Plex Media Center

We figured that you might not have quite enough content yet to keep you busy watching and out of the forums filing pesky bugs. Luckily, Scott has been on a skiing vacation, and a few evenings ago he drank a bit too much at an Après-ski, then went home and wrote the Joost plug-in. We hope you enjoy it, there is a ton of content on there. Seeking doesn’t work yet but it should be an easy fix.

James also deployed some updates for the App Store plug-in itself. There’s now an update history section where you can browse through the plug-ins you’ve installed and the latest release notes for each one.

If you have automatic updates enabled, you’ll get the new App Store without any further ado, otherwise select Check For Updates to install manually.

Less than 24 hours after we launched, we received the first third-party plug-in submission, from the very talented photographer Jasper van der Meij. It’s really impressive, because he figured it all out just from looking at existing plug-ins, and even added his own nicely designed artwork.

If you’re looking to write your own plug-in, have a look at the installed ones in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins. If you’re writing a plug-in that works with a Flash or Silverlight site, you’ll also need to add a site configuration into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Site Configurations (see existing ones in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins/SiteConfigurations.bundle/Contents/Resources). The Plex Media Server automagically picks up changes so you don’t need to restart it while you’re developing, although you may want to run it inside Terminal to see the debug output.

I promise that we’ll have tutorials and documentation in short order, but these plug-ins are very easy to write, especially if you know Python and understand XPATH. We also have a new forum for the discussion of plug-in development.

Let’s see what you can come up with!

I could present the usual release notes, talk about the CoreAudio crash on startup that’s been fixed, the Mira/Sofacontrol changes (thanks marklight!), mention the TV/Movies keymap issue that was fixed, explain that the region link to weather settings is now fixed, and that NFO files no longer cause scraping issues. But honestly, I’d rather talk about something else.

This release, one innocent little point difference from the last, has the biggest new Plex feature ever. I’m not just gushing hyperbole here when I say you will never use Plex the same way again.

I’d like to introduce you to the new Plex Media Server: