Plex Media Center 0.9.5.3

Plex Media Server v0.9.6.2 / Plex v0.9.5.3
May 18th, 2012 | Category: Release | Author: elan
Just a few short weeks after our last release, we have more goodness for you, in the form of new releases of the Plex Media Server, and the Plex desktop player. We’d like to get you releases more often, and make them easy for you to obtain, and to that end, we created a beta AppCast feed for the media server. When we release, depending on how stable we think the release is, we’ll either push it to the beta feed or the stable feed. This time around, the media server release is beta, because a lot has changed.

If you’re feeling brave, and like living on the bleeding edge, configure your media server to look for the beta feed. (Note that at worst you can just downgrade to an earlier version, we always have backwards and forwards compatibility for the library.) If you have a Roku, you’ll be especially interested in this release, as Schuyler worked some serious magic to fix the video artifacts people were observing on the Roku 2 devices.

The release builds are available in the usual place, and all of the new builds are available here (We’re still working through a Linux issue, so those builds will be out shortly.)

Let’s walk through the changes for the media server first:

NEW: Greatly enhanced media analysis. When I asked Max how to describe the changes, he said “it’s awesome”. He’s a man of few words, but I’ll try to explain a bit more. The media server analyzes your media for a few reasons: In order to extract a thumbnail, and to glean details about the exact format and codecs in the file. The latter is critical in order for players to determine what files they can consume without transcoding, which can be Direct Streamed (remuxed), and which need to be transcoded. The world of media is incredibly complicated. A simple MP4 file be optimized for streaming, or not; it can have 64-bit chunk offsets, or not; the H.264 inside it can be a myriad of different profiles, levels and have different features enabled. We now capture all of that information, and it will have many uses, not least in making the DLNA server component truly world-class. One thing you’ll notice is that when you scan in this version, the scan will take a lot longer the first time on an existing section, because the scanner is upgrading the analysis for all your files. Be patient, kick back, open a beer, and let it do its job!
NEW: The default on new installs is to empty trash automatically. This was confusing too many new users, and I think it was the wrong default, not to mention a confusing UX around learning how and why to empty the trash.
NEW: Support for non-DRM iTunes videos and iTunes U.
FIX: Improved segmented MPEGTS output (fixes Roku artifacts). And there was much rejoicing!!
FIX: TV shows didn’t load metadata properly if the episode had a date but no index (e.g. personal media).
FIX: Individual TV episodes can now have their content rating set by the agents.
FIX: A few random crashes observed in the wild.
FIX: (Linux) From scratch installs now work again (e.g. Synology).
FIX: Crash when transcoding (e.g. to LG MediaLink).
FIX: Status text while scanning didn’t show up in the OS X media manager.
FIX: Transcoder recognizes some MPEG2 files correctly now.
FIX: Return the HTTP body from plug-ins even when there’s a failure.
FIX: Audio transcoder wasn’t working for remote clients.
FIX: Regression in the transcoder leading to green/artifacts on iOS/ATV2.
FIX: Many fixes for SRT “burning” during transcode, including subtitles not showing up at all or only partially.
FIX: (Linux) Ensure we kill orphaned DLNA servers.
FIX: (Linux) DLNA server occasionally wasn’t able to start, unable to obtain IP.
FIX: Don’t identify MP4 chapter tracks as subtitles.
FIX: Durations in MP3 files should be analyzed much more accurately.
The Plex client has a number of fixes, and we’ll be paying it more attention in the coming months.

NEW: Developer ID-signed for Mountain Lion.
NEW: (OS X) Support for Crystal HD
NEW: Allow forcing transcoding on local networks (good for older clients).
FIX: Fix a crash when playing video over VNC.
FIX: Apple remote keymap was incorrect in Now Playing window.
FIX: (OS X) Many fixes for optical/HDMI audio output.
FIX: (OS X) Transcoding 5.1 AAC and DTS to AC3 works now.
FIX: When selecting multi-item videos, it always played the first item.
FIX: Occasional flicker when starting videos.
FIX: Respect the “noCache” attribute, fixes some channels not refreshing properly (e.g. Netflix).
FIX: (OS X) RTMP wasn’t enabled properly.
FIX: When playing some WebKit channels, it improperly transcoded, resulting in no audio.
FIX: Saved cookies were making some channels fail to play (e.g. YouTube).
FIX: Skinning issue that could make multiple thumbs appear for some content.
FIX: Only show watched state (and context menu items) for library content.
FIX: Changing display blanking settings required exiting and re-entering full screen to take effect.
FIX: Plex.ToggleDisplayBlanking keymap function restored.
FIX: Plex.RunScript and Plex.RunAppleScript work again (Mac OS only).
FIX: (OS X) Plex.RunScript handles files with the .scpt extension as well as .applescript.


Plex Media Center v9.5.2 ~ Smoked Wild Boar Edition
November 28th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
There are lots of goodies in this release, but never before have I felt that one small image had the potential to bring such great joy to our users as this one:

That’s right, our good friend Ryan took a break from saving people’s lives to add refresh rate switching. On TVs that support it, this means perfect 24p playback with nary a shudder, judder, or stutter. I have an old Sony TV set and it works great, taking under a second to switch rates. (You may need to have to use something like SwitchResX to add the refresh rate to your TV.)
Similarly pleasing, we’ve fixed the issue where video playback was taking much more CPU than the last release. VC-1, H.264, and all other codecs will now be at the same or lower CPU usage in this version of Laika.
We’ve also addressed an issue many have reported with the media server not being found, or being found only to be lost again. We’re still tracking down the root cause, but for now, if you’re having trouble, simply enter the address of your server in the network preferences.

Here is a full list of changes:
NEW: [Mac] Support for automatic refresh rate switching. And there was much rejoicing.
NEW: Add a way to specify a manual address for a media server, useful for working around network issues.
NEW: When running without a server, search now returns cloud results.
NEW: Add a global audio delay setting.
FIX: CPU usage for software decoding greatly reduced for all codecs, fixing VC-1 “stutter” issue and playback on older machines.
FIX: Allow selecting interface language in preferences.
FIX: Enable down-mix volume boost preference.
FIX: Enable speaker configuration preference.
FIX: A hang in the home screen.
FIX: Losing a server even though it was running on the same machine.
FIX: Not enough buffering (and therefore playback issues) with remote transcoded media.
FIX: Toggling full screen works on multi-display setups.
FIX: Allow ESC to get out of a playlist.
FIX: Add missing strings for shutdown timer.
FIX: Change the audio settings dialog to show delay in milliseconds, it seemed more human-friendly.
FIX: Crash clicking the “save as default” button in video settings.
FIX: Make sure we stop remote transcodes when stopping playback.
FIX: Update ffmpeg, fixes some artifacts with VC-1 and several other issues.
FIX: Stop printing myPlex tokens to the logs.
FIX: “Old-school” sources were disappearing after a restart.
FIX: Posters/art weren’t changing when changed on the media server.
FIX: Don’t play theme music if music is already playing or if video is playing in small window.
FIX: Background music volume is always VERY LOUD (preference works now).
FIX: [Mac] A crash when playing Flash/Silverlight videos followed by non-WebKit video.
FIX: [Mac] Flash/Silverlight video occasionally displayed black & white garbage on the screen.
FIX: Info button on iOS toggles OSD, and back button works as well.
FIX: Multiple crashes when skipping around in videos.
FIX: [Win] Crash on startup.
FIX: [Win] A randomly occurring hang.


Plex v0.9.5 – Brave New World
October 29th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
OK, I know why you’re here. You want the new releases, and you want them now. Well, you’re in the right place.

Note that as part of the release process, we’ve added new forums (for myPlex, and the new “Laika” client). There is also an amazing amount of documentation on the new release. There are a lot of new moving parts, so we’re sure there may be a few rough edges. Please let us know about them, and we’ll get them smoothed out.

Most of all, though, we really hope you enjoy the new release!

One more thing; as I’m sure you’re aware of, there is a Plex client for Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players. Thousands of people are using it, and it’s quite nice; I picked up a compatible Blu-ray player for under $99 which does 1080p and optical audio out. Oh, and it’s a Blu-ray player.

Anyway, during the Laika development cycle, we worked with the amazingly talented author of the client, Daniel, as he updated the Samsung client to support new Laika features, and upgrade the look and feel of the application. I think the results are stunning:







This is all built in HTML5/CSS and Javascript. Pretty nice, right? The release will be available as early as tomorrow, and he’s working on fleshing it out even more beyond support for video. If you’d like to see it in action, you can check out this screencast Boots put together. It’s a really nice validation of the powerful HTTP/XML API that the Plex Media Server provides.

One more note, the Linux releases will be updated shortly, it takes us a bit of time to build for all the different platforms/NAS devices. You’ll be happy to know that our Linux engineers are working on completely automating the process.

Lastly, a HUGE thank you to all the Plex Ninjas who helped us test this release. Your tireless dedication to helping us track down and resolve issues in the new code, document the new features, your friendly and helpful 24-hour presence in Campfire, all of it was just simply awesome.


Plex v0.9.3.4 – Mo fixes, mo Barkley
July 28th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan

Many thanks to all who downloaded the last release! As might have been expected after such a big set of changes, there were a few issues that were reported that we’ve been working hard this week to resolve.

NEW: We’ve added a preference to disable media file deletion, and we’ve defaulted it to off, for the sake of safety (yes, Bruce, we’re listening). If you want to enable the option, please head to your friendly neighborhood web-based media manager at http://localhost:32400/manage and enable it:

Plex Media Manager

NEW: There is a new API endpoint /library/optimize which, as you might expect, optimizes the library database. Useful in clients or cron jobs.

And the fixes:

FIX: When refreshing a library section because changes to folders were detected, we wait until the changes stop before kicking off the scan, so that we don’t scan partial/locked files.
FIX: Custom artwork with spaces in path was not displaying properly.
FIX: This is an amusing one because it’s been there for a long time and nobody noticed. When doing a new scan, every 16th movie wasn’t displayed in the media manager (it was scanned, it just didn’t show up until you switched sections). Thanks to louisd for noticing it!
FIX: Our friend diamondsw helped us debug an issue where certain MKV files were failing to play on mobile devices.
FIX: Boots has been reporting this one for a while, there was an occasional hang in the media manager when scrolling quickly.
FIX: The was an issue scanning if your username had an apostrophe in it.
FIX: A (rather rare) crash in refreshing/timed updates.
FIX: [Windows] Sign all Python extensions. Apparently some of the AV products are coming up with some false positives on the media server, and the hope is that this might improve things.
FIX: [Windows] When exiting, don’t hang waiting for system bundle.
FIX: [Windows] When OpenSSL DLLs were installed into system, PMS system bundles wouldn’t start. This would cause the “no agents” issue.
FIX: [Linux] You can now use the environment variable PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR to specify where all of the media server’s user files go (library, plug-ins, logs, etc.)
FIX: [WIN32/Linux]: If multiple copies of a piece of media are found, load metadata for all copies.


Plex v0.9.3.3 – Halfway to the stars
July 20th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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Wow, OK, so it’s been a while.

The recent paucity of blog posts has not been for a lack of anything to talk about, nor for a lack of desire to write, but rather from the sheer volume of other things that I’ve had to do. Quite on the contrary, I love writing prose instead of code, and the sense we all have is that Plex is rapidly picking up speed: Just in the last month or two, we’ve grown our team, we’ve worked with Verizon on their in-car telematics solution (Plex in the back seat, anyone?), and are working with Netgear, Cisco, and Synology in order to make sure the Plex Media Server runs well on their NAS devices and is easily available to their customers. And that’s just skimming the surface…

We’re also in the process of making some major enhancements to our platform, and along the way to unveiling that, we decided to make an interim release. Fixes! New stuff! Rejoicing!

