Plex 0.8.2: Silky Smooth
It wasn’t until I was over at a friend’s house playing with Plex v0.8.1 that I realized how much better this new version is. We’ve targeted two major causes of user interface delay (beach balling) in this release (starting streams and browsing through directories) and the results should make your experience much better than it used to be. As always, many thanks to the talented group of plug-in developers who keep expanding the content tree, as well as help us track down bugs!
If you’re just joining us, you can find helpful and friendly support on the forums (welcome 10,000th user!), or follow us via Twitter. Heck, you can even follow Barkley on Twitter. Or buy us a beer via the donate link at the right.
Along with all these additions, we’ve fixed quite a few bugs:
Also, we’ve worked on the interaction between Plex and the Media Server, as well as the Python Framework. James just pushed the official v1.0 to the store, and he’ll be blogging about all the great changes in the final release. Note that all plug-in caches and data will be reset because of changes to the encoding, which means that you will need to re-enter login data into some plug-ins (we apologize for this).
I know it’s been quite a while since the last release, and really, that only means one thing. You are owed, collectively, lots and lots of Barkley.
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Great work you guys! Really excited to see a new release! I have been checking regularly for a while and I am really pumped to give this one a run through!
Thank you guys for all your hard work and continuing to make Plex the best media center front end around!
the slideshow screen savers are awesome1
also, it was not listed above, but this release fixed the ass subtitle crashes
Great job guys
Wo0o0! Thanks for yet another update to a great program. One of my friends went out and bought a Mac Mini after seeing my Plex setup
Awesome, gotta love speed improvements and bug fixes. But… still no fix for the DTS to stereo downmixing issue? It makes anything with DTS audio unwatchable with headphones (http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?showtopic=5793)
And the disabling of the keyboard backlight while playing definitely needs to be settable, since I like having it on so I can see the keyboard which I use to control playback. It also looks spastic when I try and change the backlight and it flashes on and off.
I just bought a mini on wednesday for the sole purpose of running Plex… i like the timing here!
i bought a mini too just because of plex! its awesome
OMG, i’m once again deeply impressed.
I can’t wait to get home, install, test, enjoy this release.
Thanks all for the hard work
ps: how’s the storm over there?
Great work guys.
I’m trying to get the now playing with the visualizer in the background and its not working though. Hiding is turned off in the Skin area. I tried setting my visualizer to both Now Playing and some of the others. It seems to still do one or the other.
@phormality: Set the visualizer to ProjectM (for example) and you’ll get Now Playing as well unless you hide it
This does *not* work with the iTunes visualizers.
@Jasper: The storm is due to hit on Tuesday, right now it’s eerily calm!
thank you for the update. i’m on snow leopard now and am noticing a lot of issues with plex and my harmony one remote (snow leopard is turning up and down the volume when i press different buttons which is really annoying). i’m assuming that it’s something with snow leopard that just hasn’t been worked out yet, i just wanted to bring it to your attention.
thank you for all your hard work.
@sire: That’s the one remaining issue we have yet to resolve.
Thanks again team. Thanks for all the hard work and time!
As always great job! You guys are a busy bunch
Hmm, internal update option doesnt work for me: “Error accured”. Server overload?
@zAo: We have many mirrors, it’s possible one of them went down
@elan: tried about 5 times in a row; didn’t work. Just tried again and it’s updating! Looking forward to test it! Thanks!
Updated and found 2 things this far:
- The 8bit Theater plugin hangs Plex. Had to kill Python via SSH to get control of the system again
- I cant set 2 shutdown options (need Sleep and Exit Plex)
@zAo: We’ll have to look into 8bit Theater, but I’m not sure about the other one, I was able to set all shutdown options via the skin settings (in home).
downloads dont have .8.2 version ?!?! i always like to do clean install.
@wally007: Grab from http://www.plexapp.com home page.
@elan: thanks. I’ll file a bug next time it occurs.
I can/must select 1 option only (Sleep/Quit/Power Off). Selecting an other option, disables the option set.
@zAo: I may be misunderstanding you, and I apologize if I am, but you use the skin settings to select which of the three is accessible on the very top menu. If you want to access the other two, you hit “right” on the main menu to select them. Only one of the three is visible by default, hence why the settings prevents you from activating multiple ones at the same time.
Great!
It’s been a long time coming but this is definitely gonna be worth it.
Thanks again!
Linked volume is awesome!
ohh noooos , you took out timed quit feature ?!?!? what in the name of ugly made you do that ? I use that feature every night.
this is not ‘cleanig up’ as i understand it … more like messing up a good thing.
