We are happy to announce the 1.1 Beta release for Plasma Media Center (PMC). The first release of the software received a lot of appreciation and feedback, some of which have been implemented in this release. If you find yourself using your computer (a laptop, a tablet, or a computer connected to a big display) for listening to music or watching your favorite videos and photos, you should definitely try PMC 🙂

•  Complete keyboard/remote-like keys support

The first version of PMC had key navigation support in it, but it behaved weird at times. This was due to the way we were handling the different UI elements. This has now been changed to the standard PageStack way of putting UI pages on the current view, this made the keyboard navigation consistent.

•  Better keyboard navigation for All Music mode

Unlike the other media modes in PMC, the All Music mode doesn’t share common components for browing music etc. For this reason, the keyboard navigation wasn’t able to take advantage of the common key bindings. Now, the All Music mode has its dedicated keyboard navigation workflow.

•  More details in playlist

The playlist used to show only the media name in the list and that was it. In 1.1, we show the media title, artist and duration for each item.

•  Youtube option to search for and watch videos from Youtube

You can now search for your favorite YouTube videos and watch them directly from your mediacenter.

•  Drag and drop support for removing and rearranging media from playlist

•  Playlist shuffling
• Dimming Videos when not viewed directly
• Places integrated into browsing flow

                     

Major bug fixes

This is a video of PMC 1.1 beta running on a netbook with touch ( taken by Shantanu )

–Screenshots–

Source tarball link – http://download.kde.org/unstable/plasma-mediacenter/1.0.90/src/plasma-mediacenter-1.0.90.tar.bz2.mirrorlist

To know more about Plasma Media Center, check out the wiki http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center

Found any bug in PMC or want to have your favourite feature included in future release? file a bug to  https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=plasma-mediacenter&format=guided

Settings screen (and options) for adding media collection for Indexing

Album covers and Artist images for All Music mode

Local File Browser Searching

Folder Preview  in File Browser

Thanks to PMC contributors Akshay, Shantanu  and Sujith for helping in writing this blog post and making 1.1 beta release happen.