New Features

Automatically Organise Library Files

Songbird can now automatically organise the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customise the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.

2-way Sync with iTunes
If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

Last.fm Radio
Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbours’ libraries.

10-band Equalizer
Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.

Performance Enhancements

• Faster search
• Deleting many tracks at once is faster
• Selecting a large amount of tracks from the library is no longer slow
• Reduced the amount of threads required to be running at all times by 50%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix some of the most common crashes in Songbird.

Download boxee 0.9.11.5591 for Intel Mac OS X 10.4+ – http://dl.boxee.tv/boxee-0.9.11.5591.dmg

Last week we released a new test version of the boxee alpha for Mac and Apple TV that included Pandora, RadioTime and a new boxee browser. spending a week fixing issues reported by users taking the plunge running the bleeding edge version, today we are releasing it to the masses.

Next on our agenda are the much anticipated updates to Ubuntu and Windows, bringing them up to par with the Mac version, and releasing Windows publicly.

If you’ve used boxee to access Hulu in the past, with this new version you’ll notice that boxee displays the hulu.com webpage before playing the video. this is thanks to a new boxee browser based on Mozilla (like Firefox).

This new boxee browser lays the groundwork to support any video available on the web. to try out the new browser you can add RSS feeds in the App Box or go to Video > Browse > Add Source and add a URL – boxee will try to display the page and if there is a video on the page play the video.

Pandora – your most requested Internet music service is now on boxee. you can listen to your QuickMix and stations, as well as create new stations. it is a beautiful app built with our new API. make sure to check it out.

Using software like TVersity was the closest you could get in turning the Playstation 3 into a functional streaming media device through the method of Transcoding both the video and audio the source material.   This requires the use of a PC or Mac to act as the streaming server.  Whilst this method works well for Standard Definition devices and for streaming to portable devices like a PSP or a mobile Phone,  the loss of quality is considerably noticable on HD TV sets.

Our next Sourced article looks at the latest media streaming software available for the PS3 and it is damn impressive.

PS3 Media Server

PS3 Media Server is a DLNA compliant UPNP Media Server for the PS3, written in Java, with the purpose of streaming or transcoding any kind of media files, with minimum configuration. It’s backed up with the powerful Mplayer/FFmpeg packages.

PS3 Media Server is available for OSX, Windows and Linux and can play natively all PS3 supported videos such as AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG and does a fantastic job of transcoding your typical Net formats and containers such as MKV.

Latest Version: PS3 Media Server v1.10.5 for Windows/Linux/OSX

Current features:

• Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing is required. All folders are directly browsed by the PS3, and it also includes an automatic refresh.
• Real-time video transcoding via MEncoder, tsMuxer or Avisynth
• DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
• OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
• Thumbnail generation for Videos
• Supports a virtual folder system using the audio/subtitle language on the PS3
• All formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/WMA, JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, and all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG) the PS3 will play
• Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
• ZIP/RAR files as browseable folders for pictures/audio files
• Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
• Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
• Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support

Windows/Linux Only:

• Lossless 5.1 PCM transcoding with DTS movies
• Remux video and remux/reencode all audio tracks to AC3/PCM in real time with tsMuxer
• FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support

PS3 Media Server Blog Forum Google.Code

What is XBMC?

Originally named Xbox Media Center, XBMC is now a full featured, award winning free and open source software media-player and entertainment hub for all your digital media.  I have been using XBMC since it’s transformation from xbmp (Xbox Media Player) and was the sole reason I purchased the original xbox.  The software turned a standard game machine into a state of the art network media player – better priced and far superior to anything like it on the market at the time.  With the proliferation of High definition content, The original Xbox based XBMC didn’t have enough horsepower and thus began the interest in bring Xbox Media Center to the GNU/Linux Operating System.

Currently XBMC supports the following platforms:

• XBMC for Linux
• XBMC for Mac
• XBMC for Windows
• XBMC for Xbox
• XBMC Live (Bootable iso)

XBMC Advantages

• Multi-Codec support.
• Codec independent.
• Can play media within an archive (rar,zip), even multi-spanning archives.
• Your wife and Girlfriend can use it.
• RSS feed support.
• Localised weather.
• Quicktime Support.
• LastFM Support
• Itunes support.
• Distributed as open source under the GNU General Public License,
• Extensive Python scripting plugin system.
• Fan Art  & Album and Cover Art.
• Fully Skinable and Customisable interface.
• Configurable webserver, control your Media Center via any internet enabled device like a mobile phone.
• Effortless media management.

XBMC Disadvantages

• No native PVR capability.
• No hardware Video acceleration – Hopefully Soon or check XBMC forums for different solutions.

XBMC Forks

All great Open source software has its share of forks and xbmc is no exception:

• Boxee introduces a unique Social Media aspect to HTPC software.
• Plex is a OSX specific Port of XBMC.
• MediaPortal is a Windows only complete Home Theatre PC frontend with full PVR capability.  Loosley based of the old XBOX only XBMC builds.