@elan: sorry for my fast reaction: it works
Thanks for your explanation.
Thank you for this update, and your hard work with Plex in general!
I especially like the cache settings change, it’s much more useful now. Now I won’t have to wait the same amount of time depending on the video’s quality. There are some other changes that are really nice, but I’m just going to sum that up by saying : awesome!
Why did you remove the S keyboard shortcut, or is it just my install?
Previously that gave you a button menu where you could shut down Plex but now you have to browse all the way to the main menu and scroll down to Quit in order to shut down Plex.
Is there any way to restore this function, I only control Plex with a keyboard, no remote.
i don’t seem to have a sleep/shutdown/sysinfo/favourites menu now when i use the apple remote menu button on the top level menu.
i used to like pressing a remote button to get to the sleep option, rather than navigating through another submenu level, same goes for favourites (where i have my vpn settings).
i’ll look into replacing quit with sleep, but i’m afraid i see this as a regression and will go back to 0.8.1 for now.
You guys are da bomb. Love the keyboard backlight dimming – really great idea!
Brilliant. So much snappier.
Great work again!
Would it be possible to point me to the commit(s) that improves the browsing lists responsiveness?
Wow! Lots of really good and really *smart* refinements.
Nice job on the update. I am missing one thing though, sound with WMVHD playback. I read that it was going to be fixed with ‘the next update’, but there’s still no fix integrated. The fix that was posted on the forums died. Hope to get an answer on this.
WOW! You guys rocks, seriously, I do not know a bunch of developers that listen to the crowd as much as you do. That Linked volume thing… one of the last things that bugged me has now been fixed. Great work!
Thanks to the whole team for that release!
Elan,
The new keyboard backlight feature is somehow conflicting with the System Preferences in my MacBook Pro (17-inch unibody, 2009). During playback, instead of shutting off the backlight, it makes it flicker, almost like a strobe light. It seems that Plex is trying to turn the backlight off, and OS X is trying to turn it back on. I’m running the latest version of Plex and OS X 10.5.8 with all the updates. It’s not really a problem for me–I usually turn off the backlight manually anyway–but I thought you should know.
Otherwise, fantastic update. The improvements to the library and Media Server are really noticeable, especially the improved caching. Videos that once took a minute or more to load (and stuttered after that) now play buttery-smooth in seconds. Everything is much more responsive and polished.
As usual, great product, Elan.
Fitzwilliam
I also just bought a Mini last week because of Plex
Keep up the good work!
The release coincides perfectly with the delivery of 2GB of RAM for my Plexbox! Awesome!
@wally: You can still sleep the system after a number of minutes, but if I understand you correctly, you want to just quit Plex after a number of minutes? Can you explain the utility behind this so I can understand better?
@donnex: If you use a keyboard, hit ⌘-Q
@Mitchell: Can you point me to the fix?
@sej7278: You may have disabled it in your skin settings, make sure the Show Power Menu is enabled. Then you can quit with the remote by selecting the top-level item, or see the other options (e.g. Sleep) by hitting Right when you’re on the Quit item.
Great, new version of plex
@elan should be in here: http://ryan.plexapp.com/?p=23
Not entirely sure if that works as I didn’t have the chance to test it.
I use my 2 macs ( mini and macbook pro ) as servers / media centers. Obviously servers cant go to sleep and having Plex running all night is waste if i use it mostly before bed time. ( not to mention how loud fans rev up on macbook pro )
Both Macs are also connected to Plasma displays so i cant risk running a movie/tv show before i nap without turning on quit timer.
If i’m minority i’ll try to find different app for timed quit but from the forums it seems like this “quit menu” clean up is not very popular.
still no dvd support? i would love to use plex on my mac mini as media center, but without dvd support it isn’t that smooth. i know that you can start the dvd player within plex, but that’s not the same
I was really concerned about “no dvd support” when I switched to osxbmc off my xbox well over a year ago. I’m proud to say I no longer care. I rip movies to ISOs that I watch frequently and just use the good old OS dvdplayer for those occasional rentals.
Visualizer Problem…
I’ve run GForce 3.9.1 for iTunes for the past 4-6 months. It’s been solid. I’ll post to the forum after more extensive testing, but in this release it causes Plex to crash after about a second of audio. All other iTunes plugins work, so I’m not sure what happened. ???
Anyhow, it looks like I’ll have entertain my kids rather than let them stare at the screensaver all day. After the huge improvement in performance (thanks team), I’m not sure I want to step back to 8.1 =)
@elan, I agree with wally007 on the Quit after X minutes feature, I used that every night and can’t for the life of me figure out what would make them take that out.
