Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Nicholas Deleon from CrunchGear was kind enough to spend the time to run an interview on Plex past, present, and future. If that’s your thing, check it out.

We’ve got some great new plug-ins to share with you this week, thanks as usual to Isaac for coordinating the release and to all the developers for all their hard work creating the new plug-ins!

Feed Me – Written by Jonny Wray

Create a library of your favorite video and audio podcasts using ‘Feed Me’. This plugin allows you to build and view content from a collection of sources by browsing the integrated podcast directory sites or by entering RSS URLs directly.

Universal Sports – Written by Jonny Wray

Universal Sports is the premier Olympic and lifestyle sports network featuring coverage of the Olympic Games, Paralympic Games, World Championships, World Cups, Grand Prixs and more.

DR – Written by Nikki

DR is a danish public service tv and radio government owned company.

This plugin supports streaming of videos and audio from dr.dk/Podcast and dr.dk/bonanza and live streams of DR1, DR2, DR Update, DR K, and DR Ramasjang tv channels. It also supports TV On Demand.

TV2 – Written by Nikki

Streaming of videos from video.tv2.dk – TV2 is a danish tv channel.

Lens – Written by Elan

Lens is the photography blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web.

Live Music Archive – Updated by Billy Joe

This isn’t a new Plug-in, but rather a really awesome update to an existing one. This new version of Live Music Archive supports looking at your iTunes artists and presenting you with concerts for matching artists. This is a really innovative way to find live recordings of your favorite artists.

MTV UK – Written by Sander Spies

Watch full length music videos and video playlists for free. Browse through the years and play the top videos for each decade, watch video premiers, and more!

Anna Kim Photography – Written by Elan Feingold

My lovely wife has begun pursuing her second career as a photographer, so I thought it only appropriate to make a plug-in for her web site. Yes, that is a photo of me obsessing over a batch of sourdough loaves (thanks, Isaac). Yes, I am wearing pants.

Writen by chhitz Dieses Plug-in bietet den Zugriff auf die Inhalte auf dem SF Videoportal (http://videoportal.sf.tv/). Verfügbar sind die meisten deutschen Eigenproduktionen des Schweizer Fernsehens. Über die Einstellungen stehen 4 verschiedene Videoqualitäten mit unterschiedlichen Bandbreitenanforderungen zur Verfügung.

Written by Sander Spies, HT Guys is a podcast created by two guys, Braden Russell and Ara Derderian, known as the HT Guys. Listen in as they talk about the latest in home theater.

Also written by Sander Spies is the Uncle Jay plug-in. Uncle Jay explains the news to today’s innocent, ignorant and immature minds. Also to children. Watch Uncle Jay so you can figure out what’s going on, because grownups – perhaps you’ve noticed – haven’t.

Life is pretty good for Swedish Plex users, we have to admit, thanks to the hard work of our talented plug-in developers. This is probably why the country contains the highest per-capita of Plex users on the planet! I’m sorry to say I’ve never been, but I admit to having consumed an prodigious amount of Glögg at a friend’s house last weekend.

After the great success of the SVT plug-in (which is in the top 25 most downloaded plug-ins), the group was approached by TV4 (the largest commercial television channel in Sweden). TV4 wanted to know if they would create a plug-in for their content, and even offered to create an API to their specification.

Now let’s just stop for a minute and consider how cool this is: Can you imagine if NBC came to us with the same great attitude? It seems, at least at the moment, sadly unfathomable.

So Daniel Eriksson, Sander Spies and Andreas Wahlström sat down to design and code the new TV4 plug-in, which looks absolutely great. If you speak Swedish, make sure you check it out. Many thanks to them, and many thanks to TV4 for understanding and embracing new ways to deliver their content.

TV4 har lanserat en ny tv-upplevelse på nätet. I TV4 Play kan du se både korta klipp och hela program – om du vill se knäckebrödsdansen från Talang om och om igen så finns den här, men du kan också se avsnitt från många av TV4:s mest populära program som Talang, Robinson och Parlamentet, helt gratis. Denna plug-in möjliggör för er att se allt detta gratismaterial direkt i Plex.

OK, so we always try to make sure a plug-in is robust and fully stable before publishing it to the App Store, but we’re going to make an exception in this one case. Why? Because this new plug-in is so cool, we can’t keep it to ourselves any longer! We’ve been testing it internally for a few weeks now, and thanks to some of the bug-fixes and enhancements in Plex 0.8.5 we’re finally able to share it with you.

Do you like music? If so, riddle me this: What’s the premier subscription music service on the planet that everyone’s talking about? That’s right, Spotify. Of course, if you live in the US, you haven’t been able to enjoy it yet, but if you (or your IP address) resides in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France or Spain, you’ve probably checked out this amazing service.

So here’s the good news: If you have a premium subscription to Spotify, you can now enjoy this incredible service from the convenience of your couch for the first time ever, inside Plex. Head to the Plex App Store, install it, open up a nice bottle of wine, and enjoy the millions of tracks that are just a click of an Apple Remote away.

(Many thanks to Don McAllister and Oscar R for their initial testing of the plug-in and great suggestions!)

NOTE: Don’t forget, you need the latest Plex to use this plug-in, as well as a premium Spotify subscription.

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.

I’ll leave you with a rare sighting of the Loch Ness Barkley.

There’s a new beta out of Flash, which adds nice things like hardware H.264 decoding. Unfortunately, it also seems to not play nicely with the Media Server at the moment when using WebKit plug-ins. We’re investigating, but recommend not installing it for the moment. Caveat emptor.

If you’re in Sweden, you can’t use Netflix (silly geographic restrictions), but now you can use the most excellent Headweb movie service on Plex. It’s especially exciting because the company approached us and then wrote this awesome plug-in themselves. With the excellent selection of Swedish content available, it’s no wonder that there are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country!

The Headweb plug-in, provided by the Swedish online movie service Headweb.com, allows you to watch and rent films directly from your Plex-equipped living room. All 1800 films are available for rent for 24 hours. The plug-in has support for subtitles, parental filter, trailers, and is localized in Swedish and English. Headweb is currently exclusive for Swedish consumers, although expansion to other nordic countries is coming very soon. They just recently got rated Sweden’s best movie service by “Digitala Hemmet”. If you have any questions, please check out their Plex page.

Headweb plugin från filmtjänsten Headweb.com låter dig se och hyra film från ditt Plex-utrustade vardagsrum. Alla 1800 filmer finns tillgängliga som hyrfilm under 24 timmar. Pluginen har stöd för undertexter, föräldrafilter, trailers m.m. och finns på svenska och engelska. Headweb är för tillfället exklusivt för svenska användare men en utökning till övriga nordiska länder är på gång. Headweb utsågs nyligen till bästa filmtjänsten av “Digitala Hemmet”. För mer information och frågor kolla på http://www.headweb.com/180665/plex-ps3/

You can see a demonstration of the plug-in here.

It looks great!