Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

First of all, a huge thank you to our group of testers. We recruited 10 people who know Plex inside out and are major contributors to the forums, and they were kind enough to spend time putting the new release through its paces. So ChoccyHubNub, jayman978, phunkysai, jeremymc7, Mikey, Vengeancegoon, teh.hippy, Cranial Lethargy, BigBadWolf, and Sirreef, you all rock! (Frosty, I didn’t was to harass you because I know you’ve been busy.)

Second thing, we’ve slightly tweaked the way we do version numbering. What we’d like to do is ensure two things: that you always have a stable version of Plex to download (which gets bug-fixes), and that you have access to more bleeding edge versions (with new features). To this end, odd version numbers (0.5.x, 0.7.x, 0.9.x) will always be bleeding edge versions, and even version numbers (0.6.x, 0.8.x, 1.0.x) will be stable versions. This is identical to the system that Linux used to use. This is the 14th release of the 0.5 series, and I hope it proves stable enough so that we can release the first of the 0.6 series soon.

You’ll also note new branding, new icons, splash screen, DMG background, all courtesy of the talented Alexis Gallisá. He’s worked hard not only on the branding, but the new Plex website (where you can find download and source links).

Last, but not least, you’ll note that we have said goodbye to Project Mayhem III as a default skin. Team Razorfish has very graciously allowed us to use the lovely MediaStream skin as the default skin for Plex. Note that if you have any problems with the skin, or feature requests, please report them on the Plex forums!

NOTE A few things for this release: You’ll probably want to delete your local copy of MediaStream if you have it installed in Application Support/Plex/skin (so as to avoid having two copies). Similarly, you’ll want to move Project Mayhem III into Application Support/Plex/skin (if you want to keep it around). Also, in order to obtain full fanart support (automatically scraped fanart), you’ll want to follow the procedure outlined by Isaac here, or else blow away your library and start over from scratch. Isaac, you rule, thanks for all the help getting this release out the door!!

• NEW: Ability to configure the number of recent video and audio items returned in library mode.
• NEW: Fatal errors are displayed in a popup dialog box, instead of causing the application to crash.
• NEW: Our newest contributor, Pundy, added the ability to sleep the Mac directly from the shutdown menu. Nice job!
• FIX: Annoying crash reading replaygain tags from MP3 files.
• FIX: Hang exiting the app using the dock menu, or with Applescript.
• FIX: Using “Open With…” to open media files with Plex should work again.
• FIX: Cmd-F works to toggle full-screen mode even if you’ve remapped the backslash key.
• FIX: Starting Plex with the screensaver active will turn it off.
• FIX: Manually browsing for subtitles exits the player.
• FIX: Crashes in ffmpeg playing various files (e.g. MS-DVR samples, King of Queens sample, Odd Couple sample).
• FIX: Locking bug in SMB resulting in crashes (fixed nearly simultaneously by my buddy vulkanr!)
• FIX: Crash on startup if you had multiple RSS feeds (this took about ten frustrating hours to track down).
• FIX: Apple Remote causes Front Row to start/system volume indicator. I believe this one is finally nailed. Thanks to the people who tested it.
• FIX: RAW file threading issues, leading to some loading of RAW files to fail.
• FIX: VIDEO_TS directories stack correctly and allow direct playing, thanks to dtmetz!
• FIX: DTS music files (thanks to spiff) and AC3 music files now play correctly, although only the former in 5.1.
• FIX: We call the Crash Reporter installer as an external entity so as to properly comply with the GPL. Thanks to Enrique for throwing a patch together so quickly. He also fixed a bug relating to installing the Plex helper.
• FIX: The XBox360 controller can now scan through files properly with the left thumbstick and exit with the big “X” button.
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailer plug-ins now install properly.
• FIX: The Apple Remote menu key (and backspace key) were unable to get you out of an empty movie/TV library.

Of course we’ve also pulled lots of good stuff over from the XBMC tree including some Bluray-related enhancements (find and use DTS-HD streams, by elupus), fanart and skinning enhancements (spiff and others), and fixes including the annoying ff/rew hang bug, fast text scrolling (jmarshall, who also fixed a ton of bugs), and lots of Python stability fixes by vulkanr: you rock, Python (and lots of other things) would not be stable without you!

And here’s your Barkley!

I’m getting a number of crash reports (a couple in the last few hours) from people running older versions (usually RC1 or RC2). In this specific case (playing .img files) and others the bug has been fixed in RC3.

Unless you’re running into a specific problem with the latest version, it’s probably a good idea to upgrade. You can always check the about dialog if you’re not sure which version you have.

(And yes, the next release is dropping within the next few days, just finishing up on some testing…)

I apologize for the lack of updates, I’ve had my parents-in-law in town, and as such haven’t had that much free time. However, we’re very close to the next release (lots of bugs fixed!) and we have some other exciting things coming up.

For starters, we are extremely lucky to have the talented (and fellow dog-lover) Alexis Gallisa helping us out with our branding. Have a look at the in-progress logo for Plex below. We wanted to play off the similarities between the words “play” and “plex” (especially taking into account a potential slogan: “Don’t Play it, Plex it!”) and the orange play symbol fits nicely with that. I’m sure the keen-eyed viewers will notice the additional play logo in negative space between the E and the X. Simply beautiful.

Once we get the logo finalized, you can be sure there will be t-shirts and coffee mugs available!

The next release will hopefully drop in the next week, and with some luck will be the first of our stable 0.6 series. We will release further minor bug-fix updates (0.6.1, 0.6.2) as we progress in parallel with the “unstable” 0.7 series.

We also have a couple of surprises for the stable series, as you’ll see in the next release or two.

What better thing to do on a perfectly sunny Saturday morning than migrate blogs? I can actually think of plenty of things, but Isaac convinced me this would be a perfect time, and thanks to his great support, we got the blog migrated and upgraded to the latest Wordpress. The old URL should send you to the new one, and the RSS feed (through Feedburner) is unchanged. Isaac and Ryan both have blogs now too.

I made a couple of tiny tweaks to the site in the process, my favorite of which is support for gravitars in the comments. Don’t have one yet? What are you waiting for?

I believe everything is now finally under one domain roof now, with blogs, forums, and wiki all at plexapp.com. Many thanks to Isaac for working tirelessly to make this happen in such a seamless fashion!

Hey, pretty cool, we got a mention in the Wall Street Journal on July 24th. I spoke with the reporter for a while, but unfortunately Barkley got left on the cutting room floor. The article is called “Feeding Your TV With Video From the Computer or Web” by Christopher Lawton, and he wrote:

Developers of … OSXBMC, which this month was rebranded Plex, say [it plays] more formats than rival products directly from Apple, such as Front Row and Apple TV. Apple declined to comment for this article.