Bedia and Bedia NV came about because of my desire to have a home theatre application that fit my needs. I played with multiple software and devices and all of them forced the user to sort data the way the application wanted to sort. Both versions of Bedia allow the user to add multiple folders to the Home Page. Users can sort their data the way they want and simply have the folders as the top items on the Home Page.

Another issue with all Home Theatre devices and applications is that the remote is a collection of small buttons and different icons that the user must take their focus from the content. This application uses a standard computer mouse, the scroll wheel allows the user to scroll through the media when selecting one or more to play, and then during playback the scrollwheel allows the user to see the navigation options on the television/monitor.

Bedia is designed to be an easy to use media player for your television. A mouse is used for a remote. The benefits of this are you don't need line-of-site, like standard remotes, and the ease of use. All actions can be seen on the television, so no more hitting the incorrect button while watching a movie in a dark room. The mouse scroll wheel moves you through available menus and navigation options (during playback) while the left button is "Select" and the right button is "Back". While media is playing if you scroll the list of navgation options is shown as a pair; Left button or Right button. Very simple and easy.

One or my bigger complaints about many media players designed for use on a television is that the application would decide how to organize your media. The Bedia family of media players allow you to add as many folders to the Home Page as you want, including sub folders, and these are displayed at the top making them easy and quick to access.

Navigation

• The mouse scroll wheel is the main navigation tool. It is used to scroll up and down the menus, and during media playback to show the navigation commands.
• Left mouse button: When viewing the menus this button selects a Menu or Media item. During playback this selects the left Navigation Command, as seen when scrolling.
• Right mouse button: When viewing the menus this button is the Back button. During playback this selects the right Navigation Command.
• X-Button 1: This activates the Page option. When this is selected a single click of the scroll wheel moves the menu an entire page.
• X-Button 2: This will select the currently media and play it. If one or more media are already in the playlist then Play is activated.

New features

• IPTV New for version 2.2 Unfortunately I have not found a central repository for IPTV feeds or playlists, so select here to find playlists and then select SETTINGS -> IPTV FOLDER. This will open the a Windows Folder, place the playlists you have found here. Bedia NV supports MP4, ASF and MMS items within the playlist.
• Theatre / Movie Listings. The Home page now has a Theatre selection where you can see the current movies playing within your 10 miles of your ZIP code. Change your ZIP code in Settings -> Advacned Settings.
• Monitor folders for new media. The Home page will show new media sorted in playlists by month and year. Media played will be removed from this list. There is an option under Settings -> Advanced Settings, where you can set a past date to have NV look for all new media from that date.
• History option now shows an icon on the media. A "Play" icon if the media has been played, a "Pause" icon if the media has not been completely played. Selecting these media will then off the user the option to start from the beginning or where the media was stopped. The date the media was last played is also displayed so you will know when you last enjoyed that media.
• Animated menus, background, clock and other features to make the experience more interesting.
• Audio Visualization. Now see you music in action. New for version 2.3
• Special Colors and features for Xmas and New Years Eve
• Touch abilities.
• Left half of screen is the left mouse button. Right half, right mouse button.
• Touch and move up, scrolls up. Touch and move down and it scroll down (obvious enough?)
• If the menu is displayed and the user touches a range larger than 4 menus Bedia NV will full page scroll.
• Speech Recognition.
• "Bedia start listening" and "Bedia stop listening". Once the option is set saying this will have Bedia NV listen to the following commands.
• Menu commands: "Up", "Down", "Page Up", "Page Down", "Scroll Down", "Scroll Up", "Select", "Open", "Enter", "Back", "Clear Queue", "Clear", "Home", "Home Page"
• Playback commands: "Menu", "Play", "Pause", "Stop", "Next", "Previous", "Back 30 Seconds", "Back 1 Minute", "Back 5 Mintues", "Back 10 Minutes", "Jump 30 Seconds", "Jump 1 Minute", "Jump 5 Minutes", "Jump 10 Minutes", "Volume Up", "Volume Down", "Raise Volume", "Lower Volume", "Mute", "Volume 5 Percent", "Volume 10 Percent", "Volume 15 Percent", "Volume 20 Percent", ... "Volume 95 Percent", "Volume 100 Percent"
• You can also state any menu item to select or open that menu.