I also want to take a moment and point out that if you’re looking for real-time conversation about Plex, there are two great resources: Our Twitter feed is a great way to get questions answered, and see what we’re up to, and our public Campfire chat room usually has some Plexians in there who are happy to help you or just chat. I personally hang out there quite a bit as well, as I enjoy meeting and talking with Plex users from around the world.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the changes in this release, which I’ll group into a few different areas. The releases can be downloaded directly from the Plex home page (direct download links). After a day or two, we’ll enable auto-updates, and the Linux/NAS builds will appear shortly, as it takes a bit of time to build and package them.

By Popular Request:

NEW: Support for deleting files in the library. Lots of people wanted this one.
NEW: Initial support for Photo library sections. This means that the Plex Media Server can serve up your photos without needing to use iPhoto/Aperture, which of course doesn’t exist on Windows or Linux. We’re in the process of adding support to all the clients (e.g. next version of iOS/Android apps will add support, next firmware update for LG TV will add support), but Plex for Mac already supports it in this release. I like this one personally because it means that the Plex Media Server is now complete in the basic types of media it can scan and serve up.

Plex Media Manager 4

NEW: Automatic audio boost when mixing down multichannel to stereo for mobile devices. No, you’re not hard of hearing.
NEW: If subtitle files are dropped in next to a piece of media, they will be picked up on-the-fly without a need to rerefresh the item or section.
NEW: Support for SUB/IDX subtitles in Plex for Mac. They’re chunky evil bitmaps, but we love them. Sort of.
NEW: Support for DTS > AC3 transcoding in transcoder (useful for LG TV, ATV2 and others).

FIX: Subtitle scaling is now uniform, no more giant subtitles. No, you don’t need a different prescription for your glasses.
FIX: Anamorphic videos were not Direct Streamed.
FIX: More videos in general Direct Stream (level, nitrate, segment size issues).
FIX: Improved selection of subtitles with “shown with foreign audio” setting.
FIX: The SD MKV A/V sync issue.
FIX: A few bugs on Lion, Plex should now be Lion-ready (which answers this question)!

Platform Parity:

Over time, we want to tend towards platform parity, where features are available on all systems, whenever possible. We’ve taken some important steps towards this:

NEW: [Windows] iTunes support! (We’ll also be adding support for Linux, for those who have their iTunes XML stored on their Linux-based NAS devices.)
NEW: [Windows/Linux] Support for timed and automatic library refreshes.

Music:

We’re working hard to improve support for music inside Plex, and have made a number of changes in the core, music scanner, and agents, including:

NEW: Support for “Various Artists” (compilations) in music sections.
NEW: Initial support for multi-disc albums in music sections.
FIX: Much improved matching, far fewer false matches.

Other:

Even just with the above, this would be a pretty awesome release, but hey, there’s actually a lot more.

NEW: Faster transcoder startup.
NEW: Much faster TV and music metadata loading.
NEW: [Windows] Authenticode all binaries (hopefully preventing AV software from freaking out).
NEW: [Windows] Configure firewall on install.
NEW: Listen on new multicast group in GDM to avoid Windows 7 networking bug.

FIX: Issue where Vorbis streams were not transcoded.
FIX: Better logging for Python scanner errors while scanning.
FIX: [OS X] Database migration progress dialog didn’t always work properly.
FIX: Many fixes for GDM networking code.
FIX: [Windows] Scans stopping without completing.
FIX: [Windows] Server could become unresponsive.
FIX: [Windows] Conflicts with user-installed Python.
FIX: In certain cases, iOS app wasn’t showing channel images.
FIX: Unmatched items could become rematched, and items matched to a different agent could go back to the default agent.
FIX: [OS X] Cocoa media manager no longer jumps back to the grid when you are viewing details during a scan.
FIX: Hang when remotely playing one file followed by the next on Plex for Mac.
FIX: [OS X] Directory names are served up in precomposed UTF-8 on OS X (instead of decomposed).
FIX: [Linux] Crashes reading certain JPEG files.
FIX: [Linux] Image quality wasn’t as good for posters.
FIX: [Linux] Advertise on the real IP, not localhost.
FIX: [Linux] Playing files > 2GB failed.
FIX: [Linux] Fanart was scaled too small.
FIX: [Linux] If HOME was set to /, cache path wasn’t computed correctly.
FIX: Disable IPv6 on Linux/Windows by default, seems to cause problems in some cases.
FIX: Extreme memory usage or crashes analyzing ISO files.
FIX: Some crashes on shutdown, and also sped it up.
FIX: Don’t add the “All Episodes” directory if we don’t have any (e.g. in watched tree).
FIX: When refreshing older media libraries, bring remote media (poster/art) references local.
FIX: [OS X] Massive memory leak switching sections in the Cocoa media manager.
FIX: Offer even higher bitrates over 3G.
FIX: Issue with media streams in the database that could cause a transcode to fail on start.
FIX: A handful of other small bugs and crashes.

XML API:

Along with the new core features and fixes, we keep enhancing the Plex Media Server’s API. There are new clients appearing all the time, the most recent of which is for Samsung TVs and Bluray players (I’ve tried it, works great!), and we like to provide a rich HTTP interface for these clients. Full documentation for the API will be available shortly.

NEW: Media XML contains width and height for video and photos.
NEW: New endpoint GET /library/sections/X/allLeaves (returns all tracks, episodes, etc.)
NEW: New endpoint DELETE /library/metadata/X
NEW: Ability to search by filename.
FIX: Clipping bug in the container paging API.
FIX: Files with ‘%’ characters were not encoded correctly in XML.


Plex v0.9.2.7 – Tweaks and fixes
April 13th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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Now that the latest iOS version has made it into the store (and thank you so much for your feedback on it, you are all very kind!!), we’ve turned our attention to fixing a few issues with Plex. The new releases are available on the Plex home page, and we will enable auto-update shortly.

* NEW: We display the warning icon on shows/seasons/episodes and artist/album/tracks so that you can see more clearly which media is missing. Also note that if you dislike this feature, you can always disable it in the Library preferences by enabling “Empty trash automatically”. We enable it by default because we never want to delete any of your data without you knowing about it first.

NewImage

* FIX: We’ve updated the transcoding engine to fix a number of issues, including 3G video playback being audio only (thanks, Chris!), improvements in threading (1080p content should work more smoothly), and according to one tester, DTS-MA now mixes down correctly. Thanks also to mitch969 and others on the forums for all their help testing!
* FIX: A few fixes for for the web-based media manager, including a fix for changes to collections not saving, sections not disappearing from clients when deleted via the web manager, and fixes for the “Match using” and un-match functionality.
* FIX: When an episode is renamed, make sure we reload metadata if the episode or season number changed.
* FIX: If a slideshow screensaver is active, playing content via the iOS or Android remotes turns the screensaver off (thanks to Man for bring this to our attention).
* FIX: A fix for Turbo Scanning where if you edited a library section (to add a new directory, or when moving media, for example), you would need to perform a deep scan to pick up the changes.

We’ve also been hard at work at improving the music functionality. Besides support for FLAC, we’ve also added and fixed lots of other things. The really nice part is that the changes were to the scanner and agents, which means that they could be pushed out automatically in micro-increments. I love the thought of our users waking up to new features and bug-fixes without the need to download a whole new version!

* NEW: Support for scanning OGG.
* NEW: Improved and enhanced poster gathering from tags in all supported file formats.
* NEW: Music lacking tags is scanned in as “unknown” artist/album.
* FIX: Tons of fixes and improvements around reading tags.
* NEW: Parse track numbers out of filename if they’re not in the tags.
* FIX: Folders with more than 50 files are scanned.


Plex v0.9.2.6 – A little something for everyone
March 29th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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It’s rainy, and I have no beer. I have no beer because my car battery died, so I haven’t been able to go to the store to purchase more beer. As sure, my sadness will surely come through in these release notes. And there’s a Blues song in there somewhere.
An important general fix:

FIX: As issue when scanning a lot of new content (especially TV shows), where the Media Server could become unresponsive. We are now downloading media at the time of the scan (to make access faster in clients), and there was a bug that could cause an excessive amount of simultaneous downloads to, um, mess things up.

Some fixes specifically for Windows users:

FIX: [Win] The issue with season/episode posters not appearing has finally been fixed.
FIX: [Win] An issue where Plex Media Server refused to start when the user directory had an apostrophe in it. Many thanks to mrrwbrown and nyez1 on the forums for helping us track it down, we really appreciate it!

And a few subtitle fixes:

FIX: Subtitles weren’t being automatically enabled when there was just one embedded subtitle in a file and the preference was set to subtitles being “always enabled”.
FIX: As if that wasn’t bad enough, if a subtitle wasn’t enabled automatically when a file was played on Plex for Mac, it was disabled rather forcefully, so that it wouldn’t (won’t) appear again even if your preferences changed.

So to summarize, every video you played with the last version which did NOT choose to display subtitles automatically now has them disabled unless you manually enable them. This is likely not a big deal, because if you wanted them enabled you would have likely done so at the time! And the bug is now fixed.

We are going to be making more subtitle improvements, including fixing IDX/SUB subtitles, adding support for MicroDVD (on mobile clients as well!) and making the whole process of adding subtitles to your media easier and quicker. Don’t worry, we’re just getting started!

Next up, a few improvements for music fans:

NEW: Support for scanning FLAC! So I recently upgraded my desk stereo a bit, and as a result, I got into an argument with a friend about MP3 VBR vs FLAC. He insisted that there was a huge difference in imaging and dynamics (words that audiophiles like to throw around, along with “coherence” and “coloration”, as they mark their CDs with green pens and purchase three-hundred dollar HDMI cables in hopes that the zeros and ones are, I don’t know, transmitted in Helvetica?). Anyway, having purchased quite a few CDs in the past, and having ripped them to VBR MP3, I was hoping that he was wrong, because, after all, re-ripping 400+ discs didn’t sound like much fun. To make a long story short, he uploaded three tracks for me in MP3 and FLAC format, and I A/B’d between then (blindly, of course). The result? They both sounded great, and I couldn’t tell the difference to save my life.
NEW: The Local Media agent has been updated to pull album art out of tags for MP3 and FLAC files. And there was much rejoicing.

Plex Media Manager 3

Just like subtitles, the music support is a work in progress, and we have awesome things planned…

Finally, for all of you who access your media server remotely, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve added authentication to the web manager. OK, seriously, is that a sexy looking dialog or what?


Plex v0.9.2.5 – All Apologies
March 21st, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice, men and software engineers.

The last release contained a stupid database bug which caused the following issues in certain cases (mostly from-scratch scans):

* Scans wouldn’t bring in new content.
* Deleting the trash would crash the media server.

We apologize profusely for this issue, and we will strive to do better in the future. For starters, we’ll be sure to push major new releases as incrementals/betas before we push via Sparkle. We’ll also consider either administering beatings or reducing the beer rations as negative incentives for those guilty of the bugs.

(A known issue with this release – the last few, actually – is IDX/SUB subtitles. We’ll be working on it.)


Plex v0.9.2.4 – Solidification
March 21st, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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No matter how much testing you do, software always has bugs. It’s the curse of our profession. I guess you could say the same about any product or profession (say, that Beatles song with the guitars ever so slightly out of tune, or the house with the floors that are not quite level). But with those things, the imperfections can add to the final product, add to its character, whereas with software, flaws are just undesirable warts. Such is the binary nature of our profession.

I read a paper years ago that described the curve of bugs left over time for a piece of software, assuming new bugs are never added, and while the number asymptotically approached zero, the curve went out for ten thousand years before reaching anywhere close to it. This was both eye-opening and depressing at the same time.

Anyway, enough digression, and on with the release, which fixes a number of issues. First and foremost, let’s talk subtitles. We had a number of people comment that they liked seeing english subtitles with english audio, so of course, we listened. We listened because we care deeply about our users, and the happier they are, the happier we are! So let’s look at the new preferences:

System 2

If you pick the “Manually Selected” option, we’ll never show subtitles by default, unless you manually enable them. With the second option, we will attempt to automatically show subtitles when the audio is foreign (e.g. if you’re portuguese, we’ll try to show you portuguese subtitles for a libyan movie).

