouts in the web client Display mirroring added to the web client Theme songs in the web client New translations Thanks to the community effort, Media Browser Server is now about 60% translated, and new languages have been added. We're still looking to improve our localization, so please let us know if you would like to help translate. DLNA Play To Improvements Again thanks to community efforts, we've improved our DLNA Play To device support. This is still an ongoing effort, so please join in and share your experiences with us. DLNA Server Media Browser now features a full DLNA server, which significantly increases the number of devices we support. It is highly configurable and allows you to choose which user library is presented by the server. (This can be selected independently for each device and will be discussed later). As this is a brand new feature it may not yet work with every device out there. Please join in the community effort to report issues and expand our device support. Enhanced DLNA Profile Editing It's now easier than ever to edit DLNA profiles, and a number of new settings have been added to help you fine tune for your devices. You can even choose which user library is presented to each device by the Dlna server. New Server Notification System This is a fun one. Now when various server events take place, you can choose how and when you want to be notified: Once you enable a notification, you can choose who receives it, what notification services are used, and you can customize the message title. By default, the server ships with one included notification service, the dashboard notifications you've already come to know and love. How do you get more? By installing them from the plugin catalog: New Transcoding Audio Boost Setting Depending on how you've encoded your media, you may or may not want the audio boost we're applying. So now you can control that. New Collection Grouping Setting With the last release we enabled movie collection grouping, and we understand not everybody is going to want that, so now you can control it easily. Improved Mobile Layouts Backdrops on your smartphone? Check! And an easy to use media controller.. New Display Mirroring Now when you select your player, you can enable display mirroring, and as you browse around in the web client the same content will also be displayed on the app your controlling. Please note you won't see this option with all clients until they've added support for this. Theme Songs in the web client The web client now plays theme songs. This can be toggled in the user preferences slide out menu.

It's been a while, but we're pleased to announce the Windows Phone 8 app has been given a massive update. What's new? - Video seeking when streaming video to the app - "Play on" button moved to app bar - Now Playing bar in the app for easier access (when listening to music only) - Added the "Upcoming" section for TV Collections - Added artist background image to now playing screen (music) - Added support for Live TV (requires additional server configuration) - Local trailer support - Localisation - Transparent tile option for WP8.1 users. Let's look a bit closer at some of these updates. Live TV This may require additional configuration on your server, and is based on the Live TV feature added to the server. This feature will allow you to stream live TV straight to your device, as well as schedule any recordings and series that you want recorded. Let's take a look at some screenshots Video Seeking You asked for it, and asked for it, and we heard you. This release brings in video seeking when streaming videos to your device. Localisation The app is now localised into the following languages: German, Dutch, French, Spanish (Mexico), Russian, Portugese (Brazil), Swedish and Italian. And we have more on the way in future updates (including Kazakh). Here's the main screen in Russian, in case you wondered: Now Playing Bar When listening to music you can be navigating the app and want to have a quick way to get to the Now Playing page, so we've added a Now Playing bar at the bottom of the screen when you're in the Media Browser app: Transparent tile option for WP8.1 users. If you've gone ahead and installed the Windows Phone 8.1 preview, you probably know about the background image for your start screen. In order to benefit this, the tiles need to have a transparent background, so we've added an option in for this. Just go to settings from the main page's app bar, then swipe across to the tile section and choose the transparent tile option. Back out of that page (and you may need to give it a moment to recreate the tile before you exit out of the app). This will be applied to all live tiles, so the main tile, the remote control tile and the new Live TV tile. And here it is in action What feature are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments. Download the app now from the Windows Phone store http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=f4971ed9-f651-4bf6-84bb-94fd98613b86

It will be a staged rollout you will get is soon.

This is stupendous! Can't wait. Also looking forward to what the future holds for the iphone app.

@AdrianW, my primary development device is a non-retina iPad mini and it runs great on it!

Holly Hell....That's amazeballz!

My wife has an original non-retina mini - so that'll work, right?

This is looking so freaking awesome - I may have to buy myself a new iPad now I still have an original iPad 1.

Very exciting news, thanks for all the hard work!!!!! Can't wait to try it out!

http://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/2494ap/media_browsers_gorgeous_new_ipad_app/

That really looks incredible, well done.

New release, v1.5.1 Glad to announce that today we've released a new version of the Windows 8.1 app. This time it’s mostly about playback and minimizing the the server cpu usage. Thanks to changes made in the server on the latest release combined with changes in the app we can now play mp4’s and avi’s directly without the need to transcode nor remux if the codecs are supported natively. That means that we now also support ac3 5.1 audio. J We’ve also improved the Playback OSD to give you information on Codecs/Resolution and wether we Transcode, Remux or Directplay If you’re already using the app, make sure to change your settings for transcoding to max to fully test the new playback features. (Charms menu -> Settings -> Streaming) Other news: Local trailers for movies. Improved musicplayback view with seeking Backdrop image on actors view. Bugfixes And thanks to our translators we’ve also added new languages, The app now also supports Russian, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech and German. You can get the app from here: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/media-browser/ad55a2f0-9897-47bd-8944-bed3aefd5d06