Live streams from BBC One and BBC Two are now also available within TunerFree MCE. There is also an update to make the program compatible with new BBC feed formats. Download version 1.9.3 now!

The latest update to TunerFree MCE now brings BBC programs in high resolution. The new BBC feeds look even better, bringing a fantastic viewing experience. Download version 1.9.1 now for this great new feature.

TunerFree MCE now supports live streaming of BBC Three and BBC Four. The BBC are currently streaming them as part of a beta, so unfortunatly it could be removed at any time, but for now it works great. They will only display anything after 7pm at night when those two channels start broadcasting.

As mentioned before, watching live streaming technically counts as watching a broadcast, and as such requires a TV license.

TunerFree MCE now supports live streaming of ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and BBC News. Download version 1.8 now to get these cool new features.

Smallprint: since these live streams count as broadcasting, you legally must own a TV license to watch them.

Version 1.7.3 of TunerFree MCE changes the behaviour of TunerFree MCE to make significant improvements for extenders like the Xbox. The cache and preferences are now stored centrally so that they can be shared by all users, including the extender user. This improves startup times on extenders to about a second instead of several minutes.

Unfortunately, due to the way that the various TV providers like to meddle with their web sites, TunerFree MCE does need to be updated every now and then. To help people to keep up to date with those changes, I have added a mailing list which you can subscribe to here. If you subscribe, the mailing list will only be used to send notifications of changes to TunerFree MCE, and your e-mail address will not be passed on to anyone.

Version 1.7 of TunerFree MCE has been released with two major changes;

1) Five content is now included too

2) A change to the BBC iPlayer site had stopped the background process from caching the list of programs. Version 1.7 resolves that.

I now have a version of TunerFree MCE which is compatible with the new BBC higher resolution feeds, and is also compatible with the remote control.

This new version also uses a background program to cache the TV program details for much faster operation.

Continue reading TunerFree MCE Compatible with new BBC feeds →

I have been having an issue the past few days where some of the latest BBC programs are not playing any more, presumably due to changes in the iPlayer site. I have been trying to reverse engineer a version of the new iPlayer flash player to enable auto play and full screen from the remote, but without much success (the player keeps freezing). As an interim measure, there is a version which displays the program using the new bbc player, but this requires use of the mouse;

http://www.milliesoft.co.uk/TunerFreeMCE_1_6_1.msi

If you are also having this problem, download and install that version, and use the mouse for now to press full screen and play. I am working on a way to resolve the issue.

After the changes to the BBC iPlayer web site, the performance of TunerFreeMCE went down a little bit (they removed a really useful RSS feed). I decided that the best thing to do was to cache all of the programs in advance outside of the media center environment, so I created an caching program that can be run as a scheduled task to populate the cache on a regular basis. Version 1.6 enables this feature, automatically creating the scheduled task when you run the installer, setting it to run every hour. If you want it to run more often or less often, or tweak it's behaviour on login and waking from sleep, you just edit the scheduled task settings.

People who want to try the new version can download it here. Please send feedback on how it works for you, good or bad, to martin@milliesoft.co.uk.