The third option is new, and with it we’ll try very hard to display subtitles, using the following heuristics:

1. If we find a subtitle matching your requested language, we’ll show it (even if the audio language matches). This solves the “english on english” case.
2. If there is a “sidecar” subtitle (i.e. a subtitle file next to the video file) we’ll pick that even if the language didn’t match, because most of the time when people have a subtitle file sitting there, they want to display it.
3. If there is a single subtitle embedded in the file, we’ll use that even if the language didn’t match.

Hopefully that should be a step in the right direction. Please always bear in mind that if the automatic heuristics get it wrong, you can simply make a manual choice, and this will be remembered. On all clients.

The other slightly tricky thing about subtitles in the last release was that if you already had your media scanned into Plex, you had to do a forced refresh to find and process the subtitles. This is obviously just a transitional issue (since any new media scanned in will get the subtitles right away). Let me just explain quickly what you need to do in order to get your subtitles into the library:

First, make sure that the Local Media Assets agent is enabled for movies (Freebase) and TV Shows (TheTVDB). This will be the case on new installs, but if you’ve been with us for a while, it’s possible you don’t have them turned on:

Metadata Agent Settings

Next, you can try with a single piece of media by right clicking and selecting “Refresh Metadata”. This will pull in subtitles for a single show or a movie.

Finally, you can load all subtitles for all your media by shift-clicking on the refresh button. This will not overwrite your locked metadata or change any posters you’ve selected.

Plex Media Manager 3

Here is a full list of bugs this release fixes. The Mac downloads have been made live on the main page and via Sparkle, and the Windows builds will be made live tomorrow after we do some final testing. Thanks for your patience and for all your great feedback on the last release.

* FIX: The Media Server would crash on start if you had certain plug-ins installed with bogus XML.
* FIX: In certain cases, a scan would result in multiple movies showing the same name/poster.
* FIX: A few fixes for soft deletion, including merged movies not showing the /! icon.
* FIX: Changing the view type in Unwatched Shows would change the view type for episodes.
* FIX: Possible fix for an OS X Lion crash (Plex is still unsupported on Lion).
* FIX: Plex should now pick DTS/AC3 tracks over stereo when connected to a receiver.
* FIX: When you play a video via iOS application, screen saver is turned off on Plex.
* FIX: [Win] Issue with the transcoder, many videos wouldn’t play.
* FIX: [Win] Posters for seasons/episodes not displaying.
* FIX: [Win] Customization of application support directory wasn’t working.


Plex v0.9.2.3 – #velociraptorblood
March 17th, 2011 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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You’ve been patient, and now it’s finally here! We’re not enabling auto-update quite yet for it, so consider this a pre-release. It might even have a bug or two (gasp!). Play with it, and please let us know how you like it. Mac and Windows downloads are available on the home page.

The iOS app is just getting wrapped up and getting ready for submission.

(Also, we know that some people are having issues with A/V sync and other playback issues. Please realize that we’re aware of this, and have plans for addressing it. Really.)

Also, bear in mind that skins need updating for the universal search functionality. Maverick214 and Reddragon220 are hard at work at this, as is se.bastian, who just released his amazing RetroPlex skin, and updated it already to support search. You can get RetroPlex and other skins via the via the most excellent Preen Skin Manager.

Search

* NEW: Universal Search.
* NEW: Direct Play and Direct Streaming for clients.
* NEW: Subtitle support in agents, and streaming subtitles from server to clients (SRT/SMI/SSA).
* NEW: Support for secure access via Web Media Manager.
* NEW: Turbo Scanning (option-click to do regular “deep” scan).
* NEW: Soft Deletion.
* NEW: Added the By Folder second level menu.
* NEW: Support for our Bonjour replacement, known as G’Day Mate (GDM). Easy discovery!
* NEW: [Win] Support for storing application support files anywhere.
* FIX: The “Add Application” button was broken.
* FIX: Don’t refresh metadata every two weeks.
* FIX: In rare cases a Python process would take 100% CPU.
* FIX: “Unwatched” section second title was incorrect.
* FIX: Browsing for subtitles on Plex for Mac client.
* FIX: Flash 10.1/10.2 works now.
* FIX: With newer Flash installed, PMS is not restarted after 5.1 audio (as Flash but was fixed).
* FIX: Refresh works with local media agent even if media isn’t matched (for subs, posters).
* FIX: [Win] Various crashes (shutdown, during scans)
* FIX: [Win] Issue with dialogs popping up asking you to insert drive.
* FIX: [Win] Updated to latest transcoder, fixing lots of issues.
* FIX: [Win] Make sure we don’t conflict with installed Pythons.
* FIX: [Win] Lack of season/episode posters.
* FIX: Movies with ratings of 10 don’t show up under “5 stars”
* FIX: Any “phantom” media in the database is whacked after a scan.
* FIX: Don’t let the machine sleep while transcoding.
* FIX: Empty machine name crash.
* FIX: Support for audio playback from Android with security enabled.
* FIX: Add countries and producers tags to metadata models.
* FIX: Media is downloaded on metadata refresh, and always kept around.

And gobs of other fixes…


A new Plex incremental and some MP4 love
December 18th, 2010 | Category: Release,Status | Author: elan
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As you might have noticed, we finished up on a round of incremental releases and made v0.9.1.9 an official release, updating the main download page and pushing it via Sparkle update. We want to take a moment and thank you all for trying out the incremental releases along the way, and giving us great feedback on them. We also hope the more adventurous among you enjoyed playing around with new features and fixes before they were officially released!

Without further ado, I’m happy to introduce you to a new incremental chock full of bug-fixes:

* FIX: Media thumbnailing functionality was broken. Totally my fault, we’ve been making builds of Plex Media Server for other platforms (*hint hint wink wink*) and I accidentally left it disabled in the OS X build. Whoops.
* FIX: Minor fixes for Plex ffmpeg (MPEG-TS memory leak, fix for Blu Ray subtitles).
* FIX: There was an issue starting some MP4 streams in plug-ins (e.g. Earth Touch and MSNBC). Thanks to Sander for helping us diagnose the issue and test the fix!
* FIX: Unmatching an item wasn’t resetting posters and other graphics correctly.
* FIX: Second level movie sections weren’t showing custom backgrounds.
* FIX: On occasion, secondary lists of sections would show up without a background (thanks, Scott!)


Plex v0.9.1.7
December 02nd, 2010 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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So a mere six days after at least some of us stuffed ourselves silly with turkey, and indeed perhaps invigorated from all those calories, we’re back with another incremental release. Shiny new features! Many bugs crushed! New levels, pigs, and a new bird! (Whoops, wrong program.) Seriously though, I think James has slept about 5 hours in the last six days, and has entered an advanced state of mind meld with Cocoa.

So let’s get to the exciting part! Here is what’s new and shiny. (Note that this is another incremental, which means it’s a work in progress, and you should only download it if you want to be on the bleeding edge.)

* NEW: We’ve fleshed out the Plex Media Manager to allow browsing into seasons and episodes, albums and tracks. It’s here, it’s pretty, and finally you can do things you’ve wanted to do for ages like edit season thumbs. Please note, even though it’s functional, it’s not finished by any means, and things like selection states and keyboard navigation are missing.

Plex Media Manager-17.jpg

Plex Media Manager-21.jpg

Plex Media Manager-19.jpg

* NEW: Separate buttons for refreshing and agent settings.
* NEW: Keyboard shortcuts for Edit Metadata, Refresh, and Fix Incorrect Match.
* NEW: Typing letter scrolls to the first item which starts with that letter in the browser.
* NEW: Show Media Manager when dock icon is clicked.
* NEW: Include the WebManager.bundle in the package. This web-based media manager is really quite awesome. Built using the advanced Cappuccino framework by our one and only Brian D, it gives you a way to access and organize your media via any web browser (even on your iPad) and leaves you wondering “was that really a web app??” Try it yourself by hitting http://x.x.x.x:32400/manage – if you have an older version, delete the WebManager.bundle and let PMS refresh it for you on start (it’ll autoupdate shortly).

Plex Media Manager-18.jpg

We also fixed a large number of bugs:

* FIX: Delete collection instead section when clicking the [-] button (sorry!)
* FIX: Only allow dropping onto same-section collections.
* FIX: The Fix Incorrect Match button wasn’t working in the details view.
* FIX: We remember selection and scroll location when navigating back.
* FIX: Broken forward navigation, forward swiping in browse view.
* FIX: Missing last character in path bar in media manager.
* FIX: Plex Media Server issue which could result in hang or missing sections/plug-ins.
* FIX: Long beachball adding/removing sections.
* FIX: Rescan whacks collections, they weren’t locked correctly if you created them by dragging and dropping or context menu.
* FIX: Abort on start with Aperture XML file with weird permission/location.
* FIX: Don’t perform Bonjour resolves during video playback, fixes an every-ten-minute or so stutter.
* FIX: Rare crash in Plex when left idle.
* FIX: Continue scanning if we run into permissions issues.
* FIX: Dock icon weirdness when disabling and attempting an immediate restart.
* FIX: We’ve reverted the transcoder to use the older quality settings, which will reduce CPU usage.


Plex v0.9.1.2
November 25th, 2010 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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Ever since Plex/Nine was released, the most often requested feature has been “I want to be able to manually edit the data for a piece of media”. This request came in many different forms, from the modest “please let me edit the title for a movie” to the less subtle “plex is combeltey [sic] borkem [sic]“.

I’m pleased to say with the incremental we’re releasing today, not only can you edit titles, you can edit just about every single aspect of the metadata, and do it in a way that no other media management application in existence allows. Without further ado, let me introduce you to the new feature.

So let’s say you have a movie backed up on disk, and it’s matched to metadata.

Plex Media Manager-1.jpg

However, you really want it to have a Korean title, perhaps because you’re married to a beautiful Korean girl, or a bunch of Korean LG engineers are always coming over to your place to watch movies and eat stuff out of your fridge. Right click, select “Edit Metadata”, and you’re presented with this dialog:

Plex Media Server.jpg

So let’s have a quick look; there are all the standard fields you might expect, and then there’s Sort Title. That’s useful for enforcing the correct ordering with sequels, for example, or making “The Expendables” sort like “A Really Bad Movie With Lots of Old People”.

You’ll notice a lock icon beside every field, which turns on when you edit a field. This means “I don’t want this value to ever change again”, as opposed to the unlocked fields which continue to update based on data from the agents. It’s completely up to you; you might prefer to put your own genres in, for example, or let them update (and improve over time) from online sources.

The ability to choose exactly how metadata comes into your library (via the Metadata Agent settings), and select per-field whether or not to use online data is incredibly powerful and flexible. We’ll continue to enhance the UI to better expose this power.

One note about posters and other graphical elements: until this release, the code that manages posters, banners, and fanart was a bit of a hack, which was needed because we didn’t have full field “locking” yet. It was “sticky” but not locked. When you upgrade to this incremental version, all those graphics fields will become fully fluid, and will update with new graphics as those elements become the most popular over time. So if you’ve spent lots of time getting things just right, please visit this forum post where I explain how to lock the fields before you upgrade to this version.

So here we have our edited movie, whose title will never change, unless we manually change it or unlock the field.

Plex Media Manager-3.jpg

Moving right along, there’s another movie in this section which mismatched to “40 Days and 40 Nights”, which is actually not the 2002 romantic comedy of questionable cinematic value, but an obscure Polish film from the 30s of the same name. Very unlikely that we’ll find an online match for it, so we’ll “unmatch” it, which resets any existing metadata and leaves it as a blank slate for you to edit as you wish.

