Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Way back when I was just starting the port to the Mac, and the program was just as likely to crash on you as play a video, I dreamed of a day when it would be stable.

In the last months, we have made 22 releases of the 0.5 series of Plex. We’ve tried to fix all the most serious bugs, and add some OS X flavor to the application in the process (not to mention all the bugs that the XBMC team has fixed). I haven’t had a crash in a long time in my own personal use, and even the bug and crash reports have slowed.

Of course, there are still problems, and still bugs. No software is ever perfect. But we feel like we’ve reached a point where it works “pretty darn well” and we’d like to formalize this by ending the 0.5 development series, and releasing 0.6. Assuming nothing got screwed up in this release, we’ll make a couple of last-minute tweaks and fixes and release as 0.6.0.

Our long-term plan with Plex was always to stabilize, then enhance. First get it working well enough, then make major architectural changes.

At the same time as we’ve been working on the 0.5 series, we’ve also been staying up late at night, working hard on new stuff. Really cool new stuff. In the coming week or so, I’m going to be posting here with details on the *NINE* enhancements to Plex that have been completed. These enhancements will be included in the first release of 0.7 (the next development series). To summarize:

• v0.6.x: This will be the new stable series. If you fear change, and just want to enjoy your media in the safety of a stable release, use these. We’ll make bug-fixes, include the latest MediaStream, but nothing too scary.
• v0.7.x: If you like living on the bleeding edge, skiing down double-black diamonds, and jumping out of planes with parachutes, this is probably the series for you.

Here are the changes in this release (available from the Plex home page, and from Sparkle shortly):

• NEW: You can now configure the way the H.264 decoder does deblocking. Some will you will know this is the “skiploopfilter” setting in ffmpeg. Some will wonder if I’m speaking English. The bottom line is, if you allow the decoder to skip doing deblocking, it’ll be less intensive for the CPU. I’ve found that if you configure it to skip all deblocking, the “killa” bird sample uses about 20% less CPU and plays at a higher frame rate. Bottom line: your mileage may vary, but it may help you with hard-to-play content.

• NEW: Support for the Home and End keys in lists. Also support for using the A/Z keys to skip to the next/previous letter in lists. Jonathan Marshall added support for this last one a while ago, cool dude that he is, so we added a mapping. Also, Isaac added a new mapping for people using Snatch on their iPhone. You’ll have to whack your Keymap.xml file in ~/Application Support/Plex/userdata to get these features.
• NEW: We have included the latest MediaStream skin (no doubt out of date by tomorrow), along with the associated code fixes so that you don’t have to hit escape 23 times to return to the main menu from the Movie/TV sections. You can see some documentation for the new settings in this version of the skin here (many thanks to Jayman978!)
• FIX: We dimmed the wrong screen when you were running with a multi-screen setup and Plex was on the second screen.
• FIX: Some MP3 tags caused a hang. This includes the “Burial” album, so bretonh will be pleased.
• FIX: Refreshing movie info from NFO in VIDEO_TS folders caused a crash.
• FIX: Storing a TV show in multiple places (e.g. some seasons in one place, some seasons in another), whether by multi-path sources or different sources led to duplicates.

We’ve of course included all the latest XBMC fixes as well, including the latest UPnP and MythTV code.

I’ve taken to opening up fresh coconuts in the back yard with a big machete. The coconut water is supposedly really healthy, and if I’m feeling inspired, I make fresh coconut milk from the pulp for a Thai curry. Barkley loves both the milk and the pulp, so mostly I just lop the coconuts in half after drinking the water and give them to him.

Tomorrow morning, the XServe box that hosts our web site, forums, and blogs will be strapped into a baby seat and moved from its current location in downtown San Francisco to an undisclosed bunker location, where it will share space with Dick Cheney and his army of robot clones.

Even assuming the server doesn’t get shot in the face, we will still have a few hours of downtime in the morning. Things should be up and running and DNS propagated by the afternoon.

We have some exciting stuff coming up in the form of new Plex features which we’ll be detailing here in the coming weeks…

If you pick up the November issue of Macworld, you’ll notice that there’s a two page spread on Plex (thanks to migueld for tipping me off). I spoke with Gina Trapani months ago, and had all but forgotten about it. It’s a well written article, and hopefully we’ll see a bunch of new users show up as a result.

Speaking of users, we got our 2000th member on the forums yesterday. Congratulations to SMario for making Plex 2K, we raise our collective beers to you!

Top two reasons why I shouldn’t have released 0.5.20 quite yet:

1. I was heading out to a long dinner party, virtually assuring that there’d be a problem I couldn’t address for many hours and beers.
2. I changed things after the testers did their work. Bad me, no biscuit.

Two changes in this release:

• FIX: Crash on entering settings menu. Elan kan’t kode.
• FIX: Restore screen backlight level on exit.

The new release is available in the usual place. Will you forgive me if I post another photo of Barkley? This is him watching as his buddy Poots does tricks at the behest of our friend Heather. French Bulldogs can fly.

*** Hold off on this release for now, there’s something borked with the settings ***

First of all, I want to make a big shout out to our forum members (citizens of Plexville). We just passed 10,000 posts, and we’re just a hair’s breadth away from 2,000 members. It’s a friendly, productive, helpful community, and we like it that way. A warm welcome to the new members, and a sincere thanks to everyone who helps out, we couldn’t do it without you!

We’ve been busy working on some awesome new features for the upcoming 0.7 development version, but we wanted to step away for a moment and fix some of the lingering bugs in the 0.5 series before we declare it stable. You can find the download on the home page or via Sparkle, as soon as I update the appcast.

• NEW: We now turn off the backlight on displays that are blanked, many thanks to James. I hear the sound of happy Mac users rejoicing.
• NEW: The menu button brings up shutdown menu instead of just exiting, as requested, holding play zooms into photos, and holding menu returns to normal zoom. Also, the escape key has been made to act just like the menu button on the remote. Thanks to Isaac for these improvements!
• NEW: Added the ability to cycle through the available displays. This works in windowed or full-screen modes, and you can use the new ⌘-Shift-→ and ⌘-Shift-← keyboard accelerators to do it. Fun! Plus, ever time I connect things in XCode’s Interface Builder, I get little shivers of pleasure.
• FIX: Weather conditions are correctly localized (thanks, Enrique!)
• FIX: James fixed a small bug with the display brightness setting.
• FIX: The audio device is now saved and restored correctly in all cases. Seriously.
  
• FIX: The problem affecting video with some LOL releases (and others) has been fixed (thanks to elupus for the fix to ffmpeg).
• FIX: A rare bug causing a crash when blanking displays (thanks, Enrique!)

Since Isaac has made tweaks to the keymap and advanced settings, unless you’re an expert user who has made your own edits, you’ll want to delete advancedsettings.xml and Keymap.xml from ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/ so that the new defaults can be installed.

As usual, we’ve also pulled fixes from the XBMC code, including shoutcast fixes by the ever-productive vulkanr, the latest scrapers, the usual assortment of brilliant stuff by jmarshall, and more (RTMP fixes, etc.). I also pulled r15344 as requested by chitz.

This is a photo of Barkley with his brother (i.e. littermate)Johann. We met him by chance at the dog park we used to frequent in Pasadena after noticing the striking resemblance.