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Happy April Fools’ Day!
As you all know, the first of April is the day on which people (and companies) play practical jokes. Some are quite elaborate and take quite a bit of planning, and we really think we’ve managed to take that to the next level.
Just over five years ago, we got together around a white board to plan the prank, and this is what we wrote:
- Acquire millions of users.
- Rickroll them.
- ???
We did some more brainstorming, and decided that the best way to acquire a large user base we could proceed to rickroll would be some sort of video streaming thing. We almost called it RickPlex, but we thought that might be too obvious, so we stuck with Plex, and started coding right away.
Fast forward 5 years, 263 blog posts, and dozens of releases across multiple product lines, we finally decided we had enough coverage for our worldwide rickroll. We enabled some code we’d written all those years ago, and then cracked open a beer and waited.
After we finally stopped laughing at all the tweets and forum posts, and – frankly – ran out of beer, we all took a collective deep sigh. All those year of planning had finally paid off. We’d just pulled off what was possibly the biggest rickroll ever. And it was time to move on.
To all our users, thanks so much for being a part of this! It was a fun ride, and we wish you luck in the future. We’ll be shutting down all our services over the next few days, and moving on to other endeavors.
32 commentsPlex Media Server v0.9.7.19 – Thrones & Zombies edition
You think we rest on Easter Sunday? Think again.
We have a nice Plex Media Server update for you today, mostly focusing on transcoder fixes and improvements, including a rather significant speed up: when syncing or streaming with the new transcoder, you will see up to a 2x speedup over the last release.
You can read all the detailed changes since the last public release here. We’ve created a set of forums which list all the changes for each of our products to make it easier for you to both see what’s changed, and to allow subscribing via the forums if you’d like to receive an email when we make releases!
You can download the release in the usual place.
Here’s Barkley this morning, playing on the beach.
And here he is, on the couch, waiting for the Game of Thrones season premier (“What the woof, how much longer??”).
We hope you all had a great weekend!
62 commentsPlex for iOS v3.1 released
Ever since the all new Plex for Android was released, iOS users have been wondering when they’d be able to enjoy some of the new features on their devices, and we’re incredibly happy to say that day has finally come. Let’s jump in and explore the new features available in this release, which should be available on your devices within a few hours!
- NEW: Enhanced filtering: The new rich library filters you’ve gotten to know and love in Plex/Web and the new Plex for Android is now available inside the iOS app.
- NEW: Mobile Media Server: Play your synced content and view content from your photo albums on any other Plex client! I think this is such an awesome feature. You can go over to a friend’s house, and your iPhone or iPad will show up as a Plex server, and (for example) you could browse and play synced content on your Roku. Or even play it from Plex for Android, or another iOS device. Crazy!
- NEW: Push notifications: Plex will now alert you when someone adds you as a friend or sends you a recommendation.
- NEW: Universal transcoder (experimental): We’ve unified the media server’s transcoders, and now iOS can use the latest and greatest. Among other things, this adds support for more subtitle formats, including (finally!) VOBSUB and PGS.
- NEW: New and improved photo viewer.
- NEW: Dark theme.
- NEW: All sliders support variable scrubbing speed (just like the movie player) .
- NEW: Better integration of search in sections and channels.
- NEW: Audio boost & subtitle size settings are used for sync.
- NEW: Failed sync transcodes can be retried from Sync Settings.
- NEW: Source icons for online search results.
- NEW: Swipe up from the bottom to access connectivity settings.
- FIX: Attempt to direct-play MPEG-4 video.
- FIX: Better response validation (fixes certain sync errors).
- FIX: The app can now sync from servers that aren’t published to myPlex.
- FIX: Sort ordering for sync is more reliable.
- FIX: Various issues with manually added servers.
- FIX: Plex/HT and Plex/Roku player names are detected correctly.
- FIX: myPlex accounts couldn’t be created on the device.
- FIX: Offline sections couldn’t be accessed in some rare cases.
- FIX: A few other inconsistencies & crashes.