Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Alright, a fresh new release for your enjoyment. A few tasty new items, and some bug fixes reported by our most excellent community! You can download from the home page, or via Sparkle (within a few minutes).

• NEW: Our newest Plexville code master, Jam, added the ability to modify the panel brightness for applicable LCDs (iMacs, laptops) via the settings. Lots of other really cool things coming very shortly from him.
• NEW: Greatly simplified settings. Isaac worked really hard to come up with sane default settings, and also to move lots of the more esoteric settings from the UI into advancedsettings.xml. We’ve found that new users tend to run into the same things (e.g. disabling remote events and thus breaking Apple Remote). Plex now ships with a well commented advancedsettings.xml file which will get installed into your Application Support folder if you don’t already have the file. If you want to change settings that no longer appear in the UI, you can either edit the items in the advanced settings file, or remove from them there to make them appear in the UI again. Isaac did an awesome job at choosing reasonable defaults.
• NEW: Revamped the full-screen toggling (⌘-F) to make things more Mac-like. If you go into full-screen and quit, next time it will start in full screen. Also, if you drag the window over to another screen and hit ⌘-F, it’ll go to full-screen on that display. Quit and restart and it’ll be full-screen on that display. In summary, it should act much more intuitively. Thanks to migueld for pushing me on this one, we had lots of new users (rightly!) confused.
• FIX: Certain MKV files could cause crashes.
• FIX: Multi-channel AAC files could cause crashes (with AC3 transcoding). Ryan nailed this one.
• FIX: A regression displaying non-US charsets (e.g. French). Thanks to Soner and others who helped bring the problem to my attention.
• FIX: A regression scanning/refreshing movies in VIDEO_TS folders.
• FIX: Improvements to the German translation of MediaStream (thanks, Spacemessage!)

The new MediaStream 0.91 is included also, with lots of good stuff. There is a newer version out there, but we haven’t gotten though testing it yet with Plex.
We’ve also pulled the usual updates from XBMC: New scrapers, bug-fixes, better mouse hiding/displaying code from jmarshall, dropped frame code from elupus (look how few frames are actually dropped now!) and of course d4rk’s new plug-ins for iPhoto/iTunes (nice job!).

It was a beach day for Barkley this last weekend.

I’ll be out of town for the next couple days, but I wanted to leave you all with some entertaining reading material. Back in July we asked you to fill out a survey detailing how you store your media, how you use Plex, and what future work on the project was important to you. There’s a link to the full survey towards the end, but here are some of the things that were interesting to me:

• Almost three quarters of you have little or no media on physical discs.
• 84% of you have little or no media in VIDEO_TS folders, or in ISO/IMG files.
• 81% of you have little or no media inside RARs or ZIP files.
• More than half of you have a majority of your media in high definition. Hello, future!
• Only 4% of you use 4×3 resolution.
• Only 24% of you use library mode, with 22% finding it too buggy and 29% finding it too complicated.

The interesting thing about those numbers - to me, at least - is in terms of priorities and allocating limited resources towards work on a project. As an example, I think it’s clear from these numbers that Team RazorFish did the exact right thing by leaving 4×3 support for their lovely MediaStream skin until the end!

The top three things you wanted from Plex back in July were stability, integration with OS X, and a lovely skin. We’ve been working hard to address the first, we now ship with the MediaStream skin, and we’ve got some really exciting stuff coming up in terms of integration features.

Plex needs to have strong focus on what’s important to our users, and we really appreciate everyone who filled out the survey to help us with that.

And now I’m off to go relax and celebrate our one year wedding anniversary. Assuming I can relax without an Internet connection, that is…

Plex Planning Survey.pdf

My sincere apologies for a bug that crept in with the DTS to AC3 transcoding feature which prevented DTS from down-mixing correctly. If you use usually connect Plex to a surround receiver supporting DTS you would not have been affected.

The problem has been fixed, and I’ve uploaded the new release. The good news is you should be able to use Sparkle to do the update for you.

This is Barkley catching guava fruit in his mouth. He loves guava, pineapple, papaya and avocado, and on occasion we’ve caught him eating freshly-fallen mango out in the yard.

I know you’re getting tired of downloading these endless Plex releases, so I’m very pleased to announce that this should be the last release you’ll have to (manually) download. We’ve included the oft-requested Sparkle update system into Plex. I’m hoping it will make it much easier for people to stay up to date! The default setting is for it to check daily.

The changes in this release (available from the home page)

• FIX: A silly and evil regression that prevented DVDs and other MPEG2 content from playing correctly, and caused crashes in DVD menus.
• NEW: Ryan added support for transcoding DTS audio to AC3 audio, for those who have slightly older receivers. If you want to enable it, change the audio output mode to be Digital, enable AC3 passthrough, and disable DTS passthrough. We also worked together to fix a bug where audio settings weren’t saved correctly, especially for people with external devices. Ryan rocks. If I post a link to his blog, will that inspire him to make his first post?
• NEW: Included the latest MediaStream skin (lovely work, guys, as always!). Added the Plexalicious Unicode fontset to hopefully help our international users.
• FIX: A potential compatibility problem with Remote Buddy (thanks, Felix!)
• FIX: Removed all the remote event settings from being visible, since people were mostly just using them to hurt themselves by turning off the server (and thus rendering their Apple Remote inoperable).
• FIX: Scott (aka Superpea) made a stunning foray into coding and sent me a fix for a problem where a remote library (FTP/XBMSP) was behaving really badly because it kept trying to create video thumbnails remotely. Bad thumbnailer! No biscuit. Nice work, dude!
• FIX/NEW: Resolution settings work much better with multiple profiles now. When you log into a profile that profile’s resolution kicks in. Create a profile for each of your 7 TV sets, and then log in to the right profile as you carry your laptop around.
• FIX: I pulled all the fanart fixes from XBMC that were required because of the initial fanart server melting down. I’d hate to see that person’s bandwidth bill!
• FIX: Fixed an annoying bug where the last thing you entered into a text box showed up (thanks spiff!)
• FIX: Updated the German translation of some skin entries (thanks, Arthur!)

Pulled the usual fixes from XBMC and one nice feature from jmarshall, who added the much-requested enhancement to resuming in videos, and some background processing of downloads of thumbnails and fanart. Nice job, man, you always make it look easy.

I’ll leave the last word to Barkley.

Hopefully this release will cure most of the serious issues with the last one. Downloads and source at the Plex home page. Thanks to everyone for their kind comments and thorough bug reports, and a warm welcome to all the new users!

• FIX: The issue with using Remote Buddy.
• FIX: DVDs don’t play over SMB (and other non-local protocols).
• FIX: Crashes when thumbnailing MPEG2 files.
• FIX: Annoying popup asking to locate screensaver (99% sure).
• FIX: Hebrew characters should work again (i.e. be the right way around).
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailers thumbs don’t display.
• FIX: Going to full screen without visualizer doesn’t work (thanks, jmarshall!)
• FIX: Problems playing RAR files.
• FIX: Fixed a crash after playing an unplayable file.
• FIX: Cursor sounds work correctly until you play something.
• NEW: Latest version of MediaStream! We’ve added an experimental skin fontset called “Unicode” which uses Arial unicode for all the fonts, it may help international users.
• NEW: Mouse is turned off by default.
• NEW: Default username for web server is “plex” not “xbox”.

We also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from the XBMC code.

Here’s Barkley giving himself a good back scratch in the back yard.