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11.0.0, tenth birthday, and what's next!

Posted: Fri May 27, 2022 5:40 pm
by SubJunk
Today is the tenth anniversary of the launch of UMS! We have come such a long way over that time.

We started in 2012 as a fork of PS3 Media Server, which was one of the most popular and highly-rated media servers around. I was also a developer of that project. In those days, it was simply a DLNA media server, with a much simpler GUI:

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It did its simple job well, but we have taken UMS in new directions, and to new heights.
Here are some highlights of the journey:
  • 1.0.0
    2012-05-31
    These early versions focused on the "universal" aspect of the new program, by adding support for dozens of new devices. We were also the first media server to support smooth motion, a frame-interpolation feature that now comes with every TV, but back then was only in new, high-end TVs. Our second developer, SharkHunter, also joined us within the first few days.
  • 2.0.0
    2012-10-31
    With v2 came the addition of the Plugin Management tab that connected to our centralized plugin database, and we again were the first to introduce a feature; Live Subtitles, where you can stream subtitles on-the-fly from your renderer.
  • 3.0.0
    2013-11-01
    V3 was a huge release, and is when we started to really pull away from PS3MS with tons of our own features. We added the New Media and Recently Played folders, playback resuming, filename prettifying, and a startup configuration wizard. We also welcomed valib to the team, who is still contributing today!
  • 4.0.0
    2014-07-25
    The first web interface was added, finally we gave the UMS community the ability to access content via their web browsers! We also added support for casting, and the ability to transcode to AAC.
  • 5.0.0
    2015-01-25
    In this release, we added support for UPnP connections and playback, which meant that the community were able to connect to many more devices! Thanks largely to skeptical for that. We also added our first pass at IMDb metadata, but we didn't yet have our own API. We have OpenSubtitles to thank for this, and sorry for all the request spam in those days!
  • 6.0.0
    2016-01-30
    Here we added the "Fully played action" with overlay icons and file management, which was highly-anticipated. We also welcomed Nadahar to the team, who improved stability, logging and language support. Thanks to his Crowdin integration, we have had 523 contributors to our 40 languages!
  • 7.0.0
    2018-03-27
    This was the version to focus on our dynamic media browsing features with the Media Library folder. We added detection of Movies and TV series and also added folder-watching so files could be automatically detected in shared folders. We were also lucky to have mik_s, our forum moderator, join us around this time, who does an amazing job around this place!
  • 8.0.0
    2019-03-29
    This version focused on making it easier to enjoy streaming web content like vodcasts, podcasts, internet radio, YouTube channels, and other streaming web content by adding the Shared Content tab.
  • 9.0.0
    2019-09-06
    No need to install Java anymore! We bet many of you celebrated that milestone.
  • 10.0.0
    2021-01-12
    Here we focused on making our rich metadata more useful. We added new folders to the Media Library, including "Filter by Information", which lets you browse the videos by actor, genre, country, director, IMDb rating, and release date. The web interface got a lot more functionality by letting you click on an item like an actor or genre of a video to see other matches for that person or genre (or other metadata). We added some quick links to the front page of the web interface, like Recently Added, In Progress, Most Played, etc. We also welcomed ik666 to the development team, who has added a new API for integrations, and greatly improved UPnP support.

    There was also a lot of behind-the-scenes work that rarely gets mentioned, because it is outside of this release process. We launched our metadata API around this time, which is developed mostly by JS-Kyle and I. Written in Node.js, it aggregates 3 different metadata APIs to give the best possibility of finding matches. We are frequently improving it and fixing bugs, which means that even if you don't update your version of UMS, you get to benefit from better results behind the scenes.
11.0.0
2022-05-27
That brings us to now! Today marks the release of 11.0.0, and we have worked really hard on it. I'd like to especially thank SurfaceS, who is our newest developer, and has put a lot into this release, especially in ways that are less visible. A lot of great code refactoring and dependency updates which makes our code much more modern and easy to maintain.

In terms of more noticeable changes, we improved the web interface in many ways, including more rich data like logos and backgrounds to TV series, movies and episodes, improved device detection, improved network state detection/recovery, video playback and seeking, improved API metadata matching, HLS transcoding for all devices, and more!

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Next steps

We are never short on things to work on next, and we largely rely on you to tell us what you want.Seriously, tell us :).
We are currently working on an app for iPhones and iPads, moving our settings GUI to the web interface, adding thumbnails while seeking on the web interface, and some other goodies we'll post about later on.

Thanks for being on this awesome journey with us. It gives us great pleasure to know that we have such an active community with over 14 million downloads of UMS to date. Here’s to all the advances in the next ten years.

Download:

This release is available on our Patreon page for all subscribers, and will be released publicly during our next release.

Our previous version (10.21.1) is now available on our download page and from our official mirrors.


