Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

If you’re a basketball fan, you probably want to check out the hot-off-the-presses March Madness plug-in we just released. You can watch all the games live, in HD!

Note: You need Silverlight installed for this plug-in to work.

We’re got another batch of plug-ins to liven up your weekend. As usual, we’ve gotten a lot of help on these, and we really appreciate all the comments on and suggestions for the framework. There are now over 40 plug-ins available, and the App Store has only been open for three weeks! We look forward to getting more coverage for our international users, and are happy to provide help to developers in these countries, since many times we don’t have access to the foreign content (silly media providers). Specifically, we’ve been assisting some Swedish users on a plug-in which we’re excited about.

I’ll start with a shout out to our users in Britain, who will be overjoyed to see an iPlayer plugin. We’ve got at least one more British plug-in in the works as well. James has been working on this plug-in for a while, and it’s a real labor of love. With BBC iPlayer you can catch up with shows from the past seven days that you’ve missed or want to watch again, or watch episodes from an entire series with Series Catch-Up. Shows are available from all BBC TV channels and radio stations, and BBC Wales content shown on S4C. Inside Plex, you can view the most popular iPlayer content, highlights selected by the BBC, and browse by channel, day, genre or format, or use the search feature to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Next up, we have a couple of new ones that I know will be heavily in my rotation. Daniel Metz, Isaac and Scott created plug-ins for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Tons of content, and lovely organization.

James also whipped up a plug-in for Geekscape, which was requested by phunkysai, long-time Plex tester and all around good guy.

Next up, anyone with a TiVo is going to love this one. Written by Yoav, and described in more detail here, this plug-in lets you stream shows directly off your TiVo. Brilliant work! As one happy beta user commented “Thank you very much, this app runs beautifully”.

Last, but not least, we have another beautiful photo blog available on your TV, called Aperture Priority. There is some great tilt-shift photography on there.

We’ve got lots of things “cooking” but we wanted to make a quick release (download here) to fix Hulu as well as provide some important enhancements to the media server.

• FIX: Hulu playback was broken when the site exploited a bug in our code, which has now been fixed.
• NEW: Support for variably-sized Flash/Silverlight content (and also for sizes changing on the fly). You can now specify negative values in the site configuration for cropping, mouse operations, and in seekbars. A negative X or width value indicates the number of pixels from the right, and a negative Y or height value specifies negative pixels from the bottom. (Specifying 0 for width/height means “the entire width/height”, this should help for sites such as Vimeo.)
• NEW: We’ve moved the Plex Python plug-in framework into a plug-in named Framework.bundle (great idea, James!). Among other things, this fixes the issue with the code signature breaking on the Plex Media Server and the Leopard firewall getting upset about it. This also allows us to have multiple concurrent versions of the framework for backwards compatibility. We take this sort of thing very seriously, as we want you to be able to write plug-ins without fear of them breaking with API changes.

Also, we’ve had lots of developer interest, and we’re now working with a few people on some upcoming plug-ins. In order to prevent duplication of effort, we’ve added a page to the wiki which lists the plug-ins that are in progress. We’ll be adding more to that page (Isaac threw it up quickly from memory), but please add to it if you’re working on a plug-in; you can provide your forum name in the contact section so that others can contact you to help out.

There have been some plug-ins developed which will likely not find a place in the Plex App Store, such as the 18+ plug-ins. We’d still like to encourage good organization and structure for these “unofficial” plug-ins, so Isaac has created a wiki template for you to use. If you have one of these plug-ins, please add a page to the wiki for it, and either upload the zipped bundle to the wiki or add an external link to it. You can then add a link to the new page on the unsupported plug-ins index page. Thanks very much!

This is one of my favorite photos of Barkley. I’m not sure why he was sitting like that on the stairs, but he looks quite regal.

We have lots of interesting plug-ins in the works, but this one is kind of special. After all, who doesn’t love Pandora? Scott, who never ceases to amaze me with his plug-in writing prowess, whipped this lovely gem up. It still has a few rough edges, such as the need to log into Pandora with Safari, but we couldn’t resist releasing it early for you to play with.

