Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

OK, so we always try to make sure a plug-in is robust and fully stable before publishing it to the App Store, but we’re going to make an exception in this one case. Why? Because this new plug-in is so cool, we can’t keep it to ourselves any longer! We’ve been testing it internally for a few weeks now, and thanks to some of the bug-fixes and enhancements in Plex 0.8.5 we’re finally able to share it with you.

Do you like music? If so, riddle me this: What’s the premier subscription music service on the planet that everyone’s talking about? That’s right, Spotify. Of course, if you live in the US, you haven’t been able to enjoy it yet, but if you (or your IP address) resides in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France or Spain, you’ve probably checked out this amazing service.

So here’s the good news: If you have a premium subscription to Spotify, you can now enjoy this incredible service from the convenience of your couch for the first time ever, inside Plex. Head to the Plex App Store, install it, open up a nice bottle of wine, and enjoy the millions of tracks that are just a click of an Apple Remote away.

(Many thanks to Don McAllister and Oscar R for their initial testing of the plug-in and great suggestions!)

NOTE: Don’t forget, you need the latest Plex to use this plug-in, as well as a premium Spotify subscription.

The Plex/Eight series is supposed to be about stability, and with all the changes we introduced in the 0.8.3 there were a few regressions that slipped in as well. We’re very sorry about that, and we’ve worked extremely hard since it was released to fix the issues introduced as well as new ones that came to light. So what happened to 0.8.4? We were on the verge of releasing it and then found a few more bugs, so we “nuked” the release. Those of you who sniffed it out on the server, you may want to upgrade now to the real thing.

Without further ado, the fixes:

• FIX: A bug where Plex and the Plex Media Server could get out of sync and display the wrong contents for a directory.
• FIX: An issue when stopping music playback, where the GUI “clicks” don’t restore and the playing track is still selected.
• FIX: Photo thumbnails were broken for plug-ins (thanks to orr721 for the report!)
• FIX: Hitting the menu button during a blank slideshow causes a crash. (thank to Majkel and other for the report!)
• FIX: When a track fails to play, Plex jumps into (blank) Now Playing screen anyway.
• FIX: Sometimes the photo screensaver started going “crazy fast”.
• FIX: The new remote code logged too much.
• FIX: The duration didn’t show up in plug-ins.
• FIX: You weren’t returned to the main menu correctly from items added to your Favorites, or direct links to plug-ins in the Music section. Existing favorites will need to be removed and re-added. (James)
• FIX: The iTunes plug-in now sorts artists by the “sort artist” field in iTunes. This one is for Scott!
• FIX: Crashes with WebKit plug-ins that appear in the Music section.
• FIX: PlexHelper occasionally stopped responding (or responded incorrectly) to button presses.
• FIX: Sometimes Plex didn’t start after the first run. Believe it or not, this was an OS X bug, now worked around.
• FIX: Plex hung when using the mouse wheel to scroll through text (thanks to hqrs for the report!)
• FIX: Changed the servers in the TVDB scraper to use the load balanced ones. (many thanks to kruisje for the fix!)
• FIX: Fixed a crash loading some RAW files.
• FIX: DTS-to-AC3 was broken in the last release. Thanks to our audio doctor Ryan who fixed it and improved the AC3 trancoding in the process.
• FIX: When you select “previous track” it now does the right thing with streamed content: moving to the start of the track or the previous track depending on how far along the track is (awesome, James!)

OK, so I said there were just fixes, right? I lied! James, as usual, pulled out a great new feature or two out of his hat, and we hope you enjoy them.

• NEW: Plug-in preferences show up on the context menu for the plug-in itself.
• NEW: Auto-sourcing of remote Plex Media Server iLife plug-ins. Let’s say you have a laptop with iTunes music, or your wife’s iMac has iPhoto on it. No longer do you have to manually add the sources, or wonder if they’ll work when you click on them. With the new version, sources add and remove themselves auto-magically thanks to Bonjour. Make sure you install the new Plex Media Server on the remote machines.

