Plex Media Center

Here’s a tasty release which hopefully takes the edge off the weekend like a cold beer on a hot day. I felt bad because I think the last beta took a few steps back. Hopefully this one will set things back on the path to stability. Download is here (Bittorrent, HTTP) and source is here.

• FIX: “Pulsing” icons problem. Also fixes poor performance in library mode, and crashes when removing items from library or renaming them.
• FIX: Extremely ill-advised change to fix the “simultaneous SSA subtitles problem“. I’m relying on bmfrosty, God Emperor of Subtitles, to tell me if it works and if I broke anything else in the process.
• FIX: Logs are now saved in ~/Library/Logs, where they belong.
• FIX: VobSub subtitles seem to show up now (this bug).
• NEW: Rudd’s latest SSA patch for extracting embedded fonts. bmfrosty can play around and see if it helps things.
• Updates to latest ffmpeg and linuxport code. This includes a few months of ffmpeg development, so quite a bit of things might be working better now. Let me know if you see any regressions.

Look for fixes and improvements to the Apple Remote and power/screensaver issues in the next betas.

Believe it or not, this is what Barkley used to look like.

It *totally* slipped my mind to mention in the release notes, but we have new support forums here. Come on in, make yourself an account, say hello. Many, many thanks to Isaac (a.k.a. iordonez) for setting them up.

Alright, it’s been way too long since the last release! I apologize. Profusely. I’ve been busy getting the code moved over to Github and taking care of some other related things. It might seem like all I’ve been doing is drinking beer, but I assure you, that’s far from the truth. Really.

I’m going to write another post tomorrow detailing how totally awesome git and GitHub are, with some detailed instructions on how you can contribute to the project as a developer. For now, I’ll leave you with a link to the tagged source for this release.

Clearly we still have some rebranding/renaming to do; for now, imagine OSXBMC as standing for “OS X Barkley’s Media Center” or “OS X Bad-ass Media Center”.

Here is what’s new in this release:

• NEW : Support for Aliases.
• FIX: Listing directories with broken symlinks is wonky (things went missing).
• FIX : Timezone off-by-one issue (really fixed this time!)
• FIX : Mouse cursor sometimes shows up. I double-doggy dare it to show up now!
• NEW: libdvdcss is included, which should help with DVD playing (thanks, tokyovigilante!)

Also, I’ve updated to the latest Linux code, which has lots of good stuff as well. Vulkanr has made some great progress on getting libcdio into shape (with the help of davilla), and as a result, support for media on optical disks should be along shortly.

Here are the links (torrent, HTTP) to the release. Since a lot has changed since the last one, I’m sure I probably screwed something up.

Here’s your dose of Barkley; he’s swimming around in some salt water pools and watching Anna take a dive (and probably wondering why it looks like she only has one leg).