I second the request for DVD (disc media) support.
Thank u, thank u, thank u. !!!!
I used Plex here on 4 Machines plus Server. But after the 0.8.1 Update the most Playlists in iTunes could not play. That was quit annoying an i was allready looking for another solution
But now – YES – i can now use Plex again so nice.
Thank u very much for your hard work!
@elan, no i’ve got the power menu item enabled (and changed it to sleep instead of quit) but previously there was a “popup” that had the quit options, system info and favourites when you pressed menu.
is there a preference to re-enable that?
Michael: I’ll look into the GForce crash, thanks for reporting!
@details & wally007: I’m still a bit confused, if you fall asleep watching a movie, it’ll end and then the screen saver will kick in, so why would you need Plex to quit?
that’s the problem , screensaver DOES kick in but display NEVER turns off , it’s been like that for at least 10 versions. I’ve opened a thread about it months ago with people having a same problem but nobody able to fix it.
And its happening on 3 mac’s i have ( mini , macbook pro and mac pro ) so its pretty obviuous its plex , not my osx installation.
and even if it works , why leaving plex use up 30% cpu just idling , (and who knows how much gpu ) the whole night ? i really dont see a point messing with quit menu and removing features that others are actually improving upon. i just checked for the first time xbmc and they have added some neat stuff in quit menu like custom timer , set timer etc…. if someone want to quit its just two quick presses away , this feature wasnt adding ANY clutter to menu. With File manager gone ( feature i rarely used but was nice it was there ) , some view options removed ( forcing users to edit some weird xml files to get what they had before ) and now this gone, im looking for more featured alternative. It was great to get nice iTunes/Aperture integration ( especially with all macs in the house ) but this ‘dumbing down’ is reaching too far.
Great work!
Plex is by far the best media center solution I have tried. It works just well with my base model Mac Mini. (2,0Ghz, 1GB RAM).
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for all the hard work guys! I’ve been using Plex for a while now and I’m looking forward to kicking the tires on the new release. You guys rock! keep up the dev.
The X on the sony bd remote no longer brings me to the quit/sysinfo/sleep-”popup”.
@elan: I think a nice use would be for music.. one could play music and then set the timer to turn it off.
Thank you so much guys. I’ve been using PLEX since the early versions and it’s a fantastic project. I have sung your praise to all my Apple owning friends who all use it over front row, which to be honest is looking very ugly and dated against this. Thanks for listening to all our feedback. The improvements are fantastic and really noticeable.
P.S Could us users outside of the U.S have more scrapers?
Am i being stupid but i cannot find the link to download version 8.02.
In the downloads only 8.01 and earlier are showing??
@elan: I have Plex running on a mac mini as my htpc which also serves as my alarm clock, if I fall asleep with Plex on (which I do every night) the alarm clock fails to start most times, and when it does go off I cant hit the play/pause button on the apple remote to sleep it, I have to go through Plex to get it to quit and then the play/pause on the apple remote wont shut the alarm off. I just can’t see a reason for removing useful features from it.
Thanks so much guys… can’t explain how much i worship and praise this utility.
hi
guys its a great update…
thx
but i saw a littleproblem
some of the artworks from my library disappeared
and they are not coming back even after scanning online or choosing local posters
kindly help as quite a few of them disappeared and left ugly black patches behind..
Thanks a lot guys!
However, as stated by Andrew previously, the DTS downmix is still broken. I would really appreciate if you could fix it in the next release.
Have the same problem as others that the backlight flicker insted of turning off. Especially if I move the macbook.
I would also like a way to turn that feature on/off
I noticed the ‘S’ key no longer brings up the shutdown menu. Is that by design?
Great update guys. I’ve noticed one small issue. When movies are split into two files, the Pt1 / Pt2 naming scheme no longer appears to be recognized. Also, icons will not hold for them… can select, but they do not appear in the group presentation.
Thank you guys for good work. However the neatest feature in my book was that I could in the previous version use the Menu-button on the remote to access a pop-up menu where I could select sleep mode which enabled me to use only my remote to operate the mediacenter/plex on my mac mini. No keyboard or mouse required in other words. This is however not working in the latest version. Is there a fix or some trick that I missed to get that function going again? If not how do I get the previous version back on my mini? Would be nice if someone could e-mail me about this on andreas.ahnlund@live.se
/Andreas
Hi, I love Plex, and the new version is great!
But I have the same problem majid has: some of the thumbnails in the Movies library disappeared after the update and although I tried to select a different one and also reload them, they don’t show.
Keep up with the great work!
/Marco
do we have to start an e-petition to bring back the shutdown menu popup?
Finally the clicks and “new info found” sounds won’t scare the crap out of me when I turn on plex.
Love this software, couldn’t imagine using anything else for my media center. Enjoy some beers!
Overall, the latest updates are quite impressive. The performance gains are a welcome sight – THANKS!
I only have one major complain – my very favorite feature of plex is no where to be found in this latest one.
I used to be able to press the “MENU” button on my apple remote and it would give me the shutdown, sleep pop-up. That really was a great user experience as I don’t have to navigate to all the menu options to choose “Quit” then click the right button to choose sleep, like what we have to do with this latest update.
Is there a way to put that feature back?
Regards,
-Roland
I second the latest comment. The pressing menu in the main-screen and be able to shut It down was great, why was that removed? Now I need to scroll down to quit to exit plex!
i got fed-up counting, but its way over a dozen posts requesting the sleep/quit/favourites/sysinfo popup and the sleep timer to be put back.
i know its nice to simplify the ui, but that’s different to taking out useful features.
for those who want sleep/quit/favorites menu back, read this thread how to get it back in .8.2
http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?showtopic=8486
hope this helps someone…. i know it helped me from spliting for clunky xbmc
Don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this, but “Video Playlists” seems a bit broken.. previously, I was using it to queue up a bunch of trailers to play in sequence, before moving onto the main feature
Now however, Plex returns to the playlist screen after each item has finished with the next item appearing in the now playing/preview window, so you have to manually hit TAB to go back to full screen..
Any chance of fixing this? Or giving us a dedicated “Trailers/Intro Movies” playback feature
I also would like to have the old Quit-function via Menu-button back…
Best release yet, sound is much much better now, perfect. Thanks for making this software.
how do we get system info now – like temperatures, versions etc?
@name required: That stuff was barely working. We may put it back when/if we get it to display accurate information.
should be recieving my first mac either today or tomorrow and plex will definitely be one of the first things to be installed, sounds fantastic!
will definitely donate when i get my next paycheck as my mac purchase has cleared out my account lol
I have the same issue as a couple others… around a quarter of my movie thumbs don’t display. Also, the Apple Movie Trailers app won’t play any movies. It spits back the error “Could not determine input format” after clicking on a trailer. A fresh install didn’t fix the trailers error and I’m going to rescan my library tonight to see if the thumbs error continues.
Other than that… thanks for the update guys.
About the quit menu that everyone is talking about… if you want to keep the UI simple, why don’t you make it so when you press the menu button on the remote while on the main menu, the cursor scrolls to the Quit item. That way, it would take one less button click to sleep the system (as apposed to the 8.1 way). Best of both worlds!!!
Good work. Would love to see an eject option for optical drives.
I’m having problems on Snow Leopard. The volume seems to have a mind of its own, goes up and down when I’m not even pressing anything on the Apple Remote. And just now Front Row started itself -I didn’t even press anything.
Thanks for this new release!
I use Plex on a plasma with MacMini and apple remote.
Transitions are indeed smoother.
I noticed that the remote no longer triggers the shutdown popup. So my evote as well to bring the previous way back.
Missing movie covers on double CD movies was already identified.
More importantly, the new now playing now shows up despite my setting visualization none. With my type of screen, I preferred the previous behavior and now playing displays only upon song change.
In any case I am a happy frequent flyer and look forward to the next update!
The Now Playing screen with the visualizations in the background is great. Now I wish for Electricsheep.org screen saver visualizations in the background. Is it possible?
Hello Elan,
I realy need an update of Plex. Running Plex in Snowleopard with the Harmony remote is realy bad. Frontrow and iTunes start everytime I press the Menu or the Play button.
Greetings from Germany Arthur
I’m using the optical out on a new macpro and after playing certain MKV files, the audio drops for any other like file. I remember this bug pops up from version to version but I can’t seem to fine the 07x version where it did work that I used to have.
It would be great if you guys could fix this bug once and for all so I don’t have to keep quitting between every episode of a t.v. show.
I can not open the dmg-file. Newly installed MacBook Pro 13″ with 10.6. It says Not recognized and I tried both disk utility and diskimageutility. Have downloaded it several times using both safari and firefox. What could be the problem?
Great job on the new update guys, you rock!!
Only thing I still miss is the alternate content option for docu’s, music DVD, standup comedy stuff like that. If that was to be added it would be a 100% sollution for me. The app looks and feels great! Can’t wait to check out this update.