Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

+ Top FAQs with Plex - for more help please check the WIKI.

How do I add internet video such as TED, YouTube, CNET etc?
Internet sources are added using the App Store found in the Applications menu. See the following screencast for more info. vimeo.com/3315184
One of the plug-ins has stopped working.
If a plug-in stops working, it’s likely that the structure of the site changed. This doesn’t happen very frequently with most sites, but it’s a definite possibility. When this occurs, an entity we call the “Campfire Robot” springs into action automatically and tracks us down to let us know, and shortly thereafter we can push an update. As such, if a site stops working, the best thing to do is to check the App Store for updates. If you have automatic updates turned on, check your install history to see if an update got installed while you were getting coffee.
I don’t see the Applications Menu Item.
If you previously used v5 of Plex we suggest deleting the folder called Plex found in ~/Library/Application Support/. Many things have changed and a fresh install will ensure the best performance with Plex.
How do I make Movies and TV Shows show up in their respective areas with poster art, plot info, etc?
View this screencast for more info vimeo.com/2758185

Release 0.1.5: No more fast video

March 07th, 2008 | Category: Coding | Author: elan

I’m pretty drunk, so there’s a good chance that I’ll screw up this release, but I’ll give it a good run. This is mostly a bug-fix release, with a few new features thrown in for good measure. I also updated to the very latest ffmpeg and XBMC code, which will hopefully only improve things.

Here are the changes in this release:

  • FIX: I re-enabled the pixel shader for “advanced” OpenGL cards, which was mistakenly left disabled in the last release due to the X3100 debugging. Nobody even noticed, so it’s likely you won’t notice it being on again, but feel free to pretend like everything suddenly got a whole lot faster or better looking.
  • FIX: Crash on exit that was due to you naughty users having Python scripts in the scripts folder. I know who you are.
  • FIX: FLAC files should now play, as I fixed the linkage on the FLAC library.
  • FIX: Make sure the “Application Support” directory is there before trying to create the XBMC directory inside it. For those of you with really virgin Macs.
  • NEW: Down-mixing of AC3 and DTS. Finally, those of you having to sit there in silence watching your movies at high speed, perhaps having to suffer through a loved one nagging you over your shoulder. Set your output mode to analog, turn up the volume, and ignore that loved one. (P.S. Those of you anime fiends with 5-channel AAC, sorry people, no such luck. Post a link to a sample video with that sound format and I’ll try to look into it.)
  • NEW: Support for 4:2:2 MPEG video. This corresponds to the “30secondfergie.mpg” clip, for those of you in the know. Thanks to d4rk and elupus for the final tip on how to scale down the chroma planes. I also updated the libmpeg2 library to the latest and greatest, which adds SSE2 decoding acceleration, and probably lots of bug-fixes. There is still a problem thumbnailing certain MPEG videos. It seems to be a bug in libmpeg2, but I haven’t had time to track it down further.
  • NEW: Preliminary support for Xbox 360 wireless controllers. I have one, and I’ve modified the keymap.xml file for basic support. I’m using the drivers found here, and they seem to work pretty well, except for a few small issues (and I want to get idle mode working so that the system shuts down the controller). I’m looking for a volunteer to finish up the keymap. It’s going to be a pretty sweet option for controlling XBMC, especially once I get MAME integrated.
  • FIX: Exiting with certain skins caused a hang, which was deadly and downright rude in fullscreen mode. Being unable to quickly find the bug, I’ve simply disabled skin unloading upon exit. The pros: No more hangs. The cons: Lack of “final” animation. The pros: It exits much more quickly. So go ahead and try to have a problem exiting. I double doggy dare you.
  • FIX: Watching a movie and then switching to fullscreen mode with the ‘\’ key could result in vertical sync being disabled, which led to video tearing and hair-tearing posts on the forum and blog.
  • NEW: I updated CxImage to version 6.0 (used in displaying photos). Besides incorporating years of fixes and enhancements, the one thing I was excited about was RAW support. However, there are a few downsides I’ve found: It takes forever to thumbnail RAW files, and the thumbnails are corrupted (ha!). However, it will actually display RAW images properly in a slideshow. N.B. To enable RAW display, you’ll need an advancedsettings.xml file that looks like this.
  • FIX: When switching between fullscreen and windowed mode, the fonts would get kind of messed up, in that their sizes were wrong. d4rk explained what was going on, and I fixed it.
  • NEW: Lots of improvements on the scrapers (which load movie/TV show information) from others on the XBMC team. Hopefully they work for you.

