Due to popular demand, I've decided to make the latest build available for purchase. Prices are $9.99/£4.99/€6.99 payable via Paypal (contact me for details). Certain conditions apply, such as, there is no trial-version available at this time - meaning you're in effect purchasing the software unseen, as is. No refunds available for this pre-prelease build (due to the fact the licensing service is not up and running yet) and all support should go through this thread or the forums over here.

For anyone interested, what you're actually purchasing is a life-time license to the applications - this means you'll have unlimited access to updates of myTV for the lifespan of the application (ie. as long as it's sold/supported). If you're still on the fence, I will have a trial version available in the not too distant future.

So what is myTV I hear you ask. Well, it's a plugin/addon/utility for Windows Vista Media Center (available with Vista Home Ultimate and Vista Premium). Basically it'll display your archived TV series in a more user friendly way, as an added bonus it also includes complete metadata for Shows/Episodes and keeps track of what you've watched when (a feature it seems all the other TV archive offerings out there have forgotten about?). Rather than having to go through the Video Gallery page, choosing a folder, then another folder and finally a videofile (after having thought about which episode you were up to), just start myTV, find the show you feel like watching and if there are unseen episodes press the Play Next button - or if you just fancy an episode of The Simpsons, press Play Random. A somewhat new feature is the New Episodes screen, where it will list any unseen episodes for any of your tracked TV shows with an airdate in the past x days (x obviously being configurable).

The application consists of two parts (well, three really, if you count the MS SQL Express as one). These are, the myTV GUI - the application itself, running inside VMC all developed using MCML and C# so it looks and feels like the rest of Media Center, and it's lightning fast compared to older MCE plugins developed in Hosted HTML. The second part of myTV is the myTVservice - this runs in the background of your PC (any time it's on) and watches your filesystem for new/renamed/deleted files and updates the database accordingly. Once you've added a show to the application it'll automagically(tm) go online and grab the correct metadata whenever a new file has occured.

Now that's taken care of, I'll have the new build up by tonight - all betatesters can download from the usual spot (I'll edit this post when it's there). I've included a changelog at the bottom of this post, which, whilst not complete lists the major differences at least.

Here are some more screenies of the current build. As always, if you spot an error or would like the layout to change slightly (or even a completely new interface) let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Main Menu view with rotating banners

Main Menu view without rotating banners

Main Settings menu

General Settings screen

Season selection screen

Episode selection screen

New Episodes screen

Guess that about does it for now. Will update ya'll when I put the new build up.

changelog
Added
* Visual indication if an episode is watched or not. Green tick in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail = watched.
* (*Test on remote*) 'Overview hidden' displayed for unwatched episodes. You can view the full overview by pressing #. Userdefinable setting - HideOverviews - default: true
* Pressing '#' on the New Episodes screen will display the overview and other additional information - HideOverview not valid on this screen - ie. press # and you'll see the overview either way.
* Rewritten Settings code and screen. It now mimics the standard VMC settings. Also, all settings on the screen should now actually work.
* Ability to turn on/off the MainMenu banner rotation. Userdefinable setting - RotatingMainMenu - default: true
* Changed Main Menu filtering. Removed the sidebar Genre menu and replaced it with a top-of-the-screen pivotmenu. Also added a settings shortcut to the same.

Fixed
* Changed the way Episode Autofocusing works. If you've watched all eps in a season it will no longer autoselect the last episode but rather stay on the first.
* Season screen now only showing 'not seen' if there actually are unwatched episodes.
* UseSeasons now actually works. Setting it to false will go directly to the Episode selection screen from Show Selection. Userdefinable setting - UseSeasons - default: true
* Clicking Left from the main menu now takes you directly to the Genre menu -- OBSOLETE -- reworked filters.
* Automatic adding of show if only one match found now works as should rather than crashing application.
* Correct options now shown for NewShows setting.
* SkipFolders tweaked. It now also kicks in during startup so won't bring up dialogbox if not in DB.
* Mimics the standard VMC interface more closely - ie. buttons/spinners and animations.

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Posted Tue, Oct 9 2007 18:39 by admin