Plex Media Center

I’ve been working on getting all my changes checked in, and I’m mostly done. However, there have been lots of merges into the Linux branch from the trunk, and in getting these to build I’ve had to update ffmpeg to a newer revision. This is all well and fine, but I’ve been having some trouble getting ffmpeg to build. Shouldn’t take me too long, but this is why there haven’t been more updates.

Plus, it’s been raining here like crazy, and there’s snow on Haleakala for the first time in years.

A few changes in this release:

• Support for GMA950-based video hardware, like Mac Mini and some MacBooks. Until this point you’ve had to live vicariously through your larger-mac’d brethren. No longer. Scott kindly helped me out with a remote Screen Share session, and a few more OpenGL calls had to be changed to their ARB cousins.
• Multi-threaded decoding has been enabled in ffmpeg. This *may* provide a performance boost for H.264 and MPEG2 content. In practice, I haven’t noticed much difference, but feel free to prove me wrong.
• The postproc/swscale portions of ffmpeg have been hooked up.
• CPU ID has been partially written, you’ll at least see something on the home screen.

You can pick up the latest release here.

Oh, and my excuse for not getting this done sooner is shown below. We went whale (and dolphin) watching this weekend. Those humpback whales are some elusive bastards, and tended to jump out of the water right after my arm got tired holding the camera up to my eye. Jerks.

OK, I figured out why DTS wasn’t working. I suppose it would help to actually build libDTS. Now passthrough works with both AC3 and DTS for me and Scott, who has a MacBook Pro.

The audio code isn’t perfect yet, but it’s now much more likely to work correctly, and of course, I’d love to hear how it works for you.

Pick up the 0.0.6 binary and also the libDCA binary. Put the latter in the system/players/dvdplayer directory. Yes, I know, it should update itself auto-magically, and tell stories to put your kids to sleep. One thing at a time.