MediaPortal 1.39 Says Goodbye to .NET 3.5 and Polishes Its Living-Room Skins
*The open-source home theater PC suite sheds an old dependency and adds a fresh TV guide grabber.
Building a media center out of a spare PC is one of those hobbies that never quite ends, and MediaPortal has been the tinkerer's favorite for years. Version 1.39, which arrived on October 13, 2026, makes the setup a little lighter and a little prettier.
Out with the old runtime
The biggest housekeeping change is that the dependency on .NET 3.5 is gone. The program had already been running on .NET 4 for several versions, so the old requirement was mostly dead weight, and dropping it means one less legacy component to enable on a fresh Windows install.
What you will notice on the couch
Radio functionality has been improved, which is welcome news if your HTPC doubles as a stereo. A new tvgids24 grabber joins the program guide sources, giving viewers in the relevant region another way to fill their EPG. Skin fans get an updated DefaultWideHD skin, labelled "Reloaded", along with further refinements to the Titan skin.
For the tinkerers
Skin designers and plugin authors receive a new screen for monitoring GUIPropertyManager properties, which makes it far easier to see why a label shows what it shows. Bundled libraries and DLLs were refreshed, and a round of general bug fixes rounds out the release.
Our verdict
This is an update for people who already run MediaPortal, and for them it is an easy yes: less legacy baggage, nicer skins and a handy debugging aid. If you are shopping for a media center for the first time, 1.39 is a good moment to try it, since the setup now asks for less from Windows. Radio listeners and skin tweakers will get the most out of it.
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