Fullscreen.jpg

Finally, there is one more problem with this section. The movie “Lolita” matched to the 1962 classic by Stanley Kubrick (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”), but in reality it’s the less subtle version starring Lupe Fuentes. Not a problem, we’ll solve that with another right click to request that the movie be matched with an alternative agent.

Plex Media Manager-4.jpg

Another feature addition I’d like to highlight in this version is Collections. This is something that has been requested for a while, and it’s a great organizational tool. The amusing thing is that support for Collections has been in the code and database schema for ages now, but we’ve only now gotten around to bringing it to the surface. There is additional hidden functionality there for Collections, as well as other cool stuff, but we’ve at least enabled basic Collections support so you can start organizing your media.

You can add a piece of media to a collection by right clicking and selecting Add to Collection, or by typing in the names of the Collections in the Metadata Editing view, or by dragging and dropping to an existing collection.

Plex Media Manager-7.jpg

Usually the feature is used in coordination with the Sort Title field, to ensure that the movies are ordered properly in chronological order.

Plex Media Manager-8.jpg

So what else is new and fixed in this incremental? Quite a bit, but I need to go work on making a metric ton of mashed potatoes (yellow, purple, and sweet), and so I can’t spend much time on the details.

* NEW: Allow sorting based on date added.
* NEW: Keyboard accelerators for clipboard operations.
* NEW: Optional dock icon (set in Preferences).
* NEW: Home movies section works much better: ratings/view status/resume is now remembered, and of course you can edit all the metadata.
* FIX: Resume offset/view status now remembered for media even if it’s not matched.
* FIX: Stuttering issue with VIDEO_TS media, previously released in hot-fix form.
* FIX: Recently Viewed Shows wasn’t working.
* FIX: Lower CPU usage when refreshing TV shows.
* FIX: Seasons/episodes views weren’t getting graphics from the media server.
* FIX: Cases where a scan failed and we deleted lots of media out of the library.
* FIX: Crash in the scanner with a bogus AVI file.
* FIX: Posters/art not appearing when searching for movies.
* FIX: Tweaks in Plex to hopefully not “lose” sections and plug-ins (more fixes forthcoming).


Plex v0.9.1
October 23rd, 2010 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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Without further ado, we’d like to introduce you to the latest version of Plex/Nine. It’s much more stable, it’s faster, has more features, and it’s also much shinier than the last release. The release can be downloaded via auto-update or from the home page.

This release also includes all the changes from the various hot-fixes, which I’ll summarize here as well for the sake of completeness.

* NEW: Cast information restored to movie information dialog in Plex for Mac.
* NEW: Ability to choose a specific piece of media to watch (e.g. HD, SD) if you have multiple media items. (You can disable this in Preferences > Video.

Plex-1.jpg

* NEW: Added back “By Albums” in iTunes plug-in. Sometimes all you need is a little more cowbell.
* NEW: Allow splitting apart TV Shows and Movies in the media manager. You can see an example here.
* NEW: Added an “Unwatched” section for Movies and TV Shows.
* NEW: Added “By Album” in music library sections.
* NEW: Allow browsing for on-disk graphics (posters/art) in the Media Manager.
* NEW: Support for volume control in new remote control protocol.
* NEW: Display number of items for each piece of media (e.g. if you have SD and HD versions of a movie). If you sort by items descending it’s a good way to see if you have any duplicated media (Reveal in Finder will show all of them) or if the agents have mistakenly matched two different pieces of media to the same thing. Yes, I’m really this disorganized, or at least I was until now!

Plex Media Manager-1.jpg



* NEW: Searching for matches in the media manager is now asynchronous and can be cancelled. Death to beach balls!
* NEW: In Preferences > Transcoding, we’ve added an option to offer higher bitrates over 3G.
* NEW: In Preferences > Library, you can optimize your database.

By far we spent the most time fixing bugs. Hopefully this release will resolve most of the really pesky issues. We appreciate all the patience and kindness you’ve shown us with this first release. As we’ve mentioned, this was a ground-up rewrite of the entire library, so problems were definitely to be expected.

* FIX: That dratted issue with posters and art continually re-downloading off the Internet. The Plex Media Server is now the single entity that downloads the graphics, and all the clients request from it. Expirations have been fixed, and other improvements around caching have been made. The bottom line is that, while not perfect, it should be much, much better. N.B. As part of this change, it’s of course going to have to download everything one last time in order to transition over to this new scheme.
* FIX: Leopard crash on start (thanks, Ryan!). Also a crash on start when your computer didn’t have a name. And a few other crashes on start.
* FIX: Stuttering playback (mostly with HD media). In some cases the cache size was being set incorrectly based on bad analysis, and this could lead to stutters during playback.
* FIX: Anamorphic videos fix for iOS. Additionally, anamorphic MP4 files play correctly on Plex for Mac (thanks, Ryan!).
* FIX: High CPU usage during scan, which could cause stuttering during playback as well.
* FIX: Plug-ins could go missing in Plex when starting at same time as PMS.
* FIX: We now quit the Scanner if the Media Server quits.
* FIX: When detecting a rename, we upload location the in the database, otherwise media gets whacked when removing old location.
* FIX: When a duplicate episode was found, it lost the “addedAt” time (making it disappear from “recently added”).
* FIX: Allow backspace to exit the weather section, preferences, and a few other places where you could get stuck with the iOS app.
* FIX: The “-1″ year issue in list view.
* FIX: Better handling of locked database file.
* FIX: In certain cases, stacked movies were not played in the right order.
* FIX: Sometimes partial fanart files were displayed, leading to corrupted images being displayed.
* FIX: Better handling for audio/video distinguishing in iTunes for foreign languages.
* FIX: Allow changing metadata agent settings when there are no sections.
* FIX: Video podcasts passed back as Video elements instead of Track.
* FIX: Hebrew subtitles were displaying punctuation incorrectly.
* FIX: The word “dvdmedia” was displayed at the end of the movie title.
* FIX: Occasionally startup issues could result in agents not showing up, improve the recovery from this.
* FIX: Issue on startup, due to space in home folder.
* FIX: Videos stopping randomly in the middle of play.
* FIX: A few tweaks to the Media Server’s menu bar, to make canceling a library refresh possible, and to make it harder to accidentally start one.
* FIX: iTunes/iLife plug-ins mysteriously disappearing.
* FIX: Lots of crashes while scanning and analyzing media, including some MP3s.
* FIX: The Media Server starts (and installs) on a machine without Internet.
* FIX: We fixed a .BUP/.IFO ordering issue which could cause a crash when playing a VIDEO_TS movie. You’ll need to remove and add the section to fix the ordering (but you won’t lose view state/progress doing so).
* FIX: A buffer overflow issue reported by d1dn0t, which also caused crashes when navigating into some plug-ins.
* FIX: Adding library sections from the command line wasn’t working (thanks, Atrus!).
* FIX: The library would occasionally refresh continually.
* FIX: Crash of the iOS app near the end of a video.


Plex Media Server ever-hotter-fix (2010-09-26)
September 26th, 2010 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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I like these hot-fixes few for a different reasons; first and foremost, it’s an easy way for us to get new code into your hands in the quickest possible way. Second of all, it’s a great way to get feedback from you before we roll another official release, which will offer itself via auto-update.

So if you’re feeling brave, take them for a spin, and if you’re not, please wait for the official release. One comment we received was something along the lines of “Please don’t make hot-fix releases, just make official releases” and I think that’s missing the point a bit. It’s not an either/or sort of thing, and by all means, if you want to wait for the auto-update via Sparkle, please do so.

But if you live on the edge, regularly swim with sharks, or fly to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, try the latest hotter-fix release here. It fixes the following issues:

* FIX: Occasional crash on start.
* FIX: Issue with TV/Movie search/updates hanging.
* FIX: A rare issue where the server would get stuck exiting, and required a reboot (which seems like an OS X issue).
* FIX: GUI weirdness using the new asynchronous “fix match” dialog.

As with the last one, drop the new application into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex and replace the existing one. Look at the string after the version number to make sure you’re running the latest code, and let us know how it works for you! As long as this version doesn’t have any more regressions, we’ll roll it into an official release shortly.


Plex Media Server hot-fix released
September 24th, 2010 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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We’re happy to be able to offer you a hot-fix for the Plex Media Server which fixes a number of issues. We’re also working on the next version of the iOS app, which fixes a good handful of bugs, and we hope to have it ready for submission to Apple early next week.

This hot-fix is very easy to install:

1. Download the new Plex Media Server and unzip
2. Quit Plex Media Server
3. Drag new version of the application to ~/Library/Application Support/Plex, overwriting the old one
4. Restart by double clicking on the application

We’ve slipped in a few new things, by popular demand:

* NEW: We’ve made searching for matches asynchronous, so no more rude spinning beachballs of doom, and you can cancel a running search.

Plex Media Server.jpg



* NEW: We’ve added an option for the Plex Media Server to send back additional higher bit-rate streams when transcoding over 3G (besides the 64kbps stream that’s always there). This will result in higher quality video, if your network can handle it, but it can also result in occasional pausing when the player “shifts” between streams.

Transcoding.jpg



* NEW: You can now optimize your database. This is especially useful if you’ve added and removed lots of content. This can take a while, and I realize there’s no fancy spinny progress indicator, so just be patient and let it work, and do it when the media server is idle.

Library-1.jpg



We’ve also fixed a number of bugs, including:

* FIX: Crash on start when your computer didn’t have a name.
* FIX: Videos stopping randomly in the middle of play (sorry!).
* FIX: iTunes/iLife plug-ins mysteriously disappearing (should be fixed).
* FIX: The scanner/media analysis had its ffmpeg updated to 0.6.x, and a few other related bugs have been fixed, which should fix lots of crashes while scanning.
* FIX: We fixed a .BUP/.IFO ordering issue which could cause a crash when playing a VIDEO_TS movie. You’ll need to remove and add the section to fix the ordering (but you won’t lose view state/progress doing so).
* FIX: A buffer overflow issue reported by d1dn0t, which also caused crashes when navigating into some plug-ins.
* FIX: Adding library sections from the command line wasn’t working (thanks, Atrus!).
* FIX: The library would occasionally refresh continually.
* FIX: Crash of the iOS app near the end of a video (thanks to Mike P for the report and media sample, and to Frank for fixing).
* FIX: Agents are now allowed to set a title in the update function for movies.


Plex/Nine has been released!
August 30th, 2010 | Category: Release | Author: elan
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Come and get it, we really hope you enjoy it.

Thank you so much for your incredible support over the last week, as we’ve worked super hard to get this out to you. Is it perfect? No. Is it bug free? Absolutely not. But it’s a giant step in the right direction, and it makes us very happy to be able to share it with you. We’re over the snowy pass, and heading down into a lush valley, where great things await.

Check it out, let us know how it works for you. If anything’s badly broken, we’ll fix it, and if anything is missing, we’ll add it!

http://elan.plexapp.com/


Plex 0.8.5: Fixes, fixes, fixes
November 18th, 2009 | Category: Status | Author: elan

The Plex/Eight series is supposed to be about stability, and with all the changes we introduced in the 0.8.3 there were a few regressions that slipped in as well. We’re very sorry about that, and we’ve worked extremely hard since it was released to fix the issues introduced as well as new ones that came to light. So what happened to 0.8.4? We were on the verge of releasing it and then found a few more bugs, so we “nuked” the release. Those of you who sniffed it out on the server, you may want to upgrade now to the real thing.