Changes compared to v10:
  • General:
    • Uses image backgrounds and logos for movies, TV series and episodes on the web interface
    • Web interface switches between dark and light themes in Media Library based on background images
    • Automatic quality adjustment on web interface, with optional manual settings
    • Improved video forward-backward positioning in videos via the web video player
    • Improved web interface design
    • Improved web video player design
    • Improved API metadata matches for TV series
    • Added HLS video option which may improve support for transcoding via some renderers like Philips TVs
    • Log splitting/zipping (#2608)
    • Implemented network state scanner
    • Show the addresses of servers on the Status tab (#2372)
    • Allow to set the log level of FFmpeg in its engine settings in the desktop UI (#2677)
    • Increased maximum memory limit on macOS to match Windows
    • Fixed Restart server when network interface becomes available (#2615)
    • Fixed Network Interface not found (#1485)
    • Fixed GetProtocolInfo not being recieved (#2338)
    • Fixed Font scaling issues on some elements of the GUI for some users (#2549)
    • Fixed UMS doesn't free DLNA ports after closing (#739)
    • Fixed Service wrapper for Windows doesn't work with 64 bit JVM (#767)
    • Fixed uninstallation does not remove autostart entry for wrapper.exe (#2343)
    • Fixed Attempt to remove medias.lock on install/startup (#2838)
    • Fixed Media Library no longer populated and startup scan slowness (#2826)
    • Fixed Cound not open the default web browser: The BROWSE action is not supported on the current platform! (#2725)
    • Added editable server-side playlist support
    • Prevent users from enabling startup scanning while the cache is disabled
    • Removed second toolbar on the web interface video page
    • Increased speed of API lookups
    • Improved video and TV series posters
    • Fixed some API metadata not updating
    • Fixed Resume videos on the web interface
    • Fixed API response handling
    • Backgrounds for TV series, episodes and movies fade in
    • Image backgrounds in Media Library without text are prioritized over ones with text
    • Match more TV series in API
    • Use markdown in changelog
    • Use main branch instead of master
    • Fixed audio files detected as video files
  • Renderers
    • Samsung 2021 TVs use HLS transcoding
  • Translation updates via Crowdin
    • Catalan (100%) (thanks, Toni Grau i Quellos!)
    • Chinese (Simplified) (97%) (thanks, wwj402_github!)
    • Czech (100%)
    • Danish (99%) (thanks, GurliGebis and NCAA!)
    • English (UK) (99%) (thanks, Pete Russell!)
    • Finnish (100%) (thanks, Esko Gardner!)
    • French (100%) (thanks, Archaos and Philippe P!)
    • Italian (100%) (thanks, Oscar Zambotti!)
    • Korean (100%) (thanks, VenusGirl!)
    • Persian (34%) (thanks, Behzad Najafizad!)
    • Polish (100%) (thanks, Karol Szastok!)
    • Portuguese (100%) (thanks, mariopinto!)
    • Portuguese (Brazilian) (100%) (thanks, Mauro.A!)
    • Swedish (99%) (thanks, Lorien aka the First One (The1stOne)!)
    • Turkish (100%) (thanks, Burak Yavuz!)
  • Dependencies
    • Started using Renovate for dependency tracking
    • Added x64 windows service wrapper
    • Replaced Cling with JUPnP
    • Update actions/cache action to v3
    • Update actions/checkout action to v3
    • Update dependency com.github.spotbugs:spotbugs-maven-plugin to v4.7.0.0
    • Update dependency moment.js to v2.29.3
    • Update dependency pako to v1.0.11
    • Bump checkstyle from 9.3 to 10.2
    • Bump Jackson from 2.13.1 to 2.13.2.2
    • Bump JRE from 8u332 to 17.0.3
    • Bump metadata-extractor from 2.17.0 to 2.18.0
    • Bump Video.js from 7.13.3 to 7.19.2
    • Fixed support for latest Maven versions

Support us:

If you appreciated this release, please consider donating or subscribing. We don't do it for money, but it is nice to offset our expenses.
If you would like your name to be mentioned in our list of supporters, please leave a note with your donation/subscription or message us on here, and we will gladly immortalize your contribution.

Re: 11.0.0, tenth birthday, and what's next!

Posted: Sat May 28, 2022 5:54 pm
by pipin
Happy Birthday and what a coincidence, born on 05/27 too, but a bit older. ;)

I'm happy to see that UMS is still around and the development pace did rise in the last years.

A big thanks to all contributors!

Re: 11.0.0, tenth birthday, and what's next!

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2022 9:03 am
by Tianuchka
Happy Birthday, Guys!!! Thank You and Thanks to UMS!! You are the BEST!

Re: 11.0.0, tenth birthday, and what's next!

Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2022 4:27 am
by DetectiveKenobi
Any progress on the Roku cant fast forward/rewind/pause bug?

Re: 11.0.0, tenth birthday, and what's next!

Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2022 12:20 am
by Paradox
Seems to be a good release :) Thanks to the team. I have only one issue, in my log files i have...

Could not parse player id "FFMPEGHLSVIDEO"

and...

Unknown transcoding engine "ffmpeghlsvideo"

Is this something that has not been implemented fully yet or is it perhaps something wrong with the release or my end?

Re: 11.0.0, tenth birthday, and what's next!

Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2022 9:07 am
by SubJunk
pipin wrote: Sat May 28, 2022 5:54 pm Happy Birthday and what a coincidence, born on 05/27 too, but a bit older. ;)

I'm happy to see that UMS is still around and the development pace did rise in the last years.

A big thanks to all contributors!
Thanks a lot pipin, and happy birthday too!
Tianuchka wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 9:03 am Happy Birthday, Guys!!! Thank You and Thanks to UMS!! You are the BEST!
Thank you Tianuchka! Your support is very appreciated :D
DetectiveKenobi wrote: Sun Jun 12, 2022 4:27 am Any progress on the Roku cant fast forward/rewind/pause bug?
There is a config waiting to be tested in the support topic
Paradox wrote: Mon Jun 13, 2022 12:20 am Seems to be a good release :) Thanks to the team. I have only one issue, in my log files i have...

Could not parse player id "FFMPEGHLSVIDEO"

and...

Unknown transcoding engine "ffmpeghlsvideo"

Is this something that has not been implemented fully yet or is it perhaps something wrong with the release or my end?
Thanks Paradox :)
I'll look into that one