14 DAY TRIAL // Plasma Media Center, a unified media experience on PCs, tablets, netbooks, TVs, and any other device capable of running KDE software, has just reached version 1.3.
It's been six months since the previous Plasma Media Center 1.2 was launched, in December 2013. The developers have made some great progress since then and the software has received some important changes and new features.
Plasma Media Center is a very interesting project because it came out of nowhere and its makers moved swiftly. New versions are released regularly and improvements are added all the time. The software hasn't been adopted by many distros by default, but it's still a young application and many users don't even know it exists.
"Plasma Media Center 1.2 was released as a Christmas gift. Now, we bring to you Plasma Media Center 1.3! As always, we have made sure to make it easier to enjoy your favorite videos, music and photos – both from your collection as well as online sources."
"A big focus has been performance improvements when showing you the media on your computer as well as general polish for the UI," noted the devs in the announcement.
According to the changelog, Plasma Media Center now supports fetching the user's media collection from the new KDE Semantic Search (Baloo), the media library loads faster than ever, PMC will continue to support Nepomuk if the user has KDE libraries installed, MPRIS support has been integrated and it's now possible to use any sort of controller that utilized this protocol, and support has been added for a simple filesystem based media scanner, although it's still experimental.
Also, more details are now displayed in the All Music mode (artist, album, and duration for example), the GStreamer compatibility has been improved by fixing a conflict between GStreamer0.10 and GStreamer1.0 in some distros, tests have been added for the PMC core libs, the UI has been polished, and numerous bugs have been squashed.
A complete list of changes and new features can be found in the official announcement. You can download the Plasma Media Center 1.3 source package right now from Softpedia.
Because this is the source package you won't be able to do anything with it, unless you want to compile it. It's safer to wait until the developers of your distro integrate it into the repositories.