Plex Media Center

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.