Plex Media Center

OK, I’ve finally managed to get all my changes checked in. Here’s what seems to be working:

• Music: MP3, OGG, AAC, FLAC, MPC.
• Photos: Slideshows, viewing.
• Videos: Almost completely broken, but should show first few seconds, at turbo speed. No audio. Fun to play around with, though.
• Visualizations: ProjectM works, but there are graphical artifacts.
• Misc: Video thumbnails, IMDB, AllMusic lookups.

What’s completely unimplemented or broken:

• Full-screen mode.
• Python.
• Virtual Filesystem layer (e.g. reading from RAR, zip, etc.)
• Lots of other stuff.

In order to let people play with it (hey, it’s a great music and slideshow player!), I’ve built a release. This is a really early release, so running it may corrupt your drive, give your kids chicken pox, or ruin your credit.

If you want to run a binary release, download it here. Unpack it, set the XBMC_HOME environment variable to point to the XBMC directory that’s created, and try running it. Your milage may vary, and I really can’t spend much time at all tracking down end users’ problems, unfortunately. I recommend you post to the forum and help each other out, if possible.

You’ll need the following libraries installed (and I recommend you use MacPorts to install them) to run the release: libcdio, libfreetype, libfribidi, libGLEW, libiconv, liblzo, libsqlite, libz.

NOTE: You’ll also need to delete the file system/profiles.xml before you start, otherwise you’ll get a gray screen on boot. I should have removed this file before packaging things up. Thanks to UKP for pointing this out.

If you want to compile the release, hopefully because you want to help out in the development, check out the source from SVN, and then use one of the three following methods:

• Use XCode to build the Debug version (production has issues).
• Use xcodebuild to build on the command line, using something like this “xcodebuild -parallelizeTargets -configuration Debug”
• Use Eclipse to build (which will call xcodebuild). The .cproject and .project files are checked in, and you’ll need to install the CDT, of course.

Good luck.