Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Hope you’ve all been having fun holiday celebrations! I’ve been drinking heavily and obsessively fixing bugs in Plex, and finding that the two activities mix well.

• FIX: The audio dropout issue which was introduced in 0.7.2 should now be fixed.
• FIX: The corrupted German MediaStream strings.
• FIX: File size reporting bug in HTTP API has really been fixed this time.
• FIX: Some tweaks to “album artist” tags in Plex Media Server iTunes module. Thanks to zanex for helping explain what was wrong.
• FIX: Certain videos (FLV, YouTube, 22KHz MP3 tracks) played back at double-speed. Thanks to Ryan for explaining how to fix this one.

Release is here, and source is here.

This is Barkley on one of the first days after we moved to Maui.

It turns out there was a nasty regression in 0.7.3 with videos not playing smoothly, so I thought I’d take the time to release an update, especially since otherwise I’d be trapped decorating Christmas trees, carving hams, or wrapping presents. Here are the changes:

• FIX: Regression causing glitchy playback of videos.
• FIX: Fixed a bug present since the start of the Plex/Seven series where music playback was oddly broken, and skipping tracks only worked some of the time (thanks to cheekyboy for the detailed report!).
• FIX: Fixed another regression relating to photo downloading over the network.
• FIX: Minor fix to the way we format file sizes over the HTTP API (thanks to thedroid).

Release is here (or via Sparkle) and source is here.

OK, now can I go drink lots of eggnog and make merry? Oh right, not until I add a photo of Barkley. This is him, as a teenager, back in Fullerton, CA.

[I've released 0.7.3 to fix a small bug with audio in 0.7.2]

I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since the last release. I apologize for leaving you guys in the lurch with the CoreAudio hang issue for so long, but hopefully this release is chock full enough of goodies to make up for it.

This is a busy time of year, and many of you are likely traveling to visit family, or simply enjoying the time off at home. We’d like to wish you all a healthy and happy holiday season!

• NEW: Pundy and Frank teamed up to add full support for Logitech’s Harmony remote series. They even worked with Logitech to get the profile included in the Logitech software, so it would work without ANY manual programming. Not only that, but since it uses the codes for multiple Apple Remote devices, every single command will be both instant and not prone to misinterpretation. Brilliant stuff, guys! There is documentation for this feature here, thanks to Pundy!

• NEW: Ryan added volume normalization, to solve the problem of mixed-down audio being too quiet. You can enable it under System > Audio as “Normalize Film Volume”.
• NEW: We now ship with MediaStream v1.0, congratulations to those guys getting it done! I have always believed that it takes a lot of courage and commitment to release a version one-point-oh of anything.
• NEW: The OS X audio output device now tracks with Plex’s setting, so that DRM iTunes tracks and GUI sounds always play to the correct place.
• NEW: Enrique added a feature where the Plex background music fades down a bit when Plex is in Windowed mode and the window is not in focus.
• NEW: Enrique (who’s been extremely busy!) added a new menu toggle called “Float on Top” to make the Plex window hover above all others. The shortcut is ?-T.
• NEW: When playing music, we immediately jump to the visualizer. This should make it easier for people to skip tracks right away. Don’t like the new behavior? Set “visualizeronplay” to false in your advanced settings files. Also, when queuing audio files, we now jump to the visualizer after 10 seconds. Don’t like that value? Set “secondstovisualizer” in your advanced settings file.
• FIX: The evil CoreAudio hang.
• FIX: Enrique fixed some bugs in the Plex energy saver.
• FIX: Faster startup for online video streams.
• FIX: The H.264 speed boost settings wasn’t being displayed correctly, leading people to think it was off when it was actually on.
• FIX: The A/Z key skipping not always working in directories coming from the Plex Media Server.
• FIX: Enrique improved the proxy support quite a bit for those people stuck behind proxy servers.
• PULL: Some video player fixes by elupus.
• PULL: Seeking in audio files by spiff.
• PULL: Latest scrapers, including a Amazon scrapers thanks to jelockwood.
• PULL: Latest UPnP code from c0diq.
• PULL: New Shift+letter jump browsing by jmarshall.

