Release: Plex/Seven 0.7.6 – Month of fixes
I can’t believe it’s already February! It’s been a rainy month out here, so for the most part there was nothing better to do than hunker down and write code and hope the electricity didn’t go out.
We have a brand new release for you with lots of good stuff. The exciting part, though, is that we spent as much time on the release as we did on some great new features coming up shortly. These new features are going to change the way you use Plex, and are going to open up some very interesting possibilities. We’ll be making a preview release shortly.
The release can be downloaded from here, and the source is available here.
Without further ado, here are the changes for this release:
- FIX: Ryan coaxed DTSWAV files into playing. It turns out to be impossible to play 44.1KHz DTS files on OS X, as it assumes encoded audio is 48KHz. For now, we’re mixing down the files, and shortly we’ll move to transcoding them to 48KHz AC3 files. Not optimal, but better than nothing given the limitations of the platform. (I’m looking forward to this personally, because I want to have the first 1080p Wizard of Oz + 5.1 Dark Side of the Moon party.)
- FIX: The highly annoying bug which caused TV shows to lose audio randomly with TV theme music enabled.
- FIX: Certain dialogs in the update code didn’t support UTF8 strings (James).
- FIX: There is now an option you can disable to prevent Plex linking the system audio output device with the device selected in Plex (System > Audio > Link System Output).
- FIX: The audio device settings didn’t appear to be remembered in the settings (they actually were saved, just not displayed correctly).
- FIX: We’ve disallowed deleting files from inside Plex by default. Much safer! This is a change to the settings, so you’d need to delete your guisettings.xml file to get the new value.
- FIX: We fixed a bug that prevented actions from being sent to Plex via event clients (used by Remote buddy).
- FIX: Ryan fixed a crash when attempting to transcode a corrupt DTS stream into AC3.
- FIX: Background music tracks are now played completely randomly.
- FIX: Isaac fixed some issues in the harmony and keyboard maps, and also added Hold Up/Hold Down to control volume in Full Screen Video and Visusalization for Mira users (and likely Sofa Control users as well). He also went through and “humanized” some of the error messages that Plex spits out to be more intelligible.
- FIX: Tweaked permissions on a MediaStream file.
- FIX: Mikey gave us some fixes to French strings (thanks!)
- FIX: Stillness sent some fixes for the KinoPoisk scraper (thanks!)
- FIX: A crash in Weather for some regions.
- FIX: Maddox suggested some excellent changes in the scraper defaults which result in better movie covers by default.
We have also updated the Plex Media Server (included with Plex) with the following changes:
- NEW: James added support for nested iTunes playlist folders and iPhoto folders (a much requested feature).
- NEW: Audiobook support.
We’ve also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from XBMC, including updated scrapers, updated UPnP code, and some fixes.
Here’s Barkley resting in the yard. He’s still wearing his brace, but his limp is nearly gone, and we’re planning to start the water rehab in our friends’ pool shortly.
34 Comments so far
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Thanks for the release
Having problems with changing weather regions, to change from F to C
keep up the good work
Wow! That’s a lot of fine fixes and updates!
Thanks again for all the hours you guys have spend in making me very happy!!
Thanks!
Glad to see how hard you work on this to become THE media center for OsX!
Keep up the excellent work!
New features ahead… I am SO excited
What happened to Barkley that he needed a brace ? We love each new release of Plex, not just for the app but for pics of Barkley!
Awesome! Thanks team Plex for another great release. I’m super excited to see what’s in store for the next release, too. Keep up the good work.
If you have the bootleg Alan Parsons mix in DTS, it’s not 5.1, it’s 4.1 – there’s no center channel. Also, if you have in in DTSWAV format, it’s already been transcoded somewhere along the line anyway. If you get the proper DVD-Audio version of the mix, the DVD-Video section has a standard DTS track that should be playable without transcoding.
If you want 5.1 Dark Side, you need the SACD, and of course there’s no way to play that in Plex.
Thanks a lot for this, everyone!
nice .. a new update to play with
thx guys ..
ps. by any chance did you guys pull the xbmc change that allows for skins to have more then 10 views ?
Great Job thank you for you restless work
Thanks for making this rock solid with all the fixes instead of new features! Looking forward to those new features though
So far I’m still using v0.5.22 because my wife also uses it and she’s not as patient with beta products as I am (I’m sure many of you can relate). But I’m extremely excited to try out Plex 7. Would you guys say that v0.7.6 is “Wife Ready”?
We only use it for videos, and I’m not expecting it to be completely perfect, it just needs to usually not crash, you know? What do you think?
Thanks!! Great job! Love plax!
I installed Plex a couple of weeks ago and this is the most impressive killer-app as far back as I can remember (I guess the last one was Aldus Page Maker). Please keep-up the outstanding work!!!!
Excellent stuff.
Everyone likes features, but these bug fix releases are just as important.
Cheers.
Great. Good to see my donation at work! Thanks guys. Absolutely the best media server product on OSX.
Sweet, I didn’t know that Plex had an auto-update feature until I launched it today and it installed 0.7.6 by itself…!
Everything is working fine so far, thanks for the smooth update and for fixing the audio issues…!
Then I need to make sure never to delete my current guisettings.xml, because I use this feature all the time…!?
Seriously, you could at least have included it in the system setting within the GUI, instead of always making people edit xml files…
I know that currently most of the Plex users are geeky nerdy CLI jockeys (no offence) who love tweaking code, but not all of us do…! And the more popular Plex is becoming the more regular users there will be who just want to adjust their preferences with a few clicks and not by having to re-write code…!
Just my very personal and totally subjective 2 Cents…
Thanks for the release, great work! Greetings also for poor Barkley, please give a nice pet from all of us
…
@Brian Bowker – I was using 0.5.22 until a few weeks ago when I jumped to 0.7.5 – and I find it just as stable. I use a Harmony, so the biggest selling point was the improved remote control functions. I would say you should be fine to use it.
You cold always just rename the Application Support/Plex directory to Plex5 as a fallback. If 0.7.6 doesn’t work for you, load the old version and rename it back..
@Brian
For me it’s been wife-ready since 0.7.1. 0.7.0 had some issues with the TV themes if I remember correctly but it’s been perfect since then. We mostly watch TV shows on ours, with the occasional movie and check of the weather. I’d go for it!
@Ash: He hurt his knee, mostly likely canine cruciate ligament. He is improving steadily with the brace, I’m happy to say.
@ShavenYak: Thanks for the info, I needed that! You’re officially invited to the party.
@pletopia: No, we didn’t; To be honest we’re trying to focus on simplifying things, and having more than 10 views per skin didn’t sound very simple
Are there any skins out there right now that need the fix? If so, let me know and I can likely pull it for the next revision.
@MILE: We have near term plans to improve advanced settings, but for now you could put in the section enabling file deletion in your advancesetting.xml file. If you’re not sure how to do it, please head to the forum, where I promise you’ll find helpful people willing to lend a hand.
How exactly does one play the DTS WAV files? For me, Plex is still outputting them as static.
@Canadrian: As long as they have the extension .dtswav, they should play fine. If not, head to the forums to discuss and we’ll help you out!
@elan: there are no skins as of now .. cause its such a new change in the svn .. however the skin i use (horizon) in its latest build from a few days ago dropped widecase view which really bums me out cause thats the default view for my tv library (and i don’t think using posters looks as nice there as the wide banners) .. so i was hoping to just add in the widecase myself
the other problem is the skin i’m really waiting for aeon “stark” not only has dropped widecase .. but also plans on dropping wall view (both of which are my defaults for tv and movies) so my plan was to add both back for that too in the future
@elan, I love the you guys try so simplify plex as much as possible. In my book, there should only be one view for each mediatype. My family always changes the views by accident. I think they should be kept under the system settings. Maybe the power-users doesn’t agree with me?
Remember to inform your mirrors.
Remember to inform your manually updating mirrors as well.
@elan: Thanks for your reply, for now it still works since I haven’t replaced any settings files — but I might try changing the setting as you suggested, so that I keep the option…
My comment was also meant more like a general suggestion to slowly move away from the geekcentric approach of Plex in order to make it more usable for the average user, I guess…
Hello. Thanks for this update. Something is not working as it should, though. Plex 0.7.6 is extremely slow with library operations: eg 12sec to raise a “Marked as watched” flag, with CPU at 150% on a core2 duo!?
Is it necessary to rebuild the library from scratch? Hope not…
@pippo: We’re looking into the slow library regression, can you check out http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?showtopic=3408&st=0&gopid=22767&#entry22767 and post your set up so that we can diagnose? Thanks
Of course, can you tell me exactly what information you want me to post? Wrt the other poster, my setup is extremely simple, all my files are on a FireWire800 disc. If necessary I can test on a machine with just an internal disc, but I wouldn’t believe there would be any difference.
@pippo: Never mind, I found the issue; will push a new release out later today with some other fixes as well.
You guys are my heroes.
Keep up the great work!