One more thing, on the topic of “skiploopfilter”. I did a bunch of experimenting, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it may not be worth the effort. First, let me share some numbers with you; these are all playing the infamous “bird scene” from Planet Earth.

NO: 449 dropped, 159% CPU usage.
ALL: 443 dropped, 147% CPU usage.
BIDIR: 449 dropped, 157% CPU usage.

As you can see, there’s really not much difference. My theory is that the CABAC patch that is applied to ffmpeg, which does prediction+idct+deblock in a separate thread from decoding, already improves things to the extent that deblocking is really not the bottleneck.

Yes, I know, I need to check in my changes. Now that I’m all synced up, I’ll work on that tomorrow. I promise.

IMG_1610.jpg

41 Comments so far

  1. SoerenV March 7th, 2008 12:39 am

    -awesome job elan+crew :)

  2. beto77 March 7th, 2008 1:23 am

    Yeah! I´ll try it ASAP!

    Thx for everything elan!

  3. niad March 7th, 2008 1:24 am

    Exciting, will try it tonight, thanks alot.

    niklas

  4. Muratje March 7th, 2008 1:42 am

    Yeah it works! AC3!!

  5. matt's March 7th, 2008 1:43 am

    ummm…not sure what happened…but it shut down my computer audio…i cant get my audio to work on any of my apps now.

    still looking around to see whats going on. anyone else?

  6. Thomas March 7th, 2008 1:59 am

    Crash when trying to play video with AC3.
    http://pastie.caboo.se/162764

  7. DHJ March 7th, 2008 2:06 am

    Great stuff - ac3 and DTS .mkvs downmix fine. Still dropping frames on one of my most problematic 1080p mkvs, but this is a huge big step forward.

  8. gripworks March 7th, 2008 2:19 am

    You Rule

  9. Disponible XBMC 0.1.5 « Mac Mini HTPC March 7th, 2008 2:30 am

    [...] información: Release 0.1.5: No more fast vídeo Descarga: XBMC [...]

  10. krux March 7th, 2008 3:12 am

    looking forward to get home so i can try this out.. !

  11. Dean March 7th, 2008 3:19 am

    Elan,

    Excellent Update. I’ve been still playing around with SwitchResX and 720p /1080p resolution settings to try to find a “standard” 1080p/24 setting that would mimic the output of say a PS3/Blu Ray player. How does XBMC/OSX handle the 23.976 fps when outputting to a 60hz display? Is the 2:3 cadence added by XBMC, or the display driver itself? Some of the latest high end displays by sony, samsung, and pioneer can detect a 2:3 cadence on a 1080p/30 output and do a proper pulldown, even when a native 24p signal is not used. I have tested with an Oppo DVD player, and my PS3, however my display can never detect the 2:3 from the Mac Mini. It would be ideal for us to find a proper output from the Mini that would allow perfect viewing of 24/25/30 fps video. I can currently get 24FPS material to play perfectly, but this proves problematic at any other frame rate.

    Anyone else interested in this, or does no one else notice and is perfectly fine with the current setup?

  12. spiderlane March 7th, 2008 3:22 am

    Thanks a lot for this Elan, another great release. AC3 mixdown working perfectly on my iMac. A quick question - do you intentionally disable mythtv support in your builds? I ask because when I build from SVN the mythtv support works really great, but of course I don’t have all your other fixes. On Release 0.1.5 attempting to add a mythtv source crashes with this message http://pastie.caboo.se/162788

  13. Weavus March 7th, 2008 4:18 am

    @elan,

    The bird scene may not be the best video for testing the “skiploopfilter” as its using extreme bitrate and encoding options. Perhaps you should run the same kind of test on some more normal 1080p samples.

    Anyway, great release, keep up the amazing work! Looking forward to Python support ;)

  14. Mactastico March 7th, 2008 5:14 am

    Why does XBMC use libmpeg2 and not FFmpeg for MPEG-2 decoding?

    Have you though about if you will be integrating MAME (and other emulators) into XBMC via a Python interface/launcher like the existing emuLauncer python script emulator launcher for XBMC on the Xbox, or nativly via the Programs menu?, so that we can start specific ROM directly from the XBMC GUI without having to start a third-party MAME GUI (like MacMAME) first then start the specific ROM from there?
    http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=30659

    Finally, does anyone know if there is an open source alternative to SwitchResX which would be integrated into XBMC? I think it would be very useful and simplify the setup for those of us who plan to use XBMC on our Mac minis as dedicated HTPC.

