The great strength of MeediOS has always been its database features, so its good to see someone coming up with a plugin to automatically group Movie Series. Ccrocker on our forums just released his Freebase scraper plugin which creates the 'FilmSeries', 'Sequel' and 'Prequel' fields in your Movie library. Using these new fields, we can create all kinds of interesting views such as boxsets, sequels or maybe future "play next in movie series" functionality in Themes.

The MeediOS project has been going 5 years and probably the biggest single feature request has been for a simple to use internal video player. Many advanced users have been happy using Zoomplayer, VLC or MPC-HC but its wasn't the out-of-the-box experience that some people expected. So up steps reverson1 and after a very steep learning curve he managed to write a completely new video renderer. No config is necessary, you just need the correct windows codecs installed. Check it out in the latest 0.3.5 release.

It is our pleasure to announce the release of the MeediOS Installer v0.3.5. Special thanks goes to skypichat for all his hard work on the installer and reverson1 for the hours of work he has put into the internal video player. Yes the new video player is included in this build! There are also many fixes and stability improvements so come join us on the forums or irc to leave some feedback.

MeediOS is built with an "Everything is a plugin" ideology which makes it incredibly easy to change even the most fundamental parts of the software. banderson1311 on our forums took a look at the back end database and decided that using PostgreSQL could solve a number of limitations of the current SQLite plugin. The addition of this database plugin will hopefully allow full client server functionality of MeediOS, so many clients can be run all around your house and be kept in sync. The code was committed to SVN this week so feel free to follow the thread and try it out.

Evolution 1.3.6 is out of the door. Grab it while its hot! New features include extra theme animations, details and now playing updates, new 'efstrip popup' view(shown above) and the usual bug fixes and code optimizations. The release of this theme means we are very close to the full MeediOS installer v0.4 being made available. Look out for for an announcement soon.

The MeediOS project is now 5 years old and although many people use it as their day to day media center, we think its about time to get some proper releases out there. We have a project Roadmap available on our Wiki here and a forum thread here for discussion. The v0.4 release of MeediOS installer is only a few weeks away, scheduled for sometime in October.

EnemyWithin recently started work on an importer for the kids-in-mind website. The website claims to be the definitive parents' guide to movies and video, rating films according to how much sex, nudity, violence, gore and profanity. These scores can now be instantly displayed  in both the browse and details views of the evolution theme.