Plasma Media Center

Plasma Media Center (PMC) is an open source software project that has been designed from the ground up to act as a media center solution for mobile and portable devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. It is based on the excellent KDE and Plasma technologies.

Features at a glance

Being designed to offer a rich and intuitive experience to media addicts, the Plasma Media Center software provides a unified media experience on a wide range of portable devices, as well as on other hardware capable of running the KDE Plasma environment.

The project will allow the user to browse his or her local file system for media files with ease, use the KDE Desktop Search functionality to get a unified view of all available media files, view photos from Picasa or Flickr, create playlists from available media files, and play files randomly and sequentially.

Under the hood, supported devices and availability

As mentioned, the software uses the latest KDE Plasma technologies to provide users with a state-of-the-art media center program suitable for a plethora of portable and mobile devices, such as notebooks, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, as well as personal computers and TV sets.

It is available for download as a source archive, which means that you must manually configure, compile and install the media center on a specific device. This means that it should work well on 64-bit (x86_64), 32-bit (i386) and ARM hardware platforms.

Bottom line

Summing up, KDE’s Plasma Media Center proves to be a great product specifically designed to run only on portable devices, transforming them into state-of-the-art media centers that allows anyone to view their favorite media on the go.

What is new in this release:

• Support for fetching media from Baloo
• Plasma Media Center now supports fetching your media collection from the new KDE Semantic Search - Baloo.
• This means your media library loads faster than ever. However, PMC continues to support Nepomuk if you have KDE libraries installed.
• MPRIS support
• This lets you use any sort of controller that supports MPRIS to control PMC - this ranges from taskbar previews, Now Playing plasmoid and many more!
• (Experimental) support for a simple filesystem based media scanner
• For when you don't have Nepomuk or Baloo installed
• More details in All Music mode
• We now show more details about media in the All Music mode, like artist, album and duration.
• Improved GStreamer compatibility
• A conflict between GStreamer0.10 and GStreamer1.0 in some distros will no longer break playback (Launchpad Bug)
• We now have tests for the PMC core libs
• This will lead to less bugs in the future!
• Numerous bug fixes and UI polish

What is new in version 1.3.0 Beta:

• Support for fetching media from Baloo. As a result, your media will load almost instantly!
• A conflict between GStreamer0.10 and GStreamer1.0 in some distros will no longer break playback (Launchpad Bug)
• More details in All Music mode
• MPRIS support - so that you can control PMC from your favorite MPRIS controller
• (Experimental) support for a simple filesystem based media scanner - when you don't have Nepomuk or Baloo installed
• Replaced side panel with full-screen panel
• For the source code, we now have tests for the PMC core libs
• Numerous bug fixes and UI polish

What is new in version 1.2.0:

• Improved Music Mode:
• A lot of effort went into improving the All Music mode so that you will have a good time navigating through your music-search by artist, album or just see it all.
• Artist and Album Cover Retrieval:
• From now on, your collection will look better and it will be quicker to locate that album you want to listen to. While PMC already used album covers contained in your music files, this new release enables PMC to go to last.fm and fetch new album covers and artist images!
• Folder Previews for Picture Browsing:
• While browsing for pictures, you can now see thumbnails of pictures that are inside folders, making it easier to identify which folders are interesting. This feature was much requested and the team is glad to be able to deliver it in this release.
• Keyboard bindings for media control:
• It's not always convenient to use the mouse or media buttons to control your media playback. You can now also use the keyboard; default shortcuts include (N)ext, (Z)Previous, and space for Play/Pause.
• Multiple Playlist Support:
• You want to listen to different kinds of music in different moods and situations. For this it was essential that you be able to create your own playlists to manage your music. This is now possible as the team has built an interface to create and manage these playlists.
• Shiny new icons for controller:
• The controller icons didn't work well on darker screens so a change was needed there. The new icons are much easier to distinguish.

What is new in version 1.2 RC:

• Adding Key navigation for switching between multiple playlists
• New icons for media controller
• Displaying system time on home screen
• Picturestrip navigates in loop
• Updating CMakeLists.txt for adding po directory
• BZ#328394: Don't hide youtube search

What is new in version 1.2 Beta:

• Even easier to use All Music mode
• Automatic Artist and Album cover download
• Folder previews for Browse Pictures mode
• Multiple Playlist support
• Keyboard support for media controls [Mute, (Z)Prev, Next]
• Refactored common components for media browsers (for developers)

What is new in version 1.1:

• New Features and Improvements:
• Users who tried the 1.0 release and gave feedback or reported bugs were a big help for the work towards 1.1. A major new feature is YouTube integration but the team also introduced smaller features and implemented many improvements in the flow of actions and keyboard support.
• YouTube Integration:
• The biggest new feature in this release is the brand new YouTube mode. The shiny new YouTube mode lets you search for videos on YouTube and watch them, right inside the media center.
• A better playlist:
• The playlist now shows more details including the artist name as well as duration of the media, wherever available. The team also added Drag and drop support for removing and rearranging media in the list and integrated a playlist shuffling feature.
• Ease of use:
• Another major area of focus has been the ease of use. Plasma Media Center is meant to be used with a variety of input devices, from pointing (mouse) to keyboard and remote control. And it should be intuitive and obvious to use. A few prominent improvements:
• Improved Playlist:
• Complete keyboard/remote-like keys support: There were reports of hiccups in key navigation at places, from problems with the focus going haywire to keys not working. For 1.1 keyboard navigation has been reworked entirely using QML's recommended way of handling keys, and the team can now confidently promise you a butter-smooth operation.
• Better keyboard navigation for All Music mode: The All Music mode is one of the most complicated modes, going by the implementation. While it took blood and sweat and tears, keyboard navigation is now fully implemented and tested.
• Places integrated into browsing flow: The places panel that appeared in 1.0 was rather clumsy to use and has now been integrated with the normal browsing flow. This makes it feel far more natural and of course lets you actually enjoy the benefits of quickly finding your favorite media.
• And more:
• Of course, there are many more small enhancements and bugfixes all over. The team is are confident that PMC has become a far better and more usable product and, reflecting that, they made it possible to associate PMC with music and videos on your system!

What is new in version 1.1 Beta:

• Features:
• Youtube backend for watching online videos
• Media file association with Plasma Media Center
• Plasma Media Center command line option to open audio and video file in it
• plasma-mediacenter [--fullscreen]
• Option to go back to currently playing media on clicking empty area in home-screen
• Improvements:
• Dimming image/video when it is not viewed directly
• Shuffle playlist items instead of playing random item
• Reordering playlist item by holding and dragging to new position
• Deleting playlist item on Holding and dragging item outside playlist
• Dedicated option in home-screen to exit Plasma Media Center