  15. spiderlane March 7th, 2008 5:15 am

    I’m experiencing a crash when attempting to scan movies to the library. Here’s the trac ticket I’ve created http://dn-0.com/xbmc-trac/ticket/100.

    I hope it’s helpful

  16. LaLocaChica March 7th, 2008 5:28 am

    More Twitter updates please for us addicted to OSXBMC news :) Thx!

  17. Jasper March 7th, 2008 5:29 am

    I’m downloading right now.
    Thanks for the downmixing option .. i think it’s the most awaited feature ..

  18. phunkysai March 7th, 2008 5:41 am

    Thanks elan!

    I hope you’re still working on getting DVD discs to play within XBMC…my wife is getting tired of exiting XBMC, launching the DVD for my son, and then relaunching XBMC once the dvd is over :-)
    I’m working on ripping our entire dvd collection but it’s taking forever (and no, I’m not gonna get a new wife :-)

    Thanks!

  19. Gibbonacci March 7th, 2008 5:46 am

    Well done dude, with any luck you’ll hit the Ballmer Peak (http://xkcd.com/323/), and become somewhat of a ninja!!! Cheers for all the good work dude!!!

  20. Firefly March 7th, 2008 6:04 am

    Can I make a request? Please implement Firefly Media Server previously known as “mt-daapd” directly into XBMC, then we will we able to access the iTunes library without installing any other software or having to configure anything since XBMC already have a DAAP client that supports Firefly/mt-daapd :)

    http://www.fireflymediaserver.org

    The DAAP client library in XBMC could also do with an update though :/

  21. TheMasterOfPuppets March 7th, 2008 6:14 am

    XBMC’s old DAAP client version could do with more than just an update, it has other quirks as well so really is in need of general maintenance, just such the Firefly forum for “XBMC” and you find a few, among many this http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org/viewtopic.php?t=7429

    “xbmc fetches all metadata for the whole library as soon as it connects. Including the metadta for all items in all playlists. That takes a while. Fireplay and the soundbridge fetch smaller subsets and only when needed.”

    But Firefly in XBMC would be sweet even without those DAAP client fixes :D

  22. fpoil March 7th, 2008 6:27 am

    same as spiderlane : xbmc crashes everytime i try to scan the video library, scrappers are not working, any of them . Worst, i can’t anymore use the library mode for videos : xbmc crashes everytime. I tried to replace the scrapper folder from the 0.1.5 by the one from 0.1.4 : scans are working but not the video library mode…

    I went back to the 0.1.4 and all working

    I wil try to post the log to pastie

  23. niad March 7th, 2008 7:39 am

    Sorry to say that the AC3 sound is not working at all for me, just getting pulsating noise as before. Have tried with about 5 movies now. Can we get a reference movie sample to try? Maybe my movies are some other codec but it says AC3 in the name.

  24. elan March 7th, 2008 7:49 am

    @Dean: Good questions. I don’t know if it helps much, but I don’t think XBMC does anything besides try to output the video at the rate of the video. Any cadence or jumpiness would be related to the ratio of the video speed vs. the refresh rate of the display. Having XBMC pick the optimal refresh rate for playing videos in on my list of things to do.

    @spiderlane: I haven’t tested MythTV support at all, and it’s possible that I actually turned some portion of it off to fix a compile issue.

    @Weavus: I can try another clip, but that bird one is really the only H.264 one giving me much issue these days. I really think the improved CABAC parallelism makes deblocking “cheaper” on a multi-core processor.

    @Mactastico: Good question. I did try enabling ffmpeg for MPEG-2 support and there were serious issues; libmpeg2 seemed much faster and better supported. MAME will be integrated via Python interface/launcher. It’s not our intent to replace or integrate something like SwitchResX at the moment, but rather intelligently select the modes that are available.

    @spiderland and others: Looks like there are some scraper issues. Serves me right for updating to trunk. Try whacking Application Support/XBMC if you haven’t already. Thanks for the crash reports!!

    @phunkysai: DVD playing is on the roadmap. Where’s the roadmap? In my head :)

    @Firefly: It’s not likely that we’ll integrate FireFly anytime soon. Do keep your eyes peeled for iTunes integration.

    @niad: It looks like we’ve found our new “fast video” bug. If you have digital mode & passthrough enabled, you’re going to hear the static of encoded audio. Turn on analog mode and you should be much happier.

