Plex Media Center

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.