Stable-pre branch

When I'm developing new features or adding bug fixes, all of the work is done and maintained in the repository in the stable-pre branch.  This allows users that don't want to wait for an official release to test out the new versions.  It also lets me get some help debugging the system before I push it out and get a pile of complaints because I broke everything.

So what does the current stable-pre branch have?  This will be version 1.2.1, a small bug fix (mostly) version.  Here is a list of changes current up there:

Features:

• Addition of 30-skip.  This was a request that I thought was a great idea (from primetime34, and several others before him) that was easy to put in.  Now, presuming you don't have the info window or EPG up, using the left or right arrows will skip forward or backward 30 seconds.  A simple thing, but it's a helluva lot easier than skipping around in 10 minute steps.
• Removed the built-in Transparency skin so because the author (ronie) built it directly into the skin itself.  Check it out:

Bugs:

• There was this weird problem where exiting PseudoTV by using the escape button would end up crashing XBMC.  Here is a bit of detail that you can skip if you don't care.  XBMC has various ways for plugins to catch the many things that are happening in the system.  For example, I needed to make a subclass of the video player so that I could catch when the user stopped the video in...unexpected ways.  If they closed it from the OSD, or if they used an http remote, for instance.  So now I can actually snag those and exit PseudoTV properly.  When the user presses the escape key and chooses to exit, I need to do the same thing: stop the video.  When the user wants to exit, I immediately stop the video, stop all of the threads, and close the instance of the Overlay class (the primary class in PseudoTV).  The issue was that after this class closed and was deleted, XBMC would send a message to my Player subclass to say that the video stopped.  The player would then tell the Overlay instance that the user wants to exit...the Overlay instance that was just deleted.  Hence the crash.  So now I just have a flag to prevent the Player from sending this message in this case.
• There was a stupid bug where selecting the currently playing channel from the EPG would start the show from some random place.  It just dealt with the way I am storing the timestamps for playing videos and how I calculate where the show should play at.
• I hadn't caught an exception thrown if the XBMC webserver refused the connection for the JSON call.  Stupid of me.
• There was another uncaught exception when determining the file size of an MKV file.

So that's it for the moment.  I'm working on fixing a few more bugs, and there may or may not be another feature in the next release.  Next time I'll talk about the background threading and the pain in my ass that it's turning out to be...