Plex Media Center

OK, the following new release should fix the nasty regression with non-primary screens (HTTP, Bittorrent, Source). Enjoy, I’m off to bed.

OK, it’s been about three weeks since the last release, and we’ve been working hard. The most noticeable change in this release (HTTP, Torrent, Source) is the rebranding. The name of the app is Plex, its settings are in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex, the helper is called PlexHelper, it writes logs to ~/Library/Logs/Plex.log, etc. This means that when you start up Plex for the first time, you’ll have a blank slate. If you want to migrate over your old thumbnails and library, have no fear, Isaac has written up a handy guide to assist you with that. I personally sort of appreciated the clean slate, but that’s likely just me! Also, note that when first run, it will uninstall and kill any running XBMCHelper, so you don’t have to do anything to get that to work.

• REG: Skip to next video didn’t work, and trying to play a new video while a current one was playing caused the application to hang.
• FIX: Crashes while switching from full-screen to windowed mode (or vice-versa) when running scripts, like Apple Movie Trailers.
• FIX: Don’t hide the menu bar if we’re not displaying on the primary screen.
• FIX: Visualizations were getting the (de)amplified PCM data, which meant that volume affected the visualizations.
• FIX: The default audio latency has been re-calibrated, and should result in more accurate lip-sync.
• FIX: Crash on start on Russian systems (and possibly others).
• FIX: Crash when network goes away or is not enabled.
• FIX: Browsing photos with the Apple Remote didn’t allow for backing up a single level (thanks, Isaac!)
• FIX: Exiting DVD menu with Apple Remote now works (thanks, Isaac!)
• NEW: Remote helper now has Secure Input disabled by default, because it messed with VMware and Adobe Illustrator (among other things). You should still enable this option if (a) you have problems with Front Row starting along with Plex and (b) you don’t run any conflicting software.
• FIX: If you minimized Plex while playing a movie, things got weird when restoring, and lots of frames were dropped.
• FIX: Lots of bugs fixed with text subtitles, including missing or truncated subtitles at the end, errors in parsing that led to lots of jumbled subtitles all being displayed together, and subtitles getting lost after jumping backwards. Also, parsing subtitles use to be an O(n^2) operation, and it’s now an O(n) operation (i.e. much faster!) Thanks to everyone on the forums who helped with reproducing them and uploading subtitle files.
• FIX: DVD playback from optical media has now been disabled by default. Why? It’s too way buggy for us to leave it enabled with a good conscience (especially since it has caused crashes for people not even using the feature). If you really want to use it, you’ll have to add “<enableopticalmedia>true</enableopticalmedia>” into your advanced settings file. It’s on the roadmap, it will be fixed, but for now it’s disabled by default.
• FIX: Ryan fixed a problem with high sample rate AAC files (e.g. 96KHz) causing a crash. Sweet!
• FIX: The infamous “mouse doesn’t reach to the edges of the screen” has been fixed. Yes, in full screen mode the mouse doesn’t *quite* get to the bottom, but it’s close enough.
• FIX: Enrique fixed the OS X font loading to look in more places (/System/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts).
• NEW: Plex now replaces the default NIB shipped with SDL with its own, which means, among other things, all the standard ? accelerators work, like ?-Q, ?-M, ?-H and, yes, even ?-F to toggle full-screen mode! It also means we get a new About box. The number in parenthesis is the GIT revision of the release. Yes, those are scantily clad ladies in the background, but I blame it all on the talented djh.

• FIX: The frame rate limiter was buggy, which caused the app to use more CPU than it should when idle *and* hidden. The video frame rate display has also been slightly smoothed.
• FIX: The application is now code-signed, which means those having trouble with the Leopard firewall should see better results now.
• FIX: BMP files (such as those found in the multi-GB backpack torrent for Aeon) didn’t load correctly.
• FIX: Smart Crash Reporter has been updated, and should now install correctly on more (all?) systems.
• FIX: The ‘a’ key now goes to the next audio language track when viewing videos. Thanks, Isaac!
• FIX: A crash setting fan art in Aeon.
• FIX: RAW files (CR2) have been re-enabled, as the bug that made loading them really slow has been fixed. Superpea and other photographers will definitely appreciate this.
• NEW: Two new visualizers have been included, waveform and spectrum.

As usual, we’ve also cherry-picked stuff from the XBMC team, including:

• Lots of fixes by the ever-talented jmarshall, including fixes to background loading in skins, fanart and more.
• Some fixes by d4rk to OpenGL handling around visualizers and an off-by-one error with textures.
• Some scanning/thumbnail fixes by tslayer.
• A fix to prevent the “buffering” dialog from displaying for too long, and a bogus thin line showing up in textures by elupus.
• Other miscellaneous fixes.

It’s been super hot lately, and Barkley’s been spending lots of time sleeping on the relatively cool wood floor.

Thanks to the efforts of Isaac, we have the new Plex wiki up and running. The login is shared between the forums and the wiki, so you don’t have to create a new account. Come on in, check it out, feel free to add to it.