Plex Media Center

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.