You’ll note that the last menu item at the top level is a help screencast that walks you though the plug-in, which Isaac made. Please watch it if you have any questions. The only other tricky bit besides logging in through Safari is that we’ve added special controls for this plug-in: Hitting “right” moves to the next track, hitting “up” gives the track a thumbs up, and hitting “down” gives the track a thumbs down. (Sometimes you have to hit the key/button twice).

Hopefully it’s a fun new addition to the content available in Plex!

After a few days of working perfectly, they’ve deployed new countermeasures against us. We’re looking into it and are working on a fix.

This cat and mouse isn’t benefitting anyone.

The final thing I’ll say is that there is a ton of other content available on Plex via Joost and other plug-ins, and there will continue to be more and more as time goes on.

There’s some new stuff for you to enjoy in the Plex App Store today. First of all, we have a plug-in for the popular Daily Kos site. If progressive politics if your thing, you’ll likely enjoy this one.

If you prefer to get your politics directly from the White House, Chris Tarczon (author of the popular IGN plug-in) wrote a plug-in which gives you access to Obama’s weekly addresses (in HD!) and other White House content.

And for those of you who don’t care a whit about (American) politics, but like your rock indie flavored, install the Pitchfork TV plug-in, which provides access to a *ton* of content, including band interviews, live performances, music videos, and more.

We’ve also released an update to the CNET plug-in so that the “Today on CNET” section actually reflects the current date.

A couple of fixes in this one, which you can download here.

• FIX: Silly regression which resulted in you being left in an empty directory after installing from the app store (and a few other cases).
• FIX: Improved compatibility with certain Flash sites.

Here’s Barkley pondering the perennial question: To Eat or Not to Eat?

Just in time to distract you at the start of your work week, we have a bunch of new content available from the App Store.

James added Academic Earth, a brilliant site with thousands of lectures from the best professors in the world. This one was requested in the forums.

We received a submission for an IGN plug-in from Chris Tarczon. Chris obviously “gets” our framework and did a great job with it. There is a ton of gaming-related content here.

James also did a plug-in for The Escapist, which houses a collection of gaming-related shows, reviews and entertainment content.

Scott and Isaac whipped up a plug-in for The Onion, a hilarious site with fake news.

And finally, we received another user submission from Chris Barnes for his wife’s photoblog site. She’s a talented photographer, check it out!

We also released updates to Hulu (display more season/episode data), Google LIFE (update for site change), and Revision3 (added thumbnails).

We hope you’re enjoying consuming all this content as much as we’re enjoying bringing it to you!

Lots of good stuff fixed in this release, and we’re happy to bring it to you. You can download this release here.

• FIX: Crashes in Plex Media Server with Safari Adblocker and other similar plug-ins.
• FIX: Pulled a fix from XBMC for variable framerate FLV files (important for a new plug-in).
• FIX: Crashes in Apple Movie Trailers with 5.1 audio (integrated Ryan’s excellent audio fixes).
• FIX: Some of the menu shortcuts were broken (thanks to migueld for pointing this out).
• FIX: Some other crashes in Plex Media Server with badly behaved or misconfigured sites.
• FIX: Much improved Swedish translation, with many thanks to atrus.
• FIX: Updated to the latest Amazon scrapers (thanks to John Lockwood).
• NEW: Support for executing Javascript inside plug-in site configurations (as an action).

And some really nice new stuff. James and Isaac worked hard on usability for this release. First of all, we’ve made it easier for you to get to the App Store:

They also renamed some of the top level menu items, and added favorites, since with the ever-growing amount of content, favorites can be very helpful (use the context menu to add items to your favorites):

And finally, you know how most applications have this thing called “Help” where you can go to seek assistance inside the actual program? Novel concept, right? Well, James whipped up a plug-in, Isaac populated it, and now you can browse helpful screencasts without leaving Plex:

One minor note: we really want to express our gratitude to all the websites we support. They have really been helpful, as the changes they make to their sites have ended up assisting us greatly in finding and fixing bugs in our code, as well as enhancing the flexibility of the plug-in code and site configuration files. Hulu works again in this new release, I’m happy to say.

Here’s Barkley, artfully dangling some sandy drool.