Plex Media Center

In order to get the code more quickly and easily into your hands, and get early feedback, we’re going to start making the occasional incremental release. Every so often, we’ll spin a full DMG and upload it for you to play with. If you’re feeling adventurous, play with it, and if you’re not, wait for the official releases. These incrementals will be snapshots that are likely to be less stable than the official releases.

Installation is as easy as dragging Plex into your applications folder, and on first run Plex will take of upgrading/downgrading your Plex Media Server.

We’ve created a new sub-forum for discussion of the incrementals, and each one will have its own topic. Please let us know how it works for you, and focus on the changed areas for testing, of course.

The first incremental was just posted!

Without further ado, we’d like to introduce you to the latest version of Plex/Nine. It’s much more stable, it’s faster, has more features, and it’s also much shinier than the last release. The release can be downloaded via auto-update or from the home page.

This release also includes all the changes from the various hot-fixes, which I’ll summarize here as well for the sake of completeness.

• NEW: Cast information restored to movie information dialog in Plex for Mac.
• NEW: Ability to choose a specific piece of media to watch (e.g. HD, SD) if you have multiple media items. (You can disable this in Preferences > Video.

• NEW: Added back “By Albums” in iTunes plug-in. Sometimes all you need is a little more cowbell.
• NEW: Allow splitting apart TV Shows and Movies in the media manager. You can see an example here.
• NEW: Added an “Unwatched” section for Movies and TV Shows.
• NEW: Added “By Album” in music library sections.
• NEW: Allow browsing for on-disk graphics (posters/art) in the Media Manager.
• NEW: Support for volume control in new remote control protocol.
• NEW: Display number of items for each piece of media (e.g. if you have SD and HD versions of a movie). If you sort by items descending it’s a good way to see if you have any duplicated media (Reveal in Finder will show all of them) or if the agents have mistakenly matched two different pieces of media to the same thing. Yes, I’m really this disorganized, or at least I was until now!

• NEW: Searching for matches in the media manager is now asynchronous and can be cancelled. Death to beach balls!
• NEW: In Preferences > Transcoding, we’ve added an option to offer higher bitrates over 3G.
• NEW: In Preferences > Library, you can optimize your database.

By far we spent the most time fixing bugs. Hopefully this release will resolve most of the really pesky issues. We appreciate all the patience and kindness you’ve shown us with this first release. As we’ve mentioned, this was a ground-up rewrite of the entire library, so problems were definitely to be expected.

• FIX: That dratted issue with posters and art continually re-downloading off the Internet. The Plex Media Server is now the single entity that downloads the graphics, and all the clients request from it. Expirations have been fixed, and other improvements around caching have been made. The bottom line is that, while not perfect, it should be much, much better. N.B. As part of this change, it’s of course going to have to download everything one last time in order to transition over to this new scheme.
• FIX: Leopard crash on start (thanks, Ryan!). Also a crash on start when your computer didn’t have a name. And a few other crashes on start.
• FIX: Stuttering playback (mostly with HD media). In some cases the cache size was being set incorrectly based on bad analysis, and this could lead to stutters during playback.
• FIX: Anamorphic videos fix for iOS. Additionally, anamorphic MP4 files play correctly on Plex for Mac (thanks, Ryan!).
• FIX: High CPU usage during scan, which could cause stuttering during playback as well.
• FIX: Plug-ins could go missing in Plex when starting at same time as PMS.
• FIX: We now quit the Scanner if the Media Server quits.
• FIX: When detecting a rename, we upload location the in the database, otherwise media gets whacked when removing old location.
• FIX: When a duplicate episode was found, it lost the “addedAt” time (making it disappear from “recently added”).
• FIX: Allow backspace to exit the weather section, preferences, and a few other places where you could get stuck with the iOS app.
• FIX: The “-1″ year issue in list view.
• FIX: Better handling of locked database file.
• FIX: In certain cases, stacked movies were not played in the right order.
• FIX: Sometimes partial fanart files were displayed, leading to corrupted images being displayed.
• FIX: Better handling for audio/video distinguishing in iTunes for foreign languages.
• FIX: Allow changing metadata agent settings when there are no sections.
• FIX: Video podcasts passed back as Video elements instead of Track.
• FIX: Hebrew subtitles were displaying punctuation incorrectly.
• FIX: The word “dvdmedia” was displayed at the end of the movie title.
• FIX: Occasionally startup issues could result in agents not showing up, improve the recovery from this.
• FIX: Issue on startup, due to space in home folder.
• FIX: Videos stopping randomly in the middle of play.
• FIX: A few tweaks to the Media Server’s menu bar, to make canceling a library refresh possible, and to make it harder to accidentally start one.
• FIX: iTunes/iLife plug-ins mysteriously disappearing.
• FIX: Lots of crashes while scanning and analyzing media, including some MP3s.
• FIX: The Media Server starts (and installs) on a machine without Internet.
• FIX: We fixed a .BUP/.IFO ordering issue which could cause a crash when playing a VIDEO_TS movie. You’ll need to remove and add the section to fix the ordering (but you won’t lose view state/progress doing so).
• FIX: A buffer overflow issue reported by d1dn0t, which also caused crashes when navigating into some plug-ins.
• FIX: Adding library sections from the command line wasn’t working (thanks, Atrus!).
• FIX: The library would occasionally refresh continually.
• FIX: Crash of the iOS app near the end of a video.

For the next release, we are focusing on local metadata editing, to allow you to customize (and lock in place if you desire), your metadata. We’re super excited about this feature, and we think you’ll enjoy how powerful and flexible it’ll be.

I’ve really been enjoying taking photos with the iPhone4, so I’ll leave you with two photos of Barkley: