Plex Media Center

No matter how much testing you do, software always has bugs. It’s the curse of our profession. I guess you could say the same about any product or profession (say, that Beatles song with the guitars ever so slightly out of tune, or the house with the floors that are not quite level). But with those things, the imperfections can add to the final product, add to its character, whereas with software, flaws are just undesirable warts. Such is the binary nature of our profession.

I read a paper years ago that described the curve of bugs left over time for a piece of software, assuming new bugs are never added, and while the number asymptotically approached zero, the curve went out for ten thousand years before reaching anywhere close to it. This was both eye-opening and depressing at the same time.

Anyway, enough digression, and on with the release, which fixes a number of issues. First and foremost, let’s talk subtitles. We had a number of people comment that they liked seeing english subtitles with english audio, so of course, we listened. We listened because we care deeply about our users, and the happier they are, the happier we are! So let’s look at the new preferences:

If you pick the “Manually Selected” option, we’ll never show subtitles by default, unless you manually enable them. With the second option, we will attempt to automatically show subtitles when the audio is foreign (e.g. if you’re portuguese, we’ll try to show you portuguese subtitles for a libyan movie).

The third option is new, and with it we’ll try very hard to display subtitles, using the following heuristics:

1. If we find a subtitle matching your requested language, we’ll show it (even if the audio language matches). This solves the “english on english” case.
2. If there is a “sidecar” subtitle (i.e. a subtitle file next to the video file) we’ll pick that even if the language didn’t match, because most of the time when people have a subtitle file sitting there, they want to display it.
3. If there is a single subtitle embedded in the file, we’ll use that even if the language didn’t match.

Hopefully that should be a step in the right direction. Please always bear in mind that if the automatic heuristics get it wrong, you can simply make a manual choice, and this will be remembered. On all clients.

The other slightly tricky thing about subtitles in the last release was that if you already had your media scanned into Plex, you had to do a forced refresh to find and process the subtitles. This is obviously just a transitional issue (since any new media scanned in will get the subtitles right away). Let me just explain quickly what you need to do in order to get your subtitles into the library:

First, make sure that the Local Media Assets agent is enabled for movies (Freebase) and TV Shows (TheTVDB). This will be the case on new installs, but if you’ve been with us for a while, it’s possible you don’t have them turned on:

Next, you can try with a single piece of media by right clicking and selecting “Refresh Metadata”. This will pull in subtitles for a single show or a movie.

Finally, you can load all subtitles for all your media by shift-clicking on the refresh button. This will not overwrite your locked metadata or change any posters you’ve selected.

Here is a full list of bugs this release fixes. The Mac downloads have been made live on the main page and via Sparkle, and the Windows builds will be made live tomorrow after we do some final testing. Thanks for your patience and for all your great feedback on the last release.

• FIX: The Media Server would crash on start if you had certain plug-ins installed with bogus XML.
• FIX: In certain cases, a scan would result in multiple movies showing the same name/poster.
• FIX: A few fixes for soft deletion, including merged movies not showing the /!\ icon.
• FIX: Changing the view type in Unwatched Shows would change the view type for episodes.
• FIX: Possible fix for an OS X Lion crash (Plex is still unsupported on Lion).
• FIX: Plex should now pick DTS/AC3 tracks over stereo when connected to a receiver.
• FIX: When you play a video via iOS application, screen saver is turned off on Plex.
• FIX: [Win] Issue with the transcoder, many videos wouldn’t play.
• FIX: [Win] Posters for seasons/episodes not displaying.
• FIX: [Win] Customization of application support directory wasn’t working.

This release, as always, brought to you by Barkley, looking a bit fang-ful.

73 comments

You’ve been patient, and now it’s finally here! We’re not enabling auto-update quite yet for it, so consider this a pre-release. It might even have a bug or two (gasp!). Play with it, and please let us know how you like it. Mac and Windows downloads are available on the home page.

The iOS app is just getting wrapped up and getting ready for submission.

(Also, we know that some people are having issues with A/V sync and other playback issues. Please realize that we’re aware of this, and have plans for addressing it. Really.)

Also, bear in mind that skins need updating for the universal search functionality. Maverick214 and Reddragon220 are hard at work at this, as is se.bastian, who just released his amazing RetroPlex skin, and updated it already to support search. You can get RetroPlex and other skins via the via the most excellent Preen Skin Manager.

• NEW: Universal Search.
• NEW: Direct Play and Direct Streaming for clients.
• NEW: Subtitle support in agents, and streaming subtitles from server to clients (SRT/SMI/SSA).
• NEW: Support for secure access via Web Media Manager.
• NEW: Turbo Scanning (option-click to do regular “deep” scan).
• NEW: Soft Deletion.
• NEW: Added the By Folder second level menu.
• NEW: Support for our Bonjour replacement, known as G’Day Mate (GDM). Easy discovery!
• NEW: [Win] Support for storing application support files anywhere.
• FIX: The “Add Application” button was broken.
• FIX: Don’t refresh metadata every two weeks.
• FIX: In rare cases a Python process would take 100% CPU.
• FIX: “Unwatched” section second title was incorrect.
  
• FIX: Browsing for subtitles on Plex for Mac client.
• FIX: Flash 10.1/10.2 works now.
• FIX: With newer Flash installed, PMS is not restarted after 5.1 audio (as Flash but was fixed).
• FIX: Refresh works with local media agent even if media isn’t matched (for subs, posters).
• FIX: [Win] Various crashes (shutdown, during scans)
• FIX: [Win] Issue with dialogs popping up asking you to insert drive.
• FIX: [Win] Updated to latest transcoder, fixing lots of issues.
• FIX: [Win] Make sure we don’t conflict with installed Pythons.
• FIX: [Win] Lack of season/episode posters.
• FIX: Movies with ratings of 10 don’t show up under “5 stars”
• FIX: Any “phantom” media in the database is whacked after a scan.
• FIX: Don’t let the machine sleep while transcoding.
• FIX: Empty machine name crash.
• FIX: Support for audio playback from Android with security enabled.
• FIX: Add countries and producers tags to metadata models.
• FIX: Media is downloaded on metadata refresh, and always kept around.

And gobs of other fixes…

This release, as always, is brought to you by Barkley, who is bummed that lilikoi season is over.

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