I’ll leave you with a rare sighting of the Loch Ness Barkley.

There’s a new beta out of Flash, which adds nice things like hardware H.264 decoding. Unfortunately, it also seems to not play nicely with the Media Server at the moment when using WebKit plug-ins. We’re investigating, but recommend not installing it for the moment. Caveat emptor.

If you’re in Sweden, you can’t use Netflix (silly geographic restrictions), but now you can use the most excellent Headweb movie service on Plex. It’s especially exciting because the company approached us and then wrote this awesome plug-in themselves. With the excellent selection of Swedish content available, it’s no wonder that there are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country!

The Headweb plug-in, provided by the Swedish online movie service Headweb.com, allows you to watch and rent films directly from your Plex-equipped living room. All 1800 films are available for rent for 24 hours. The plug-in has support for subtitles, parental filter, trailers, and is localized in Swedish and English. Headweb is currently exclusive for Swedish consumers, although expansion to other nordic countries is coming very soon. They just recently got rated Sweden’s best movie service by “Digitala Hemmet”. If you have any questions, please check out their Plex page.

Headweb plugin från filmtjänsten Headweb.com låter dig se och hyra film från ditt Plex-utrustade vardagsrum. Alla 1800 filmer finns tillgängliga som hyrfilm under 24 timmar. Pluginen har stöd för undertexter, föräldrafilter, trailers m.m. och finns på svenska och engelska. Headweb är för tillfället exklusivt för svenska användare men en utökning till övriga nordiska länder är på gång. Headweb utsågs nyligen till bästa filmtjänsten av “Digitala Hemmet”. För mer information och frågor kolla på http://www.headweb.com/180665/plex-ps3/

You can see a demonstration of the plug-in here.

It looks great!

Do you like music videos? Then you’ll love this new plug-in written by Jonny Wray. Yahoo! Music allows you to watch thousands of music videos.

Like to watch South Park and live in Sweden? Ported by Henrik Engman, South Park SE allow you to watch every episode of South Park for free.

Written by Sander Spies is a plug-in for the Netherlands, Bekijk RTL Nieuws, RTL Z en andere RTL programma’s via RTL Gemist.

Does Sander ever sleep? Apparently not, and that’s to the benefit of our Dutch users. Bekijk programma’s van NET5, SBS6 en Veronica via Programma Gemist van SBS.

We want to thank all those who participated in the survey. We appreciate all the valuable input we received, and the time you took to give us your thoughts on Plex’s future. Without further ado, let’s meet the winners!

The winner of the brand new Mac Mini was Ian H. from Bristol in the UK. He’s been using Plex for 3 to 4 months, and he works as a software project manager (looking for the next project). His favorite Plex feature is the Academic Earth plug-in.

The winner of the Harmony One Advanced was Daniel E. from Boston, MA, who is an astrophysicist. He’s a recent convert to Plex, having switched from Boxee because he was fed up with the Hulu/Boxee war and loved “the almost infinite options to customize Plex“. When asked his favorite thing about Plex, he replied: “Several here. First, I love the forum community – it’s great to see such an organic development of the software and plugins for it. Next, the scraping is second-to-none. Finally, I’ve got to give huge props to the PlexAlaska skin, which is truly beautiful.“

The winner of the Harmony 700 was Don W. from Placentia, CA. Don has been a Plex user for about 9 months and says that Plex gave him the solution for “cutting the ‘cable cord’“. He added “Plex handles my media the way I want it, but makes it easy enough for my wife to understand.” Don is a Sales Manager for Swank Audio Visuals, and works designing Audio Visual elements for Fortune 500 meetings and events. His favorite Plex feature is the App Store and Plug-ins: “It has increased my ability to make Plex my only source of media in the house. No Cable or Satellite but I watch more content and have access to more media than ever before.”

Congratulations to our winners, and thanks again to everyone!