Moovida’s first dev contest was a great success. Four new plugins were developed, giving Moovida users access to some great new content. Here are the winners:

• 1st place prize goes to Guillaume Desmottes from Belgium for developing Arte
• 2nd and 3rd place prizes go to Michal Sawicz from Poland, Moovida’s steadfast community member and most active Forum moderator, for his Vimeo and CNN plugins

Although We Are Hunted trailed behind, that plugin got my vote…

I will let the guys introduce themselves in an upcoming post. On behalf of the whole Moovida community, let me just say a big thank you to both for all your great contributions, and keep the great plugins coming!

Well the title pretty much says it all, but to be more specific, you have until 11:59 pm tonight to vote for Moovida’s dev contest winner. Competition is fierce between the two leading plugins, Arte and Vimeo, from authors Guillaume Desmottes and Michal Sawicz. It’s a race to the finish line… so make sure to show them your support!

If you’re not sure who to vote for, check some examples of the content you can now view from Moovida thanks to their participation:

Arte

If you’re in France or Germany, I’m really jealous because you can see the short documentary La Photographie Surréaliste on Moovida. If you have the priviledge to access it, make sure to comment what you think of it on this post.

Vimeo

Here’s a video I found browsing through Vimeo’s staff picks from Blake Whitman

Warning: This video features disturbing scenes (in case you have a phobia of clowns)

May the best plugin win!

Every now and again we can get complaints from Moovida users about hardware related problems. No, we’re not perfect, but often enough, neither is the user’s hardware, which is why we recommend Verybox.

Verybox is a Spanish based company delivering custom hardware solutions. You can select the type of hardware you want (media center, professional, xGamers or home), choose from a wide selection of models, then configure to your needs. Not only does Verybox have very competitive pricing, lucky for you Moovida & Verybox are in the giving mood and offer 5% off any Verybox hardware order, all you have to do is enter this promotional code when making your order: Moovida09.

So why not give a Moovida Media Center gift for the holidays this year? Moovida already comes pre-installed in all Verybox machines, just thrown in any infrared remote control, and there you have it! It seems the Christmas lighting and cheesy music is getting to us…

Note: Check out our minimal hardware requirements to put together the ideal Verybox machine for Moovida.

As you may have already noticed in an earlier post, Moovida’s dev contest brought some goodies to its user community, namely with the Vimeo plugin.

You’re most likely already familiar with Vimeo, YouTube’s younger, more attractive and less trashy sibling.  Why less trashy? Maybe because Vimeo has strict upload guidelines, and was created by a community of artists.

So yesterday while I was perusing through the Vimeo plugin on Moovida, I came across some good recommended content, like NIN in concert. Cool beans. Image quality is great, and when searching for videos, both Vimeo and YouTube results appear, just in case you wouldn’t find anything in Vimeo (which would be my first choice for the reasons mentioned above). If you’re feeling uninspired, I’d suggested checking out the videos from the always entertaining Montreal based electrofunk duo Chromeo:

Chromeo “Night By Night” Video

Chromeo “Fancy Footwork” Video

Congratulations are in order for Michał Sawicz, Moovida’s tireless community member responsible  for the Vimeo, CNN and We Are Hunted plugins. To show your appreciation for his work and for bettering the lives of Moovidamankind, vote for Michal’s Vimeo plugin.

To announce the partnership between Moovida and themoviedb.org, Travis Bell shares what the new collaboration means to him and TMDB community:

Hi there, my name is Travis Bell and I am the sole proprietor of the popular open source movie database, themoviedb.org.

For those of you unfamiliar with TMDb, it’s an open source, user contributable movie database. I started it originally as a source for movie backdrops but quickly realized there was a need for raw movie data as well. As I adapted to this change, many popular applications like Moovida jumped on board. This was pretty awesome, but holy crap, I was building something real that people actually found useful! What? When did this happen?

This is where the helpful hands of Moovida came in. As the cost of running TMDb increased, I rallied with my users to help donate whatever cash they could but it was never enough. TMDb was quickly becoming a financial burden for me personally and I did the only thing I knew how to do at the time, and that was to just persevere (hardly a plan, but it was working‚ sort of). It wasn’t until one morning I got an email from someone at Moovida telling me they would like to discuss the possibility of sponsoring my project. I’ve received offers like this before but they were generally not at the scale that would actually help. I appreciated them of course, but TMDb needed something a lot more ‘first class’ and that’s exactly what Moovida was offering me.

This means a lot more than you might think. See, TMDb was pretty close to being in real trouble. I was unable to keep up with our month-to-month growth and spending more time keeping things operating instead of doing what I loved. I started this project because of my passion for movies and media, yet I wasn’t doing that anymore. Moovida helped me by removing the problems I was facing so I could go back to making my community better. I’d like to make sure to extend my thanks to companies like Fluendo who have such a firm commitment to open source software and projects. If it wasn’t for guys like you, it would be hard for us small guys to get anywhere.

I extend my sincere thanks, and hope this can be an encouraging note to anyone else who might be in a similiar position.

Moovida and Fluendo now sponsor themoviedb.org by hosting its servers and managing its backend. Themoviedb.org is Moovida’s source for contextual information to provide users with fan art and synopsis details, for which all the content is licensed under Creative Commons.

For more information: www.themoviedb.org

Remember that development contest we announced a while back? It was decided the Moovida community would determine the winners [1], and now has come the time to act.

Here are the contenders:

• Arte [2]
• CNN
• Vimeo
• We Are Hunted

The criteria to help guide your decision should be:

• Functionality: Does it work the way you want it to? If not, make sure to recommend improvements on our Forum, or report the bug
• Value: Do you dig the content and are you likely to use this plugin?