Without further ado, the fixes:

* FIX: A bug where Plex and the Plex Media Server could get out of sync and display the wrong contents for a directory.
* FIX: An issue when stopping music playback, where the GUI “clicks” don’t restore and the playing track is still selected.
* FIX: Photo thumbnails were broken for plug-ins (thanks to orr721 for the report!)
* FIX: Hitting the menu button during a blank slideshow causes a crash. (thank to Majkel and other for the report!)
* FIX: When a track fails to play, Plex jumps into (blank) Now Playing screen anyway.
* FIX: Sometimes the photo screensaver started going “crazy fast”.
* FIX: The new remote code logged too much.
* FIX: The duration didn’t show up in plug-ins.
* FIX: You weren’t returned to the main menu correctly from items added to your Favorites, or direct links to plug-ins in the Music section. Existing favorites will need to be removed and re-added. (James)
* FIX: The iTunes plug-in now sorts artists by the “sort artist” field in iTunes. This one is for Scott!
* FIX: Crashes with WebKit plug-ins that appear in the Music section.
* FIX: PlexHelper occasionally stopped responding (or responded incorrectly) to button presses.
* FIX: Sometimes Plex didn’t start after the first run. Believe it or not, this was an OS X bug, now worked around.
* FIX: Plex hung when using the mouse wheel to scroll through text (thanks to hqrs for the report!)
* FIX: Changed the servers in the TVDB scraper to use the load balanced ones. (many thanks to kruisje for the fix!)
* FIX: Fixed a crash loading some RAW files.
* FIX: DTS-to-AC3 was broken in the last release. Thanks to our audio doctor Ryan who fixed it and improved the AC3 trancoding in the process.
* FIX: When you select “previous track” it now does the right thing with streamed content: moving to the start of the track or the previous track depending on how far along the track is (awesome, James!)

OK, so I said there were just fixes, right? I lied! James, as usual, pulled out a great new feature or two out of his hat, and we hope you enjoy them.

* NEW: Plug-in preferences show up on the context menu for the plug-in itself.
* NEW: Auto-sourcing of remote Plex Media Server iLife plug-ins. Let’s say you have a laptop with iTunes music, or your wife’s iMac has iPhoto on it. No longer do you have to manually add the sources, or wonder if they’ll work when you click on them. With the new version, sources add and remove themselves auto-magically thanks to Bonjour. Make sure you install the new Plex Media Server on the remote machines.


Plex 0.8.3: Let it Snow (Leopard)!
October 26th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We realize it’s been a little while since the last release, but hopefully the wait will have been worth it. We’re thrilled to serve you up a fresh new version of Plex with lots of bug-fixes and a few little enhancements. First up, the fixes:

[French users, be sure to read through oncleben31's blog post on the new scraper included in this release here.]

* FIX: On Snow Leopard, 5.1 audio had issues. We’ve cleaned up the code, fixed the problems, and it now runs great on 10.6. Many thanks to Ryan for all his work on this one.
* FIX: We fixed an issue with the new caching system that could cause some MKVs and other files to stutter when played over the network.
* FIX: Video playlists work again.
* FIX: Multi-part videos display thumbnails again.
* FIX: Crash reading GPS EXIF data from photos.
* FIX: Fix for crash when displaying subtitles (Thanks, Billy J!)
* FIX: A few crashes in the Media Server (custom iTunes genre artwork, and playing Netflix movies).
* FIX: First WebKit play on a fresh install didn’t work.
* FIX: App Store would sometimes not show up on a fresh install.
* FIX: GForce visualizer for iTunes causes Plex to crash.
* FIX: TVDB image issue (thanks to Poldi!)
* FIX: Posters issue in IMDB scraper (thanks, Jay!) and issue with cast lists (thanks to Todd G!)
* FIX: DTS downmixing method reverted to use libdts. People who listen on headphone *may* be happier.
* FIX: Make keyboard backlight feature optional (James). You can access this setting in the advanced Cocoa preferences area under the Videos tab.

To summarize, Plex should now work pretty well on Snow Leopard, and hopefully most of the annoyances and issues in the last release have been fixed. Moving right along, what other tasty nuggets await in this new release?

* NEW: James revamped Plex shutdown options, adding a beautiful UI that allows quitting, sleeping, or powering off after a specified time. Check out the screencast below to see it in action.
* NEW: One of the longest-running complaints about Plex has been the low volume when listening to downmixed 5.1 audio. We’ve added three levels of dynamic range compression (in Preferences > System > Audio): Normal, Large, and Huge. These settings apply only to AC3 and DTS downmixed audio, and the Large and Huge settings can introduce (usually subliminal) clipping. This one is for you, Aayush!
* NEW: Captions for iPhoto photos, and EXIF comment tag also used for captions.
* NEW: We’re using Felix’s new Apple Remote code (thanks to Evan for integrating it!). This provides, as Apple would say “improved compatibility”. One note: we recommend using the Candelair driver even on Leopard, because it can help resolve cases in which the Apple Remote loses exclusive access with the Apple driver.
* NEW: Toggle full screen option on dock menu (thanks to Billy Joe).

Along this release comes a new improved version of the Plex Media Framework used to write plug-ins, and enhancements to the Plex Media Server itself.

* NEW: Support for one-click install of plug-ins. You can now easily install plug-ins off the web without having to copy files all over the place.
Plug-in Installer.jpg
* NEW: Support for auto-refresh in directories.
* NEW: Context menus in plug-ins.
* NEW: Rating support for plug-ins, with support for community/system ratings as well as user ratings. This feature was used to great effect by David B in the upcoming update of our Netflix plug-in. Here’s an unrated movie and us rating it via the context menu item.

And here’s the movie with our rating.
foo.jpg
* NEW: Upgrade Plex WebKit libraries to 4.0.3.
* NEW: Allow passing back User Agent (makes Apple Movie Trailers work again).


Plex 0.8.2: Silky Smooth
August 09th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

It wasn’t until I was over at a friend’s house playing with Plex v0.8.1 that I realized how much better this new version is. We’ve targeted two major causes of user interface delay (beach balling) in this release (starting streams and browsing through directories) and the results should make your experience much better than it used to be. As always, many thanks to the talented group of plug-in developers who keep expanding the content tree, as well as help us track down bugs!

If you’re just joining us, you can find helpful and friendly support on the forums (welcome 10,000th user!), or follow us via Twitter. Heck, you can even follow Barkley on Twitter. Or buy us a beer via the donate link at the right.
# NEW: Allow Plex Media Server photo sources to be used for the slideshow screensaver. It’s kind of nice to have a subfolder of Web Gallery of Art as your screensaver, your date will be impressed.
# NEW: This has been a popular request for those of you without surround receivers. We’ve added a new setting that links OS X sound volume with Plex sound volume. This means that you can use your Apple Remote for *all* of your volume changes, including all the WebKit plug-ins. (For those of you with surround receivers, you’ll continue to use your receiver’s remote for all of your volume changes.)
Plex.jpg
# NEW: This is one that’s bothered me for ages. Setting the cache size in Megabytes is really silly, because the amount you want to cache depends on the bandwidth of the content. For example, if you set it high, your Apple Movie Trailers might play without stuttering, but then that low bandwidth FLV would take forever to buffer. With this version, we’re introducing Bandwidth-based Caching®, which dynamically adjusts the size of the cache depending on the needs of the stream. The result: lower bandwidth streams start faster, and higher bandwidth streams play with less stuttering. Also as a consequence, the cache settings now look quite a bit more simple. You simply specify the number of seconds of media that you would like to cache.
Plex-1.jpg
# NEW: Greatly improved responsiveness when browsing. Things like entering or leaving a big list of items (e.g. iTunes artists list) that could hang the entire interface for 5-15 seconds are now instant.
# NEW: Thanks to James, the keyboard backlight turns off during videos playing so you can grope your date more easily.
# NEW: Maverick214 on the forums submitted a great patch for displaying the end time for videos. Always nice to know how much longer you’re going to be tortured watching So You Think You Can Dance.
Plex-2.jpg
# NEW: We’ve added a “Shuffle” context menu item for the photos area.
# NEW: Do you like having your cake and eating it too? Do you like the Now Playing screen, but wish you could induce epileptic fits in your pets with the visualizer at the same time? Luckily for you, Scott was stuck on a plane, armed with a laptop and he hacked together this perfect marriage. Not for you? Simply select the “Hide Now Playing in Visualizer” in the Skin settings.
Plex-3.jpg
# NEW: Improved Snow Leopard support. There are still a few glitches, but Plex now runs quite well on the new kitty.
# NEW: James cleaned up the shutdown options for Plex. In the skin settings, you can select which of Quit, Sleep, or Shut Down appears on the main menu. If you want to access the other choices, you simply hit “right” to pick another option. If you have your Harmony remote mapped to something custom, you can use the actions Plex.Quit, Plex.SleepSystem, and Plex.ShutDownSystem.
Plex-35.jpg 471×313 pixels.jpg
# NEW: We display error messages when an item fails to play (as opposed to silently returning to the menu).

Along with all these additions, we’ve fixed quite a few bugs:
# FIX: Manually added PMS sources can be removed via context menu (James).
# FIX: The default folder for the slide show was set to “F:/” (#303)
# FIX: Fixed an issue when Auto-Subtitles are enabled, we weren’t allowing manual activation of other subtitles if they were automatically disabled.
# FIX: Crash in the Media Server in iTunes plug-in.
# FIX: James made some minor tweaks to menu/keyboard handling, so that the ‘Move focus to the menu bar’ command (mapped to ^F2) works, and also ⌘W now closes the About window.
# FIX: We now scrobble to Last.fm as “Plex”.
# FIX: Thumbnails obtained from the Plex Media Server are all stored in their own directory, and given a limited time to live, so that you shouldn’t need to go manually whack icons or fanart any more. In addition, thumbnails created by the Plex Media Server with Quick Look are also only cached for a limited amount of time.
# FIX: Removed the System Info window, which really wasn’t doing much good (thanks to James).
# FIX: Disable cross-fading by default (also thanks to James).
# FIX: Fixed an error in the keymap (thanks to Mickey for reporting, and James for fixing).
# FIX: The Plex Media Server quit confirmation dialog didn’t always appear on top (James).
# FIX: Improved A/V sync, those with senses tuned to this sort of stuff should find it better behaved.
# FIX: iTunes visualizers didn’t show elapsed time (thanks to Daniel for reporting it).
# FIX: Resume point for videos is now saved when quitting.
# FIX: Years weren’t showing up in IMDB matches.
# FIX: On updates or restarts, PlexHelper (and thus Apple Remote) could stop working.
# FIX: If you had the Plex Media Server set to “Always running” it would not start on boot.
# FIX: A crash starting a zoomed MKV (with software upscaling enabled).
# FIX: A crash on startup with audio device changes.

Also, we’ve worked on the interaction between Plex and the Media Server, as well as the Python Framework. James just pushed the official v1.0 to the store, and he’ll be blogging about all the great changes in the final release. Note that all plug-in caches and data will be reset because of changes to the encoding, which means that you will need to re-enter login data into some plug-ins (we apologize for this).
# NEW: We now support redirection from HTTP to RTMP, MMS, and WebKit streams.
# NEW: Site configurations can live inside plug-ins.
# NEW: We check for other Python files changing besides __init__.py inside of Contents/Code.
# NEW: Seek bars are allowed to specify small/large percentages to jump.
# NEW: Video items can specify bandwidth if they wish to override the automatically computed bandwidth (also useful for some FLV files where it’s not possible to extract it).
# NEW: You can pass back cookies from the Media Server to Plex, which is useful for accessing authenticated content.
# FIX: The Preferences item refreshes parent, useful for displaying/hiding sub-menus based on logged in status (James)
# FIX: Javascript seek bars didn’t reset properly.
# FIX: String keys are now allowed for album media items.
# FIX: The Plex Media Server would crash if a site configuration moved to an unknown state.
# FIX: Showing a message dialog at the top level of a plug-in didn’t work right.
# FIX: The Media Server didn’t forward requests to the right plug-in when they shared a common prefix (James)


Release 0.8.1: Crazy Delicious
May 22nd, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

Remember how when Windows 3.0 came out, it really sucked, and it wasn’t until 3.1 that Microsoft got things right? Well, I’d like to think of this release (download here) as being the “Windows 3.1″ release of Plex. We’ve fixed a lot of issues, and this version should be much more stable than the previous one. Additionally, the people who were staying with v0.7.13 because of issues with BluRay rips in subsequent versions can now download this version without fear.

