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Plex for iOS v2.1
We’ve also been hard at work this month on the new release of Plex for iOS. The most exciting change in this new version is support for myPlex-only configuration. Previous versions required a media server to be present, but no more! You can watch videos out of your queue and play shared content by simply signing into your myPlex account. Of course, Flash and Silverlight video still requires a media server to transcode, but thanks in no small part to Apple’s refusal to put Flash on iOS devices, more and more content is available in HTML5 video.
- NEW: Serverless operation!
- NEW: Added a preference for enabling/disabling Direct Play.
- NEW: Added even higher quality transcode options for iPhone 4S/iPad 2. More Direct Streaming, more winning.
- NEW: Display all the shared servers in settings area.
- NEW: Added new translations for Catalan, Czech, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, and Hungarian. Thanks so much to everyone who has been helping out, and if you’d like to contribute a translation, please visit this site in Firefox.
- FIX: Improvements in Direct Play, more media should play without transcoding. If you’ve got media which is transcoding and shouldn’t be, please send us logs and samples, we want to hear about it.
- FIX: The letter index no longer shows black letters on a black background, which turns out to be quite hard to read.
- FIX: Crash when tapping to play a video.
- FIX: Rotation to landscape in remote view.
- FIX: Gesture area background color was odd.
- FIX: AirPlay Mirroring should work now.
- FIX: A crash in the details view on the iPhone.
- FIX: Better detection of non GSM iPhone 4 devices, allowing higher video quality settings to show up.
- FIX: The video player would sometimes continue playing in the background (audio only).
- FIX: When stopping video playback right away, sometimes it would display an error.
- FIX: Occasional black screen after playback, especially after multi-part media.
- FIX: In conjunction with the newest media server, fixes some channel content not playing.
- FIX: Occasionally the app would display the second level filters as a list.
- FIX: A few other miscellaneous crashes.
The update has just been approved by Apple, so it should be available shortly!
28 commentsPlex Media Center v9.5.2 ~ Smoked Wild Boar Edition
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.
This release brought to you by the ever-vigilant, hyper-loyal, best friend of man and woman, Mr Barkley.
