14 DAY TRIAL // The development team of the MythTV open-source media center has announced today, April 11, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the MythTV 0.28 update.
According to the release notes, MythTV 0.28 is a pretty important version, which brings WebFrontend, a new component whose main design goal is to replace the MythWeb web interface, as it requires no configuration because it is using the web server built into the backend.
For now, WebFrontend is not mature enough to replace MythWeb, which is still present in the MythTV 0.28 release. In addition to the WebFrontend component, there are major improvements to the built-in Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) implementation, deprecation of the cardinput table, and storage groups support for MythMusic.
"The UPnP code has seen major changes, improved browsing modes, more metadata, artwork for all media, strict UPnP (2014) and DLNA compliance and support for additional UPnP features. (Note: Client support for additional metadata varies. Client behavior depends on UPnP compliance.)," reads today's announcement.
FFmpeg 3.0, H.265 (HEVC) and VP9 support
But that's not all, as MythTV now supports the latest FFMpeg 3.0 multimedia backend, along with the H.265 (HEVC) and VP9 codecs. Furthermore, it looks like the MythMusic Radio Stream List has been updated with support for over 31,000 radio streams, and MythZoneMinder now displays pop-up notifications on alarms.
Under the hood, MythTV now requires Qt 5.2 or later, the Exiv2 image tag reader library, the taglib 1.7 and libcec 1.7 libraries, though libcec 1.8 or later is recommended, as well as the libsystemd-daemon-dev library for the sd_notify() function. More details about the prerequisites can be found in the changelog.
Other than that, the Gallery component has been removed and replaced by a new feature that uses a combination of MythUI and storage groups, and starting with MythTV 0.28, VBox TV Gateways are now officially supported. You can download the MythTV 0.28 sources right now via our website.