Services

• IPTV
• Podcasts
• Theatre locations, shows and movie times.
• NYC MTA Status Information. Shown only if you are within the NYC area.
• Weather

Settings

• Audio Devices. If your computer has multiple audio output devices, such as headphones and sound card, this option will be available. It seelction allows the Audio Visualizations to listen to that device so Bedia can display the moving bubbles.
• Audio Visualizations. Choose one or more of these and the Bedia Bubbles will respond to music. If multiple visualizations are selected a random one is choosen at the start of each song.
• Audio Visualizations Colors. When this is selected the audio visualization bubbles have random colors, otherwise they are the current Bedia Color. See "Color Options"
• Bubbles: This option will show background Bedia Bubbles during the menu display. Bubbles are not running when media is playing.
• Bedia Background Color: This changes the background color of the Titlebar, icons, bubbles and main window. This allows you to select from a list of existing color choices, or seelct any color via a Custom Color Dialog
• Bedia Foreground Color: This changes the color of the Text, icons and bubble border. This allows you to select from a list of existing color choices, or seelct any color via a Custom Color Dialog
• Fonts: You can select any font installed on your computer.
• Late Night: When this option is set, between the hours of 9pm and 6am the background is only black, as opposed to the gradient black to blue, and the Bedia Bubbles have blue outlines instead of white and are black instead of blue. This is all designed so that there is minimal glare/brightness when viewing the menus late at night.
• Menu Options. Home Page: This allows the user to select which items and Services are displayed on the Home Page.
• Menu Speed: This is the speed at which menus move.
• Minimize Volume: This option will reset the volume to 20% if the volume is over 50% when the screen saver starts. This is to avoid the media playback being too loud next time.
• Random. This option places a menu option at the top of every folder. Selecting that option will select one media file from the current folder or within it's sub folders and place that media in the Queue. This option avoids adding duplicate media to the queue.
• Shutdown. This option allows the user to choose to also shutdown Windows when exiting Bedia.
• Startup. With this option selected Bedia will start when Windows loads.
• Video Stretched: This will expand the video to fit the screen.
• Volume Percentage: The Volume Bubbles will show the percentage during playback.
• Watch for New: This option will monitor the folders choosen by the user for new media that is added to those folders. These new media are available from the Home page under the "New" icon. If there are no new media the icon is not shown.
• Windows Volume: When this option is on and the user is at 100% of Bedia NV's volume the next clicks will raise Windows's volume. If Bedia NV's volume is at 5% and the user goes lower it starts lowering Window's volume.

Advanced Settings

• Home Page Title. This is simply the text that will be displayed on the Titlebar when on the home page. (kind of obvious)
• Menu Speed. This allows for more granular control of how fast the menus move. The lower the number the faster the menus move. This can be a value from 100, which is very fast, to 5000, which is glacial.
• Watch for New date. Bedia NV now can watch your local folders for new media, as mentioned above. This option allows you to set a date in the past so the application will add any files from that date forward.
• Speech recognition. Here you can set a name that Bedia NV will call you, as well as the phrases that start and stop Bedia NV's speech recognition. Also available is a Confidence level, from 50 to 95. The higher the value the less likely that the speech recognition will not have false-positives.

Files Supported

• Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV, M4A
• Video: AVI, ASF, MP4, M4V, MPG, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, 3GP, MOV, DIVX
• Playlists: M3U
• Windows 10 users can also hear Flac and view MKV files

Thanks and Credit where due...

• WPF Custom Color Dialog by Sacha Barber from CodeProject.com
• Many icons or basis for icons used in Bedia from IconFinder.com Great selection, great prices.
• Theatre / Movie info provided by Gracenote.com
• Transit info provided by MTA.info
• Weather provided by Weather.gov

Download Bedia NV - Version 2.4.420 April 20, 2017

This is the 2nd version of Bedia NV. The first version was designed for Windows 8 Store, however because of limitions of that platform I used technologies that are available for Windows 7, 8/8.1 and 10.

Technologies: C#, WPF, XAML, XML, JSON