* FIX: Idle CPU reduced greatly. On an iMac we went from 24% to around 9.8%. On a 1.83GHz Mini we went from 38% to 16%. Al Gore is happy.
* FIX: Hang when playing WebKit content after 5.1 content.
* FIX: A few issues causing App Store/plug-ins to disappear.
* FIX: Hang on exit (when Media Server Scrobbler was enabled).
* FIX: Cannot play/browse AC/DC (and other artists with funky names) from the iTunes library. Heavy metal fans rejoice!
* FIX: Scrobbling plays of AAC files to the Plex Media Server wasn’t working.
* FIX: Crash on start when Plex Media Server was run on a computer without Plex.
* FIX: Intermittant lack of audio when starting 5.1 videos when background music/themes was enabled. (We also disabling the fading, which was not helping.)
* FIX: VC-1 apparent regression in ffmpeg 0.5 which caused much higher CPU usage and related problems. Ryan and I resolved it by reverting to an earlier version of the codec. Thanks to Peter for bringing the issue to our attention, and to Aaron for help in tracking it down.
* FIX: View Slideshow context menu items weren’t enabled for top-level photo plug-ins.
* FIX: Jay and Isaac tweaked the default settings for IMDB to make sure the best quality posters are returned.
* FIX: James made some tweak to Now Playing. The flip time is now configurable in the Advanced Settings Cocoa UI (Make it flip every 5 seconds! Make your child and/or pets motion sick!) Additionally, the background is more in line with look of MediaStream.
* FIX: We’ve defaulted the automatic audio stream selection to false, as we think that default makes more sense (Thanks, Isaac! You can turn it off manually yourself in the video player preferences.) We also fixed an issue with the auto-selection of subtitles if the auto-selection of audio streams was disabled.
* FIX: We pulled the latest libdcr code which decodes RAW images (it fixes some pink-hue issues with newer cameras).
* FIX: As forum user “someone” reported, the German strings were botched in the previous version.
* FIX: Sébastien Vaast kindly send us updates to the French translation.
* FIX: We fixed a possible crash with Javascript seek bars in site profiles.
* FIX: Relative coordinates on “thumb” seek-bars were broken, many thanks to Robert Nio for reporting the issue and testing the fix.
* FIX: We pulled the latest XBMC UPnP code, in hopes this would help with some problems reported on the forums. We also pulled a fix related to the sendkey HTTP-API command, and a few other fixes.


Plex/Eight Released
May 10th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

First of all, happy Mother’s day to all the Plex moms out there! (Remember, Plex Dads, a new Plex release is not a substitute for flowers or a nice call.)

We’re very pleased to announce the first release of our stable Plex/Eight series. It’s been a long road, but we’re quite happy with the stability, especially given the massive amount of new functionality. You can download it here.

We’ve already started work on the Plex/Nine series, and you’ll be seeing lots of change between here and the official “1.0″ release. We know what areas need the most work (the library, usability) and we have a few surprises up our sleeve which we hope you’ll enjoy.

We’d like to give a really, really big shout out to our growing community of plug-in developers. The response to the new Framework has been tremendous, the plug-ins are flowing in, and we’ve gotten great feedback from everyone. Thank you all very much! As promised, James and I are heads down on documentation and will have something for you to look at very shortly. We’re also working on some updates to the App Store to improve the “regionalization” which will make it easier for our users around the world to get to the plug-ins that work for them. A pox on content providers who limit the content to only certain areas of our little blue planet.

This release consists primary of bug-fixes, but we’ve added the usual treats. As Chuck Norris said, “Anything else would be less than civilized”.

* NEW: Have you ever been annoyed by a video playing with subtitles even though the audio track is in your native language? Or having to look through all the 24 subtitle tracks in the MKV just to find the one in your language? Annoying, right? Plex/Eight auto-manages subtitles and audio tracks based on your language setting (i.e. the OS X language setting). For example, if your language is set to English, videos with English audio tracks won’t display any subtitles, whereas a foreign film will display English subtitles. If the language is set to Portuguese (Olá amigos!), an English film with lots of subtitles will auto-pick the Portuguese ones.

Likewise, for those of you encoding dual 5.1/stereo tracks in your MP4 files, Plex will pick the AC3 track if the receiver is AC3-capable and the tracks have language tags.

These options are both on by default, and they will not override per-video settings. Also, note that some video files don’t have language information for the audio and subtitle tracks. The code tries to be clever, but it’s not magic.
* NEW: James whipped up a cool animation for the Now Playing screen. Those of you with Plasma screens can now rest easy. The animation triggers every two minutes. Drink some nice red wine and stare at the screen.
* NEW: There are more and more of you using the Plex Media Server to stream your iTunes libraries to Plex, and a common request was to update the play counts and mark podcasts as viewed. In Plex/Eight, Plex now “scrobbles” plays to the Media Server, which updates the iTunes library (note that since it uses AppleScript, you’ll need to have iTunes running on the machine where the Plex Media Server is, and it will be started by OS X if it’s not). This feature is off by default, and you can enable it in the Media Server section of the preferences.
* NEW: Anamorphic zoom mode. Falk Husemann submitted a patch to change the 16×9 zoom mode to work with projectors which have anamorphic lenses attached. You can read more about this sort of set up here. You can enable this new mode by setting <anamorphiczoom>true</anamorphiczoom> in your advanced settings.

And the fixes:

* FIX: Sometimes album art didn’t show up in the Now Playing window.
* FIX: Remote fanart (e.g. iTunes) wasn’t showing up.
* FIX: Very slow start/skipping tracks for music. We made some improvements to the Media Server, and the ever-skilled jmarshall committed a nice related fix which we pulled. You won’t believe how much faster it is.
* FIX: Speaking of performance, a big shout out to Jens Kleemann, who has been working for a while on analyzing and improving the performance of Plex. A few weeks ago, he told me that one of the main sources of the idle CPU usage was in some code that was locking and unlocking a mutex. He even sent over a patch that did less locking, and Plex took less CPU with the fix. Now this didn’t seem right to me, as a thread that is blocked on a mutex doesn’t consume any CPU. One night I looked over the mutex code, and I noticed a line of debug code that got the thread’s Mach port. I’d put this line in when I was trying to track down a threading issue *ages* ago, and it wasn’t used anymore. Except, as it turns out, it was responsible for consuming about a quarter of Plex’s CPU usage when idle. So a big thank you to Jens, and a big apology from me. Just think how many trillion of instructions your computers have executed for no good reason because of me. I might actually be responsible for global warming.
* FIX: We’ve changed the thumbnailing code for photos to use a single thumb instead of four, by popular request.
* FIX: Nikolas Stephan kindly submitted a patch so that Last.fm scrobbling works with tracks played from the Plex Media Server.
* FIX: Nikolas Stephan also submitted a patch which allows selecting folders for the photo screensaver, apparently something which used to work.
* FIX: We restart the Plex Media Server when we quit after 5.1 play (or upon restart after a crash). This is needed to work around a CoreAudio/WebKit issue, and you would have seen this issue as WebKit videos playing back without audio.
* FIX: We automatically remove empty iLife sources, so if you don’t have Aperture, it won’t show up, for example.
* FIX: GlimmerBlocker no longer prevents WebKit plug-ins from working.
* FIX: The new wider list view works with the “hide thumbs” option.
* FIX: Some SSA subtitles (e.g. Chinese) didn’t render correctly.
* FIX: James made some fixes to background music; the volume level of the background music shouldn’t be quieter than regular music, and fixed a couple of problems with it not restarting properly. Also, it’ll fade out when starting a video.
* FIX: The fonts have been fixed in the Now Playing window for the Original font set.
* FIX: A possible crash in the Plex Media Server.
* FIX: Better keyboard mappings for the Now Playing window and Mira (thanks to marklight!)
* FIX: We pulled the latest IMDB scraper from XBMC (thanks to aaron and jayman for testing it out!) and this should fix it bringing down incorrect posters when the IMPA awards option is on.
* We also pulled a good bunch of code fixes from XBMC. (No Aeon fixes, sorry.)

Next up will be a big release of new and enhanced plug-ins, and then back to work on Plex/Nine.


Release 0.7.15: Improved Music Experience
April 23rd, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We’re coming to the end of the Plex/Seven series, so we’re primarily focused on bug-fixes, but we did find the time to add a few new things for your enjoyment. Many, many thanks to all the people who helped out with this release. In the next few days, we’re going to release a few new plug-ins (and updates to existing ones) that make use of new features/bugfixes in this release, so be sure to update as soon as you can! The release can be downloaded here.

* NEW: One of the complaints we’ve heard is that the visualizers available with Plex, while cool, sometimes cause seizures in kids and household pets. Others say that it leads them to look forward to 4:20 PM. In any case, James and Mike B (of MediaStream fame) teamed up to bring you a sexy new option: The Now Playing visualizer. Select it just as you would any other visualizer, and take it for a spin.

now-playing.png

* NEW: We’ve added support for ratings in Plex Media Server content. So in the next revision of the Netflix plug-in, for example, you’ll now see star ratings, as you will in another new plug-in that will be released shortly.

untitled.png

* NEW: Do you ever find yourself struggling to shuffle a playlist, or play an album straight through, by displaying the playlist, toggling settings, and then switching back, having forgotten what you were doing in the first place? James added a convenient Shuffle item on the context menu to make that struggle a thing of the past. Together with the new Now Playing visualizer, we’re hoping you find music playing just a little bit easier this release.

untitled.png

* NEW: New iLife art (thanks to the talented tassitassi). You see some of it peeking out from the screenshot above. (Note: you’ll have to whack your existing cached art at ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/Thumbnails/Programs/Fanart/)
* NEW: Our friend Kent has been hard at work on analyzing our user data. Among other things, he’s discovered that our Swedish users rock! There are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country. He compiled this data by looking at the Sparkle update requests. To make his job a bit easier, we’ve added a token to each update request that’s unique for each computer. We’re sending a one-way hash of the computer’s MAC address, which when broken down into plain English means that (a) we’ll be able to figure how many total computers are running Plex and (b) we can’t use the data to obtain any information about your computer.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in this release:

* FIX: The context menu was broken for the Favorites section.
* FIX: We weren’t saving the ’show extensions’ setting correctly in advanced settings.
* FIX: James fixed a long-standing (since Plex/Five) scraper hang with tvshow.nfo.
* FIX: We got a patch from rgrove (thanks!) that ensures that LAN cache settings are used for SMB shares.
* FIX: Caching was disabled, which caused no end of trouble playing back Internet content.
* FIX: We added Lanczos back to the OSD upscaling menu.
* FIX: We increased the size of the default fonts. I have to personally apologize for that, apparently I ate too many carrots as a baby.
* FIX: Crash/hang when exiting after playing a video.
* FIX: Also a longstanding bug, the occasional lack of GUI sounds after playing videos (thanks to Kent for helping me track this down).
* FIX: The Plex Media Server is a Universal Binary again.
* FIX: Ryan helped me fix a DTS->AC3 transcoding channel mapping bug.
* FIX: A Plex Media Server crash (when stopping a WebKit video shortly after starting) was fixed.
* FIX: We’ve made the list view give more room to text. After all, scrolling text is hard to read.

untitled.png

* FIX: Stopping a video with 5.1 audio could be a bit slow.
* FIX: The clock could display letters (e.g. “kk:49&#8243;). Thanks to Daniel for helping me track this one down.
* FIX: James made the thumbnail searching code respect the dvdthumbs advanced setting (so you can add support for Front Row style preview.jpg files).
* FIX: Double speed playback of 22KHz audio in videos (e.g. some FLV video).
* FIX: Enhanced the caching of directories to work well with the Plex Media Server (much quicker backing up to parent directories).
* FIX: Isaac fixed a few confusing strings.
* FIX: Improved Russian strings (thanks to friendly).
* FIX: Blurry fanart. Thanks to tassitassi for bringing it to my attention and to jmarshall for the fix).