These plugins are now available, so if it’s not already done, install Moovida now and start enjoying the new content!

Vote for your favourite plugin until December 15th, 11:59 pm CET in the poll below.

***

Good luck to our participants!

[1] 1st place plugin developer takes home the 1st prize, 2nd place plugin developer gets the 2nd place prize… you get the point

[2] Arte.tv only makes news content available to all, the rest of the content is restricted to France and Germany

Moovida 1.0.9. is the latest product of our team’s efforts, which includes a great number of much needed bug fixes (31 to be exact). Some of the most notable improvements:

• switching to the previous/next item in the playlist no longer hides playback
• the recategorization feature from the moviedb is now working smoothly
• it’s now possible to access home network parallels on win32

More importantly, if you encounter an error using Moovida, there is now a generic pop-up that lets lets you know. Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times someone like me will hit a command to see if it works the 25th time around. Check out the full list of Moovida 1.0.9. milestones right here.

Thanks to our wonderful group of translators, Moovida has 3 new languages under its belt, which would qualify it as quite the polyglot media center given it’s now available in 13 languages:

• Czech
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• French
• Galician
• German
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Polish
• Russian
• Slovak
• Spanish

That’s being fluent in more languages than the whole Moovida team put together. We cover 5 out of these, not including the 10 Galician words I learned the other day. So go ahead, enjoy the latest Moovida release in the language of your choice!

Who isn’t a fan of Christopher Columbus? You know, the guy who rediscovered a continent abundant in natural resources and allowed a herd of shady Europeans to start over in the land of opportunity? Granted he only achieved this by getting lost, but still, the guy has some merit.

Wondering where I’m going with this? Well, you too could be the pioneer of unchartered territories by joining Moovida’s beta tester program. Ok, maybe I’m going a little “overboard” with this analogy, but if you’re fan of Moovida and want to be the first to experience new content and features, joining the beta tester program is the best way to go. Get all excitement minus the sea sickness and tuberculosis.

The goal of the program is to get plugins and features to Moovida users faster, so by becoming a beta tester you actually contribute to the greater good of Moovidamankind. It’s easy to join, all you need to do is:

1) create an account with Launchpad

2) sign up to Moovida’s beta tester group on Launchpad

3) subscribe to the group’s mailing list

4) get the instructions by email which explain how to get the beta content and make bug reports (alert! there are mildly geeky concepts involved here so make sure you are familiar with changing values in Moovida’s configuration file)

5) get cracking!

The group is open to anyone, and we’ll be contacting members to test specific topics on an ongoing basis. All we ask from beta testers’ is that they know Moovida well (as in power user) and file complete and easy to reproduce bug reports. If you’re not sure how, get some practice first by trying to find inconsistencies with Moovida’s current version, and file your bug report here. Our QA Team will let you know if there is missing information to confirm the bug.

So what next? Moovida beta testers’ first assignment is to check out the newest Wearehunted plugin, developed by steadfast Moovida community member Michal Sawicz. Don’t hesitate to tell your friends about the program, the more the merrier.

Happy testing!

It was with a slight smirk in the Fluendo offices as the Moovida team looked at the latest 3.0 update to Apple’s ‘Hobby’ project the AppleTV. What caused us to smile was the new changes to their ‘Main Menu’ with Apple declaring that it ”…features a simpler and faster interface that gives you instant access to your favorite content” [1]. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before and came to the same conclusion?

It is interesting to see someone like Apple struggle with the complexities of a media center and despite its ‘hobby’ status it stands out as one of the poorest products in their inventory. How do you transport desktop features and methodology to a TV set and offer a simple interface that everyone can understand and find easy to use? Apple is failing at this. Some of the Moovida team has been doing this media center gig for nearly ten years and we feel we have the answers. We have been wrestling with interface ideas and that healthy balance of power versus simplicity as we continually ask ourselves that very question. I feel we are getting it right and on the verge of making it even better.

When Moovida replaced Elisa, we redesigned our Main Menu. The reason for this was to remove clicks, to make the experience as speedy and intuitive as possible and more importantly put a real emphasis on ’simpler and faster’. In fact, at the time I highlighted the AppleTV as a shining example of what NOT to do! (hey, I don’t like everything Apple does!). However, Apple updated their Main Menu and in effect ‘borrowed’ one of the key aspects that make our media center so much more intuitive. Is Apple following in our footsteps? In many ways they are, but in a smug way it is nice to see a ‘competitor’ as big as Apple trailing behind us and yet still not achieving the level of user experience standard we feel Moovida offers (but maybe we’re just full of ourselves?).

Still, the good thing about our project being open source is, we have the chance to move faster and more importantly for us, it isn’t a hobby!

[1] Apple Introduces Apple Tv 3.0 Software With Redesigned User Interface – Eddy Cue VP of Internet Services: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/29appletv.html

Moovida is a great open source Media Center, simple and free to download on Linux or Windows . But what’s even sweeter is when it’s packaged by your open source operating system…

Now Ubuntu and Mandriva users can have the Moovida installed faster that you can say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (ok maybe this is only true for heavy stutterers) by checking the software center for Ubuntu, or by editing the package manager. Find details on how Moovida is packaged on all other Linux distributions here.

To update Moovida to the latest version, there are automated and transparent updates in the plugin repository, and Ubuntu users can also use the packages in our PPA .
 
Fear not Windows users, we understand that it might sound like Chinese to you, this post is for Linux aficionados