Plex Media Center

I dropped Anna off at the airport this morning; she’s on a two week trip to the mainland to visit family. Plus, it’s been raining all day. These two things conspired to keep me inside all day wrapping up the release. (That’s not entirely true, a couple of friends came over with a lot of beer and I spent the better part of the afternoon in an alcohol-induced stupor. But I digress.)

Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, torrent, source). I’m hoping that we can get this 0.5 release wrapped up and move on to the new and interesting things coming in 0.6. (Translation: please don’t report any more damn bugs for this version!) The next beta will be a release candidate.

• NEW: AC3 encoding. This is a killer new feature that allows your receiver to play full surround sound from “unsupported” formats, like AAC and FLAC. My hat is off to Ryan Walklin who got it working in record time. I know, we’re supposed to be stabilizing things for 0.5 final, but this was just too damn cool not to work in. Go play some Apple Trailers and then throw your Apple TV out the window.
• FIX: The infamous and incredibly annoying “CAPETag” bug, manifested by a crash in the middle of music playlists (randomly, of course).
• FIX: GIF image loading was kind of broken. I’m surprised nobody noticed. I guess everyone’s pr0n collection has moved to JPEG? Boobs do look better in 24 bit color.
• FIX: A crash with keyboard layouts (thanks to Enrique and Roman).
• FIX: Text subtitles with more than two lines would have missing lines.
• FIX and FIX: Lots of fixes to smart folders. We now run asynchronously and timeout after a while if nothing has been returned. Memory handling has been fixed (thanks, Enrique!) so it doesn’t crash when scanning a smart-folder-source to the library. And we respect the folders scope when executing the query.
• FIX: Switching between full-screen and windowed mode has been fixed to return to the same windowed resolution.
• FIX: Hugely reduced latency with controllers (XBox360/Apple Remote). The difference is unbelievable with the XBox360 controller, it should be indistinguishable from a wired controller at this point.
• FIX: Crash when displaying SSA subtitles in some cases. Thanks to Bad Mr Frosty and Parag for helping me track this down!
• FIX: Minor changes to the way we do vsync, not sure if it will improve things for people having trouble, but it won’t make things worse.
• FIX: Revert the logarithmic volume change. Not sure if it’s a Mac thing or not, but it just made things really quiet for the majority of the volume range.
• FIX: Crash on exit when exiting when a script is running.
• FIX: Some erroneous references to /opt/local in the libraries we ship in Resources.
• FIX: 187.avi was getting stacked with 300.mkv, and I can assure you that the latter really doesn’t play well after the former. Although, come to think of it, Samuel L Jackson yelling “This is motherfucking Sparta!” would be pretty awesome.
• FIX: The XBMCHelper is now killed again when you disable it in the settings.
• NEW: Enrique added support for CoreFoundation’s exception handling, so that we better log those sorts of errors.
• FIX: Enrique fixed a few more memory leaks and built the latest libcdio to fix a crash.
• NEW: (Bonus subtitle-lover’s feature) Rather than just being able to select the lowly Arial font (or whatever you tossed in the media/Fonts directory in your application package (and come on, who does that?) you can now pick from a large number of Apple-supplied fonts. Seen below is Georgia Bold. Please let me know if you have an answer to the question posed.

I also cherry-picked some fixes from the linuxport branch, most notably:

• A crash opening context menus (yuvalt).
• Crash in Python selecting list items (nice one, vulkanr!)
• Better thread-safety in DLL trackers (charleydoes)
• Fixes to AC3/DTS buffering (elupus)

With these changes plus the crash on exit from the list above, Python support should actually be pretty solid, or at least getting there!

My sincere thanks to our community, you are all awesome. Almost 450 users on the forum, over 2000 posts, simply brilliant. We’re getting top-notch bug reports, and people are being really helpful and friendly.

Without further ado, your Barkley.

Family in town, not much time, but I wanted to get a new release out there. Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, Bittorrent, source):

• REG: Switching between windowed and full-screen mode when watching a video now works again.
• NEW: The genius known as bmfrosty realized that all Leopard installations come with Arial Unicode, so I’ve put some code in to intercept requests to Arial and redirect to the system-installed Unicode version. This means no more need to download and install the font for all you international folk, it should work out of the box! Simply select Arial as the skin font, and it should work. We’ll be putting more work in here shortly, including allowing you to pick more system-provided fonts.
• FIX: You can now add Smart Folders as sources.
• FIX: Some memory leaks playing sounds and loading images (thanks to riquedafreak!)
• NEW: We’ve upped the minimum cache size in a few cases to be more realistic for HD media. Still lots of improvements to be made in this area, but if you’re having trouble with frames dropping or jerky playback, make *sure* your cache settings are high enough.
• FIX: I’ve included a patch by crocodile that apparently fixes streaming from a Dreambox.
• FIX: The default on-screen time for the song information has been raised from 2 seconds to 10.
• FIX: New ffmpeg libraries to include a fix by elupus relating to seeking in MKV files.
• FIX: A patch by Roman Sokolov has been included which apparently helps out with Cyrillic input, switching keyboard layouts, and allowing hot-keys to work. I’m not completely clear on the fixes because, frankly, I don’t type in Cyrillic, but the patch was clean.
• NEW: Another part of the same patch, we now allow the desired URL encoding to be specified in a scraper. We default to UTF-8, and the new KinoPoisk scraper that’s been included in this release specifies CP1251.

Areas to test:

• Cyrillic/international keyboard input, Russian movie scraping.
• Smart folders.

Here’s a screenshot with Greek language enabled, using the system-supplied Arial font.

And finally, your moment of Barkley:

Assisted by the lovely Stella Artois, I worked a while this evening fixing some bugs. The result can be found here (HTTP, torrent, source):

• FIX: For ages now we’ve had trouble with large subtitles and the lovely Aeon skin (cases with fonts having point sizes great than 50). Well, no longer. Thanks to jmarshall for pointing me in the right direction on this one.
• REG: Amazingly nobody noticed, but playing movie trailers with the AMT plugin caused a crash. Luckily, before anyone complained, it’s now working again.
• FIX: Better behavior with switching between full-screen and windowed mode in terms of fonts and skins resizing correctly.
• REG: Caching A/V ratios tweaked, fixes frame dropping problem introduced last version. I tried a bunch of HD trailers and got frame dropping only when my pathetic connection couldn’t keep up.
• NEW: Bumped up maximum allowable cache size in certain cases.
• FIX: TIFF loading crash reported by superpea, fixed by upgrading to the latest version of libtiff.
• FIX: ProjectM was updated to 1.1 by malloc64 (nice work, mate!), and I recompiled for OS X. I ran into some problems on GMA950 (go figure), but worked around them. It *should* now work and not display garbage on the lower third of the screen. More tweaks may be needed, but I think it’s much better than the old one.

We’ve seen these racquetballs before, haven’t we?