We also added a few new Media Server plug-in features and fixed some bugs:

* NEW: Support for typing a string in the site config (requested by Rick, useful for authenticating into Flash sites).
* NEW: We allow specifying a dead zone in the seek bar site config, which can help make a tooltip disappear after a seek.
* FIX: Preferences weren’t being correctly escaped, which could lead to problems logging into Netflix, for example.


Release 0.7.14: An-nyoung!
April 07th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We’ve been working hard for the last month and I’m really happy to finally be able to announce this next release (download here, but please read the release notes first). Besides the usual bunch of new features and bug-fixes, this release brings with it support for the next major release of our Media Server plug-in API, and this means that you’ll be seeing lots of new content in the App Store this week (and hopefully provides extra incentive to upgrade quickly!)

* NEW: Cocoa UI for advanced settings. Why should you have to edit XML files? You shouldn’t, and now you don’t have to, because the most important advanced settings are easily accessible in this advanced settings dialog that James added. The dialog is accessible via Plex > Advanced Settings… in the menu bar.

Picture 1.png

* NEW: This all started with a giant bug that Youngcho Kim posted detailing improvements that would help Korean users. Seeing as I like &#46028;&#49573; &#48708;&#48724;&#48165; as much as the next guy, I read the bug, thought about it, and we decided that a lot of his suggestions were really excellent for all non-English first time Plex users. So we’ve done a few things:
o Plex respects the language setting in the International preference pane. Whatever language your OS X applications start with, Plex will start with (assuming there’s a translation).
o Plex respects the units setting (Metric/US) also specified in that preference pane, and these are used to determine the units for temperature and speed.
o Plex uses the date and time formatting specified in that pane as well; for example, MediaStream uses the short time format for its clock, which you can easily configure it in a number of different ways. More importantly, it will use whatever format you have configured already.
o Plex auto-selects the font based on your language, so if your language is configured in OS X to be Chinese, for example, it will use Arial Unicode automatically.
o If you really want Plex to be running with different language/units than OS X, you can specify this in advanced settings (<language> tag, e.g. “en” or “it”, and <units> tag, e.g. “metric”).

time.png

* NEW: Evan Schoenberg was kind enough to add support for the IRKeyboardEmu virtual remote, which provides support for his awesome Rowmote app for the iPhone.
* NEW: SMS jump support for Harmony, to make it easy to jump around in lists (thanks to aaronjb!)
* NEW: Ryan updated our ffmpeg to v0.5 from the XBMC source, and added the new version of libfaad2 and some other patches which provide support for more formats. See his blog post for more details. The new ffmpeg adds support for WMAv2 and lots more.
* NEW: We’ve enhanced support for .dfont files, to allow specifying font variants; the skin now uses Helvetica Neue by default, except for languages whose character sets aren’t supported by that font, which use Arial Unicode. We’ve also moved to using mixed case, which we think is more readable than all-caps. (We’ve left the original font-set as “Original” for those who prefer it).

fonts.png

* NEW: Improved fanart images for iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture, thanks to Aargh-a-Knot.
* NEW: Support for Plex.MoveToNextScreen and Plex.MoveToPrevScreen actions, as requested by Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy.
* NEW: Finished up localization support in Plex and the Media Server so that plug-in localization works. There was already support for it in the framework, but it needed a bit of plumbing.
* NEW: James enhanced the photo text overlay so that (a) it hides after 10 seconds and (b) you can toggle it with the ‘info’ command (’t’ on the keyboard, menu on the Apple Remote). We’ve tweaked the keymap in slideshows to be more consistent with other sections, so pressing menu displays information, holding menu returns you to the browser. Additionally, hold left and right zoom out and in, and hold play displays photo EXIF details. Also, if you just don’t want to see the overlay at all, you can hide it in the skin settings.

Lots of good fixes in this release as well.

* FIX: Allow specifying “always on” vs. “on for SD content” for software upscaling (we’ve also allowed you to select the algorithm used in the advanced settings dialog).
* FIX: If you have audio linking to system output, it restores the original setting when exiting.
* FIX: Improved support for SMI subtitles (pulled from XBMC).
* FIX: Backing up from App Store or Help brings you back to main menu.
* FIX: When upgrading, helper and Media Server sometimes didn’t get restarted. This one was driving me crazy.
* FIX: Apple Remote could drop key-presses when system was loaded (many thanks to Evan Schoenberg for the fix, this has been annoying many for quite some time).
* FIX: When using an HTTP proxy (like Glimmer Blocker), the Media Server wouldn’t play Flash content.
* FIX: Huge speed increase starting plug-ins in the Media Server on startup.
* FIX: Signature on Media Server should always be correct now, eliminating firewall warnings.
* FIX: iPhoto album ordering now exactly matches iPhoto.
* FIX: Many things restored to Mediastream which were taken out in the last version (allow hiding Movies, TV Shows, and the Quit items, back back background image folder settings, restored “hide thumbs in list view”, and put back the library button in music files).
* FIX: Sometime when displaying a slide show, moving to the next image would simply exit out of the slideshow (nice find, James!)
* FIX: HD Homerun should work now.
* FIX: Stillness sent an encoding patch and scraper updates for KinoPoisk.ru (thank you!)
* FIX: Seasons and episodes views will now display correctly for first-time users, thanks to Isaac.
* FIX: We were missing a key mapping for deleting individual video bookmarks.
* FIX: Ryan, our resident audio wizard, fixed an issue with static noise when skipping forward in an AAC 5.1 file.

And lots of changes in Plex Media Server land:

* Support for new V1 of Plex plug-in Python framework. Major cleanups and enhancements, if you thought the first version was easy to use, you’ll love what James has done with this version. We’ll have great documentation available shortly.
* Support for plug-in preference panes (and support in the V1 framework for adding preferences).
* Support for conditions in simple seek bars (i.e. for specifying that played color is *not* a given color).
* Support for sending key presses to WebKit plug-ins in site configuration.
* Support for setting cookies in site configuration.
* Support for WebKit plug-ins that change frame size.
* Support for specifying relative coordinates for cropping and mouse events (e.g. 10 pixels from the right).
* Support for Javascript seek bars, and Javascript conditions.
* Support for site configurations reading values from a plug-in’s preferences (useful when performing authentication).
* Allow manually locking plug-ins on a page, useful with authentication and some misbehaved sites.


Release 0.7.13: Improvements to the Media Server
March 10th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We’ve got lots of things “cooking” but we wanted to make a quick release (download here) to fix Hulu as well as provide some important enhancements to the media server.

* FIX: Hulu playback was broken when the site exploited a bug in our code, which has now been fixed.
* NEW: Support for variably-sized Flash/Silverlight content (and also for sizes changing on the fly). You can now specify negative values in the site configuration for cropping, mouse operations, and in seekbars. A negative X or width value indicates the number of pixels from the right, and a negative Y or height value specifies negative pixels from the bottom. (Specifying 0 for width/height means “the entire width/height”, this should help for sites such as Vimeo.)
* NEW: We’ve moved the Plex Python plug-in framework into a plug-in named Framework.bundle (great idea, James!). Among other things, this fixes the issue with the code signature breaking on the Plex Media Server and the Leopard firewall getting upset about it. This also allows us to have multiple concurrent versions of the framework for backwards compatibility. We take this sort of thing very seriously, as we want you to be able to write plug-ins without fear of them breaking with API changes.


Release 0.7.12: Knight to Bishop 3
March 03rd, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

A couple of fixes in this one, which you can download here.

* FIX: Silly regression which resulted in you being left in an empty directory after installing from the app store (and a few other cases).
* FIX: Improved compatibility with certain Flash sites.


Release 0.7.11: Fixes and Improved User Experience
March 01st, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

Lots of good stuff fixed in this release, and we’re happy to bring it to you. You can download this release here.

* FIX: Crashes in Plex Media Server with Safari Adblocker and other similar plug-ins.
* FIX: Pulled a fix from XBMC for variable framerate FLV files (important for a new plug-in).
* FIX: Crashes in Apple Movie Trailers with 5.1 audio (integrated Ryan’s excellent audio fixes).
* FIX: Some of the menu shortcuts were broken (thanks to migueld for pointing this out).
* FIX: Some other crashes in Plex Media Server with badly behaved or misconfigured sites.
* FIX: Much improved Swedish translation, with many thanks to atrus.
* FIX: Updated to the latest Amazon scrapers (thanks to John Lockwood).
* NEW: Support for executing Javascript inside plug-in site configurations (as an action).


Version 0.7.10: Hulu-licious
February 26th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We just pushed a new release out which improves compatibility with some Flash sites, and to go along with it, Scott prepared a new version of the Hulu plug-in with some nice enhancements, including more fanart, better thumbnails, flattened movie hierarchy, and more results returned for specific shows.

Besides the known issue of the Plex Media Server not working with Safari Adblocker, if a plug-in stops working, it’s likely that the structure of the site changed. This doesn’t happen very frequently with most sites, but it’s a definite possibility. When this occurs, an entity we call the “Campfire Robot” springs into action automatically and tracks us down to let us know, and shortly thereafter we can push an update.

As such, if a site stops working, the best thing to do is to check the App Store for updates. If you have automatic updates turned on, check your install history to see if an update got installed while you were getting coffee.

To answer your question, no, we rarely sleep.


Release 0.7.9: A few goodies
February 24th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We’re really happy to see that people seem to be enjoying the store. We’ve had tens of thousands of plug-ins downloaded already, and we have a bunch of new ones in the works! In the meantime, we’ve cooked up another quick release to try to fix the most egregious issues with the last one.

* FIX: Fixed permissions on the Plex binary to allow non-administrative users to run.
* FIX: Tweaks to the skin for upcoming Plug-ins.
* FIX: Some crashes and leaks in the Media Server.
* FIX: Fixed the scrapers/NFO issue, this time for real (many thanks to Isaac for all the hard work on this one!). We also include the TMDB scraper again.
* FIX: A regression where only the first iPhoto album showed up.
* FIX: Improved compatibility with Flash sites for the Media Server.

The release can be downloaded here or via Sparkle as usual.


Release 0.7.8: Brave New World
February 21st, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

I could present the usual release notes, talk about the CoreAudio crash on startup that’s been fixed, the Mira/Sofacontrol changes (thanks marklight!), mention the TV/Movies keymap issue that was fixed, explain that the region link to weather settings is now fixed, and that NFO files no longer cause scraping issues. But honestly, I’d rather talk about something else.

This release, one innocent little point difference from the last, has the biggest new Plex feature ever. I’m not just gushing hyperbole here when I say you will never use Plex the same way again.

I’d like to introduce you to the new Plex Media Server:
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Very nice, right? Alexis did an awesome job with the icon. (It also looks a bit like the new Mac Mini, the one with 36 USB ports all around the circular case, but that’s another story.)
So what’s so special about the new Plex Media Server? Well, it connects with the brand new Plex App Store (built by Jon Maddox, the latest talented developer to join our group). The Plex App Store serves plug-ins which are downloaded by the Plex Media Server, and provide a huge amount of online content to Plex.
What content and which sites? Great question. Let’s just say that you won’t be disappointed by the 20 plug-ins that are currently available from the App Store (most of them written by Scott, and the rest by Isaac, James, and myself), and you’ll also be amazed by some of the ones we’re working on behind the scenes.
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There is also great news for developers: writing these plug-ins is amazingly easy. James has done a simply fantastic job writing a Python framework to develop the plug-ins with, and the Plex Media Server provides an easy, XML-based method to display Flash or Silverlight content to Plex. Almost none of the plug-ins are over 100 lines of code, and many are 20-40 lines. We’ll be following this release with lots of technical discussion of the framework, and top-notch documentation.
The plug-ins live in the Plex Media Server’s application support area, and the App Store itself is just another plug-in. The App Store plug-in can browse and install plug-ins, as well as update itself and installed plug-ins with ease, meaning that you’ll always be up to date.
I’ve leave you with three screencasts that Jon Maddox was kind enough to put together, which demo some of the new functionality. Seeing as this is the initial release, expect some glitches, and there are some known issues of which you should be aware (PLEASE READ THESE):

* There is no support for authentication yet, so certain content or features which require being logged in are not available (e.g. Hulu videos that require you being logged in).
* You need to make sure you have the Flash plug-in installed for Safari, and you must make sure you don’t have any plug-ins like Safari Adblock installed (possibly Pith helmet as well).
* You may want to increase your cache settings, as plug-ins like Apple Movie Trailers, TED Talks, and other, stream video in high quality HD video.
* We have added quite a few new skin features and fixed some bugs in MediaStream, so your mileage in any other skin WILL vary greatly.
* If a Flash video is unavailable online, Plex will not detect this, and will stall while buffering.

