Progress Report, of sorts

It's been a while, hasn't it? To give you a quick run-down on latest developments: Aufero is still doing fine and I try to squeeze in as much time as I can, all in all there has been ten alpha builds released to testers. Due to the state of the builds there's not been much point in reporting problems since they're all over the place, so I will decrease the rate at which builds are released to have something really testable at every increment.

The current alpha is expired and I don't expect to release a new build just yet, I really want to wrap up Wish List functionality (even though a lot of the backend was there it's quite a bit of logic that needs to be implemented).

Last week or so I added functionality for transcoding on the XBox 360 via Aufero. The transcoder package used is TVersity and I have heard that this really is suboptimal compared to how T360 works, so to all the fans of that: It might look like I'll add support for that transcoder as well (down the line at least).

No new screenshots this time, sorry!

The initial feature list from day one still stands, more features were added of course, but the outline is still there and no compromises were made so far:

• Navigate and view collections of general information, previews, trailers, reviews, releases from scene to theatre to DVD and torrents related to your media or media you will be interested in.

• Aufero uses about fifty sources for its information gathering, a lot of it is irrelevant but over time it gathers more relevant information about present and future. For instance it definitely is worth scheduling the download of "Magnum P.I. 'trailer'" (scheduled for release sometime in '07) already today.

• Aufero is written completely from scratch with the sole purpose of being a Vista Media Center application. Built using MCML/Managed Code for that smooth look we all love.

• Manage existing library of downloaded media.

• Manage a Wish List of interesting videos that you would like to know about.

• Automatic download of videos on your Wish List as Torrents becomes available (give it some hours to monitor activity after something is released)

• Manual downloading of torrents.

• Seamlessly play non-WMV (e.g. XviD etc) on XBox360 using Aufero's media library (requires TVersity)

• Subtle notification on your screen when something you had on your Wish List is found, downloaded, unpacked, indexed and moved into your library. Notifications can also be sent through mail to you when you are not in front of your TV.

• The user interface tries to be simple to increase the so-called "Wife Acceptance Factor".