[Announcement] UMC 2.1.0

[DonGyros]

Dear users of UMC,

You have all been very patiently awaiting the release of the next version of UMC, version 2.1.0. After a long time restructuring UMC's core and fixing issues, we are very proud to announce that UMC 2.1.0 will be released on the end of July 2011. This version is currently being intensively tested by our betatesters. We have chosen to finish a first version of UMC 2.X which is feature complete and useable for all NMT platforms. The most effort during development in the past months was invested in bugfixing and increasing the resilience of the code; at this moment, the UMC GUI and scanning engine have been completed. The next weeks, we will still need time to work on ensuring that as many different NMT devices as possible are supported, and fixing a small number of bugs.


At this point I already want to thank the most important people involved in UMC version 2.1.0

- first of all big thanks to CRiSP who joined the UMC team a while ago and greatly contributed to this version of UMC
- also big thanks to our core testers IC-Killer, Mitchlw, Mooh and all the other ones who did tests again and again


The most significant changes to UMC 2.1.0 will include:

UMC 2.1.0 is considered a "full" release, so the label 'beta' and 'alpha' disappear.

New functionality
Disk and memory cache speeds up scanning times drastically.
UMC now supports running as a background service in the system tray.
New 'observer' functionality which automatically detects changes in your libraries and updates your database accordingly.
Media management shows preview of the collected information and images.
UMC console can be secured using username and password to prevent unauthorized changes to your configuration.
Integration of Android and UMP support into UMC.

Changed functionality
The scanning process has been optimized and been made more clear by separating every step of the process into plugins. These plugins are fully user configurable.
The entire process of finding movies & series, identifying which media files correspond to what movies and collecting information from XML files and internet sources, has been largely rewritten. In particular the handling of series should now be fully functional.
Series XML format has been updated to support multiple languages.
Updating process has been greatly improvied.

Deprecated functionality
Synchronisation functionality has been removed due to its complexity; this feature will be rewritten and re-introduced in a later version.

Furthermore, we have been working also on providing you with an extended support for skins to use for UMC, for both users of the X-100 and X-200 devices.
We hope to provide very soon more information about this topic.

Known limitations for UMC 2.1.0:

Music and photo functionality is currently limited; this will be the focus for the next releases of UMC.

We have set out a roadmap for UMC, where the featuresets for the next releases 2.1.1 and 2.2.0 have been defined. We have a clear vision on where we want to go with UMC and of course welcome all of your feedback.

We appreciate your patience while waiting for the next release of UMC

[PeterB]

(06-04-2011 11:01 PM)DonGyros Wrote:  ...we are very proud to announce that UMC 2.1.0 will be released on the end of July 2011.

Wow .... many thanks to all those involved. I have July 31 (conveniently, a Sunday) marked in my diary and will be counting off the days!

Quote:We have set out a roadmap for UMC, where the featuresets for the next releases 2.1.1 and 2.2.0 have been defined. We have a clear vision on where we want to go with UMC and of course welcome all of your feedback.

Is/will this roadmap be published anywhere?

Quote:We appreciate your patience while waiting for the next release of UMC

I fear that the final eight weeks wait may be the longest!

[DonGyros]

(06-05-2011 02:49 PM)PeterB Wrote:  Is/will this roadmap be published anywhere?

We will publish the roadmap in the next days.

[xor]

Excellent. Progress has been slow, and news less than optimal, but finally a new release. Thanks.

[CRiSP]

(06-05-2011 11:21 PM)xor Wrote:  Excellent. Progress has been slow, and news less than optimal, but finally a new release. Thanks.

Yes, there is of course a good reason for that . We have restructured a lot of the code of UMC into plugins, which makes UMC a very flexible solution now. At the same time, we took the opportunity to rewrite some parts of code to make them flexible as well. Now as a user you have a very granular control of how movies and episodes are going through the scanning process, you can enable/disable features that you don't need which makes the scanning process a lot more efficient. A simple example is how an episode is recognized, there are perhaps 20 possible ways of defining an episode file (S01E01, 01x01, 01.01, S01xE01, ... ) -- now you can disable all patterns that you don't use such that the scanning process just needs to do less testing, checking, ... by combining that with a whole bunch of performance optimizations that we made (memory cache, disk cache, more efficient code, ...) we can now say that scanning is very fast if you do some tweaking .

Also, because the 'flow' that a media file goes through is now very clearly set out in stages (for every stage there is a type of plugin), it should be more clear for the end-user how UMC works and what you need to do if a movie/series/episode is not automatically recognized.

Of course, the default settings work fine too, so if you don't care about tweaking or customization, UMC will work out of the box too .

So you see, we have changed quite some things in UMC; we decided to work another few weeks on 2.1.0 because we did a lot of improvements and also wanted to go for a few loose ends that we still had open (it would have been a shame to release an almost completely restructured program if only a few weeks more work can make it 'complete').

BR,

Crisp

[buba013]

good News ,

Keep up the good work.

Thank you

[joe citizen]

Its great to hear you guys are still working on this. Cant wait to see what the new version looks like and how it functions.

[Xorron]

Greats News for me ... thx for

Regards Xorron

[excal]

That's great news, glad to hear things are in the works!

[Groovy]

Cant wait

[yasan]

Hi everyone does anyone know what is the final situation for umc 2.1.0

[DonGyros]

The final situation is that UMC 2.1.0 will be released as announced by the end of this month.

Even if we still need more time to finish some things or to do more tests UMC 2.1.0 will be definitely released.

Me and CRiSP had a lot of other problems and challenges to deal with in the last few weeks/months -> we became both daddies

[buba013]

congrats with that,

good to see it will be out soon

[yasan]

(07-23-2011 11:43 PM)DonGyros Wrote:  The final situation is that UMC 2.1.0 will be released as announced by the end of this month.

Even if we still need more time to finish some things or to do more tests UMC 2.1.0 will be definitely released.

Me and CRiSP had a lot of other problems and challenges to deal with in the last few weeks/months -> we became both daddies

That's great news. Thanks for your great work.

[kiranos]

Cant wait to try out the new version! I got help maybe 6months ago by Crisp and his nfo scraper. I'll have to continue my work on appling that for my collection How is work going with the headless scraper for linux? to be able to scrape movies etc without graphical gui? is it in the todo list?

Congrats to both of you (fatherhood) btw!!!