These items will all fixed shortly.


Release: Plex/Seven 0.7.7 - A Few Small Repairs
February 08th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

As much as we try to ensure the quality of every release, there can always be some gremlins that sneak in, which is why it’s important to make it extremely easy to make new releases. After all, there’s a lot of stuff happening between writing a line of code and getting that code into your living rooms.

Luckily, we have a few scripts written, and there are really only a few simple steps: The first script builds a release, tags it, and packages it up into a DMG. The second one uploads it to our server, distributes it to a set of initial mirrors, and uploads metadata about the new release. The third “throws the switch” on the new release.

Here are the changes in this new release, which can be downloaded here (source here):

* FIX: iPhoto events sort by date, not by name.
* FIX: Slow access to media, marking unwatched/watched, etc.
* FIX: The HTTP receive timeout was increased to 15 seconds, to hopefully allow TVDB time to respond. Thanks to Todd L on the forums for suggesting this fix.
* FIX: IFO files weren’t showing up in DVD video directories.
* FIX: The MediaStream “Info List” view mode was tweaked to make the list the same size and positioning vertically as the regular list view.


Release: Plex/Seven 0.7.6 - Month of fixes
February 04th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

I can’t believe it’s already February! It’s been a rainy month out here, so for the most part there was nothing better to do than hunker down and write code and hope the electricity didn’t go out.

We have a brand new release for you with lots of good stuff. The exciting part, though, is that we spent as much time on the release as we did on some great new features coming up shortly. These new features are going to change the way you use Plex, and are going to open up some very interesting possibilities. We’ll be making a preview release shortly.

The release can be downloaded from here, and the source is available here.

Without further ado, here are the changes for this release:

* FIX: Ryan coaxed DTSWAV files into playing. It turns out to be impossible to play 44.1KHz DTS files on OS X, as it assumes encoded audio is 48KHz. For now, we’re mixing down the files, and shortly we’ll move to transcoding them to 48KHz AC3 files. Not optimal, but better than nothing given the limitations of the platform. (I’m looking forward to this personally, because I want to have the first 1080p Wizard of Oz + 5.1 Dark Side of the Moon party.)
* FIX: The highly annoying bug which caused TV shows to lose audio randomly with TV theme music enabled.
* FIX: Certain dialogs in the update code didn’t support UTF8 strings (James).
* FIX: There is now an option you can disable to prevent Plex linking the system audio output device with the device selected in Plex (System > Audio > Link System Output).
* FIX: The audio device settings didn’t appear to be remembered in the settings (they actually were saved, just not displayed correctly).
* FIX: We’ve disallowed deleting files from inside Plex by default. Much safer! This is a change to the settings, so you’d need to delete your guisettings.xml file to get the new value.
* FIX: We fixed a bug that prevented actions from being sent to Plex via event clients (used by Remote buddy).
* FIX: Ryan fixed a crash when attempting to transcode a corrupt DTS stream into AC3.
* FIX: Background music tracks are now played completely randomly.
* FIX: Isaac fixed some issues in the harmony and keyboard maps, and also added Hold Up/Hold Down to control volume in Full Screen Video and Visusalization for Mira users (and likely Sofa Control users as well). He also went through and “humanized” some of the error messages that Plex spits out to be more intelligible.
* FIX: Tweaked permissions on a MediaStream file.
* FIX: Mikey gave us some fixes to French strings (thanks!)
* FIX: Stillness sent some fixes for the KinoPoisk scraper (thanks!)
* FIX: A crash in Weather for some regions.
* FIX: Maddox suggested some excellent changes in the scraper defaults which result in better movie covers by default.

We have also updated the Plex Media Server (included with Plex) with the following changes:

* NEW: James added support for nested iTunes playlist folders and iPhoto folders (a much requested feature).
* NEW: Audiobook support.

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* FIX: More tweaks for “album artist” tag.
* FIX: iPhoto sorting of events and albums was broken.

We’ve also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from XBMC, including updated scrapers, updated UPnP code, and some fixes.

Here’s Barkley resting in the yard. He’s still wearing his brace, but his limp is nearly gone, and we’re planning to start the water rehab in our friends’ pool shortly.


Release: Plex/Seven 0.7.5: Five juicy fixes, and a partridge in a pear tree
December 26th, 2008 | Category: Release | Author: elan

Hope you’ve all been having fun holiday celebrations! I’ve been drinking heavily and obsessively fixing bugs in Plex, and finding that the two activities mix well.

* FIX: The audio dropout issue which was introduced in 0.7.2 should now be fixed.
* FIX: The corrupted German MediaStream strings.
* FIX: File size reporting bug in HTTP API has really been fixed this time.
* FIX: Some tweaks to “album artist” tags in Plex Media Server iTunes module. Thanks to zanex for helping explain what was wrong.
* FIX: Certain videos (FLV, YouTube, 22KHz MP3 tracks) played back at double-speed. Thanks to Ryan for explaining how to fix this one.


Plex v0.5.22: Last in the series
October 28th, 2008 | Category: Release | Author: elan

Way back when I was just starting the port to the Mac, and the program was just as likely to crash on you as play a video, I dreamed of a day when it would be stable.

In the last months, we have made 22 releases of the 0.5 series of Plex. We’ve tried to fix all the most serious bugs, and add some OS X flavor to the application in the process (not to mention all the bugs that the XBMC team has fixed). I haven’t had a crash in a long time in my own personal use, and even the bug and crash reports have slowed.

Of course, there are still problems, and still bugs. No software is ever perfect. But we feel like we’ve reached a point where it works “pretty darn well” and we’d like to formalize this by ending the 0.5 development series, and releasing 0.6. Assuming nothing got screwed up in this release, we’ll make a couple of last-minute tweaks and fixes and release as 0.6.0.

Our long-term plan with Plex was always to stabilize, then enhance. First get it working well enough, then make major architectural changes.

At the same time as we’ve been working on the 0.5 series, we’ve also been staying up late at night, working hard on new stuff. Really cool new stuff. In the coming week or so, I’m going to be posting here with details on the *NINE* enhancements to Plex that have been completed. These enhancements will be included in the first release of 0.7 (the next development series). To summarize:

* v0.6.x: This will be the new stable series. If you fear change, and just want to enjoy your media in the safety of a stable release, use these. We’ll make bug-fixes, include the latest MediaStream, but nothing too scary.
* v0.7.x: If you like living on the bleeding edge, skiing down double-black diamonds, and jumping out of planes with parachutes, this is probably the series for you.

Here are the changes in this release (available from the Plex home page, and from Sparkle shortly):

* NEW: You can now configure the way the H.264 decoder does deblocking. Some will you will know this is the “skiploopfilter” setting in ffmpeg. Some will wonder if I’m speaking English. The bottom line is, if you allow the decoder to skip doing deblocking, it’ll be less intensive for the CPU. I’ve found that if you configure it to skip all deblocking, the “killa” bird sample uses about 20% less CPU and plays at a higher frame rate. Bottom line: your mileage may vary, but it may help you with hard-to-play content.

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* NEW: Support for the Home and End keys in lists. Also support for using the A/Z keys to skip to the next/previous letter in lists. Jonathan Marshall added support for this last one a while ago, cool dude that he is, so we added a mapping. Also, Isaac added a new mapping for people using Snatch on their iPhone. You’ll have to whack your Keymap.xml file in ~/Application Support/Plex/userdata to get these features.
* NEW: We have included the latest MediaStream skin (no doubt out of date by tomorrow), along with the associated code fixes so that you don’t have to hit escape 23 times to return to the main menu from the Movie/TV sections. You can see some documentation for the new settings in this version of the skin here (many thanks to Jayman978!)
* FIX: We dimmed the wrong screen when you were running with a multi-screen setup and Plex was on the second screen.
* FIX: Some MP3 tags caused a hang. This includes the “Burial” album, so bretonh will be pleased.
* FIX: Refreshing movie info from NFO in VIDEO_TS folders caused a crash.
* FIX: Storing a TV show in multiple places (e.g. some seasons in one place, some seasons in another), whether by multi-path sources or different sources led to duplicates.

We’ve of course included all the latest XBMC fixes as well, including the latest UPnP and MythTV code.

I’ve taken to opening up fresh coconuts in the back yard with a big machete. The coconut water is supposedly really healthy, and if I’m feeling inspired, I make fresh coconut milk from the pulp for a Thai curry. Barkley loves both the milk and the pulp, so mostly I just lop the coconuts in half after drinking the water and give them to him.


Release 0.5.20: Progress is the opposite of Congress
October 04th, 2008 | Category: Release | Author: elan

*** Hold off on this release for now, there’s something borked with the settings ***

First of all, I want to make a big shout out to our forum members (citizens of Plexville). We just passed 10,000 posts, and we’re just a hair’s breadth away from 2,000 members. It’s a friendly, productive, helpful community, and we like it that way. A warm welcome to the new members, and a sincere thanks to everyone who helps out, we couldn’t do it without you!

We’ve been busy working on some awesome new features for the upcoming 0.7 development version, but we wanted to step away for a moment and fix some of the lingering bugs in the 0.5 series before we declare it stable. You can find the download on the home page or via Sparkle, as soon as I update the appcast.

* NEW: We now turn off the backlight on displays that are blanked, many thanks to James. I hear the sound of happy Mac users rejoicing.
* NEW: The menu button brings up shutdown menu instead of just exiting, as requested, holding play zooms into photos, and holding menu returns to normal zoom. Also, the escape key has been made to act just like the menu button on the remote. Thanks to Isaac for these improvements!
* NEW: Added the ability to cycle through the available displays. This works in windowed or full-screen modes, and you can use the new &#8984;-Shift-&#8594; and &#8984;-Shift-&#8592; keyboard accelerators to do it. Fun! Plus, ever time I connect things in XCode’s Interface Builder, I get little shivers of pleasure.
* FIX: Weather conditions are correctly localized (thanks, Enrique!)
* FIX: James fixed a small bug with the display brightness setting.
* FIX: The audio device is now saved and restored correctly in all cases. Seriously.
* FIX: The problem affecting video with some LOL releases (and others) has been fixed (thanks to elupus for the fix to ffmpeg).
* FIX: A rare bug causing a crash when blanking displays (thanks, Enrique!)

Since Isaac has made tweaks to the keymap and advanced settings, unless you’re an expert user who has made your own edits, you’ll want to delete advancedsettings.xml and Keymap.xml from ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/ so that the new defaults can be installed.

As usual, we’ve also pulled fixes from the XBMC code, including shoutcast fixes by the ever-productive vulkanr, the latest scrapers, the usual assortment of brilliant stuff by jmarshall, and more (RTMP fixes, etc.). I also pulled r15344 as requested by chitz.

This is a photo of Barkley with his brother (i.e. littermate)Johann. We met him by chance at the dog park we used to frequent in Pasadena after noticing the striking resemblance.