History
Overview
We started in 2012 as a fork of PS3 Media Server, which was one of the most popular and highly-rated media servers around. Our founder, SubJunk, was also a developer of that project. In those days, it was simply a DLNA media server, with a much simpler GUI and set of features.
It did its simple job well, but we have taken UMS in new directions, and to new heights.
Here are some highlights of the journey:
Previous Versions
v14 (2022-12-13)
The biggest changes here involved the ability to control access to your content. This includes improvements to user accounts like avatars and playback status per user, as well as the ability to display different content to different devices and media players/renderers.
We also added the ability to add a TMDB API key to manually add and edit metadata for TV series and videos, and to mark TV series and movies as fully played.
See more details on the What's New page
v13 (2022-12-13)
This release was all about 3D and virtual reality, led by the contributor threedguru.
See more details in the release announcement
v12 (2022-11-29)
This was a complete rewrite of our GUI using modern tooling in the web browser, with huge effort by SurfaceS and js-kyle.
This also introduced the concept of authentication, users and groups.
Another change is that the Shared Content area has been unified, where before it was split between local and web content, now they are in the same list.
See more details in the release announcement
v11 (2022-05-27)
We improved the web interface in many ways, including more rich data like logos and backgrounds to TV series, movies and episodes, improved device detection, improved network state detection/recovery, video playback and seeking, improved API metadata matching, HLS transcoding for all devices, and more!
This was our first version with our new superstar developer, SurfaceS, who put a lot into this release.
See more details in the release announcement
v10 (2021-01-12)
Here we focused on making our rich metadata more useful.
We added new folders to the Media Library, including "Filter by Information", which lets you browse the videos by actor, genre, country, director, IMDb rating, and release date.
The web interface got a lot more functionality by letting you click on an item like an actor or genre of a video to see other matches for that person or genre (or other metadata). We added some quick links to the front page of the web interface, like Recently Added, In Progress, Most Played, etc.
Thumbnails for TV series now have the fully played icon if all episodes have been fully played:
We also welcomed ik666 to the development team, who has added a new API for integrations, and greatly improved UPnP support.
See more details in the release announcement
v9 (2019-09-06)
No need to install Java anymore!
See more details in the release announcement
v8 (2019-03-29)
This version focused on making it easier to enjoy streaming web content like vodcasts, podcasts, internet radio, YouTube channels, and other streaming web content by adding the Shared Content tab.
See more details in the release announcement
v7 (2018-03-27)
This was the version to focus on our dynamic media browsing features with the Media Library folder.
We added detection of Movies and TV series and also added folder-watching so files could be automatically detected in shared folders
We were also lucky to have mik_s, our forum moderator, join us around this time, who does an amazing job around this place!
See more details in the release announcement
v6 (2016-01-30)
Here we added the "Fully played action" with overlay icons and file management, which was highly-anticipated.
We also welcomed Nadahar to the team, who improved stability, logging and language support.
Thanks to his Crowdin integration, we have had 523 contributors to our 40 languages!
See more details in the release announcement
v5 (2015-01-25)
In this release, we added support for UPnP connections and playback, which meant that the community were able to connect to many more devices! Thanks largely to skeptical for that.
We also added our first pass at IMDb metadata, but we didn't yet have our own API. We have OpenSubtitles to thank for this, and sorry for all the request spam in those days!
See more details in the release announcement
v4 (2014-07-25)
The first web interface was added, finally we gave the UMS community the ability to access content via their web browsers!
We also added support for casting, and the ability to transcode to AAC.
See more details in the release announcement
v3 (2013-11-01)
V3 was a huge release, and is when we started to really pull away from PS3MS with tons of our own features.
We added the New Media and Recently Played folders, playback resuming, filename prettifying, and a startup configuration wizard.
We also welcomed valib to the team, who is still contributing today!
See more details in the release announcement
v2 (2012-10-31)
With v2 came the addition of the Plugin Management tab that connected to our centralized plugin database, and we again were the first to introduce a feature; Live Subtitles, where you can stream subtitles on-the-fly from your renderer.
See more details in the release announcement
v1 (2012-05-31)
These early versions focused on the "universal" aspect of the new program, by adding support for dozens of new devices.
We were also the first media server to support smooth motion, a frame-interpolation feature that now comes with every TV, but back then was only in new, high-end TVs.
Our second developer, SharkHunter, also joined us within the first few days.
See more details in the release announcement
PS3 Media Server (2008)
The project that started it all! We are a fork of that project which was started in 2008 by shagrath, who was shortly joined by SubJunk, the founder of Universal Media Server.
The PS3 was a great machine for playing media, but it did not support many video formats, so PS3 Media Server used a lot of tricks to make it play any video you could throw at it. We have applied the same strategy, for all devices and players.