This release also includes a new version of the Plex Media Server, with the following changes:

• NEW: Support for iTunes and custom genre thumbnails. Place your custom JPG thumbnails in the ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/Thumbnails/Genre directory (e.g. ambient.jpg). Thanks to padexx for the idea and spaceman for the useful information.

• NEW: There is now a “Most Played” section (by artist, album, and track.
• NEW: Support for the “album artist” tag.

The release can be downloaded from here, or via Sparkle (source is here).

Poor Barkley has spent the last month recovering from a knee injury. We ended up opting for conservative management of the injury instead of surgery, and purchased him a brace from Wound Wear. He’s in good spirits, although he misses being able to go to the beach.

We can’t tell you how much we appreciate the overwhelming response to our request for mirrors. Isaac worked his ass off on some scripts, and now the whole thing is automated. Adding or removing a mirror is trivial, and you should never get a bad link even if mirrors go down. What this should translate to from your perspective is FAST Plex downloads!

At this point we have 23 active mirrors, and that should be enough. We’ll definitely keep all the contact information for everyone who emailed, in the event that we look to add more mirrors in the future.

We would like to thank the following people, on the active mirror list, for their generosity:

• Juggeli (Finland)
• Roopesh Sheth, Family, and Pets (USA)
• Anonymous (USA)
• Anthony ter Neuzen, Theatre Projects, (The Netherlands)
• Michel Rabozee, aka Mickey (Belgium)
• Elias Vaattovaara, University of Oulu (Finland)
• James Garrard, 3wires.net Hosting (UK)
• Torfinn Nome (Norway)
• Cato
• Nicolas Hyvernat (France)
• Nick Peelman, Peelman.us (USA)
• Steve (USA)
• Nicolas Hyvernat (France)
• Andreas Schlicht, media byte Hosting (Germany)
• The Computer Society at Lund University and Lund Institute of Technology, <http://www.df.lth.se/> (Sweden)
• Liquid Gravity, Inc <http://liquidgravity.com> (USA)
• Lars-G. – dev.n0ll.com
• Aris Biscevic
• Martin Månsson (Sweden)
• Ron Dutt (USA)
• Karl Söderström
• Michal Waissmann, Sok Media (USA)
• Rune H.
• Vivek Iyer
• neuro, zensoft.net

Thank you all very much, and also many thanks to all other other people who responded with offers for hosting.

Edit: Looks Like Elan forgot a to mention a couple of our mirrors! I’m using my ninja skills to hop in here and add them for him (–Isaac)

Again me with the edits! I just added a late comer to the list neuro, zensoft.net

Exactly one year ago, I made the following post to the XBMC forums:

One year later, we have a great media center that feels at home on the Mac, a talented group of developers and designers, t-shirts, a website, a canine mascot, and most importantly, a thriving community of great people. Many, many thanks to everyone who helped along the way, I’m incredibly excited to see what the next year of Plex brings!

We’ve had so many thousands of downloads of Plex in the last couple months that the cost of hosting via Amazon’s otherwise excellent S3 service is starting to really add up. Cayce has been kind enough to support us with the S3 hosting since the beginning, and we really appreciate it, but we’d like to move to a more affordable, and more geographically distributed solution. We’d like to know if there are people out there with a fast network connection and bandwidth to spare who would be willing to help us out in hosting Plex.

In order to make this easy, we’ve written a few scripts that monitor mirrors, and round-robin between “active” mirrors when providing download links to the Sparkle update checker. So if you have fiber to the curb, but you can only provide us with bandwidth on the weekends, that’s still valuable. Even so, we’re looking to start with a good handful of fast always-on servers.

Other features we’ll likely add are country correlation to provide the closest server, and transfer speed monitoring. Our goal: To get Plex to you, via auto-update, wherever you are, as fast as we possibly can.

So if you can spare us some bandwidth, please us know by dropping us a line at mirrors at plexapp dot com. Please let us know how much bandwidth you would be able to allocate to Plex downloads.

Many thanks!