  25. Matt March 7th, 2008 8:08 am

    Elan,

    I have same issue as spiderland and fpoll. Crash everytime trying to use Library mode. I’ve tried mounting my shares locally and also through SMB, it hangs both ways. Also tried both windowed mode and full screen, no difference. Also tried deleting Application Support/XBMC folder and still hangs. Here are both the xbmc.log and a stack trace…

    log - http://pastie.caboo.se/162895
    trace - http://pastie.caboo.se/162896

    Thanks for all the hard work!!!

  26. Firefly March 7th, 2008 9:28 am

    @Elan, the thing with Firefly integration is that it would work for all XBMC ports over the network so not just OS X as iTunes is available for Windows as well. Nice if XBMC has the same function on all platforms no?

  27. elan March 7th, 2008 9:35 am

    @Firefly: The Firefly server is already cross-platform, and I personally am not planning to integrate it into XBMC. Where in my reply do you see anything OS X specific about iTunes integration?

  28. fatez March 7th, 2008 9:37 am

    Hi elan,

    thanks a lot for ur time.. for this great porting and… for ur time!

    Just a request if u can (time/wife) : can u implement audio output in raw mode like vlc? Couse my receiver works well in DD5.1 only with VLC but i love osxbmc!

    Thanks elan, bear for you soon!

  29. phunkysai March 7th, 2008 9:42 am

    elan, watch out, fatez is gonna send you a bear.

  30. fatez March 7th, 2008 9:47 am

    *bear -> BEER :)

  31. zebb March 7th, 2008 11:02 am

    “(P.S. Those of you anime fiends with 5-channel AAC, sorry people, no such luck. Post a link to a sample video with that sound format and I’ll try to look into it.)”

    So the same applies for the Apple Trailers? :(

  32. elan March 7th, 2008 11:05 am

    @zebb: The Apple trailer I tried was 2-channel AAC. Post a link to a 5-channel video if you find one.

    @fatez: Beers, bears, they’re all the same except for one gives you a buzz and the other is furry and mauls you if you run slower than your hiking companion.

  33. Tufty March 7th, 2008 12:34 pm

    I can’t post to the XBMC forums but it’s not been approved then though I’ve been a member for a while, what’s gives?

    Anyway, I wanted to post my settings to get 1080/24p on Sony Bravia x3500/x3000 and XBR4/XBR5 series tellies. It’ll probably work with the w3000 and other Bravias as well.

  34. elan March 7th, 2008 12:36 pm

    @Tufty: Domain changed, try xbmc.org. I for one would *LOVE* to see your settings, as I have a TV in that series. 48Hz refresh rate, right?

  35. Tufty March 7th, 2008 12:40 pm

    @elan: that’s where I was. Tufty,

    “you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

    Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else’s post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
    If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation”
    No-ones got round to activating me. :(

    Your Bravia must support 24p first. Email me and I’ll send a screenshot of the settings so you can post it somewhere. ;)

  36. Tufty March 7th, 2008 1:17 pm

    @Elan: Everthing in OSx shows as 24hz. In Vista it shows as 48hz.

  37. Jezz_X March 7th, 2008 6:17 pm

    Tufty if you signed up with hotmail read this
    http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=31189

  38. Julien March 7th, 2008 9:46 pm

    Simply Wonderful :)

    I’ve just bought a macbook a few weeks ago, 0.15 version runs so fine on my sony bravia 32D3000 (dvi to vga in).
    AC3 downmixing in this version definitely kills my old xbox (thanks of you Elan, it makes some room at home!)

  39. niad March 7th, 2008 11:26 pm

    The solution for the “new fast video bug” worked fine for me. I hade indeed the sound set to digital. After i had changed it to analog now AC3 works fine.

    The next big thing for me to wish for would be support for scripts, otherwise it is a fully working app.

    Thanks again.

  40. Peter March 8th, 2008 12:44 am

    Tech Digest wrote an interesting post yesterday about XBMC for Mac OS X on MacApper

    OSXBMC: A Better Front Row?
    http://macapper.com/2008/03/07/osxbmc-a-better-front-row/

    I just which people would stopped calling the software for OSXBMC or Xbox Media Center on OS X, when its name is XBMC for Mac OS X :P

  41. zebb March 9th, 2008 4:18 am

    @elan: here you should have some 5.1 AAC trailers!
    http://www.demo-world.eu/trailers/quicktime-hd-trailers.php

Leave a reply