Plex Media Center

• NEW: [Mac] Support for automatic refresh rate switching. And there was much rejoicing.
• NEW: Add a way to specify a manual address for a media server, useful for working around network issues.
• NEW: When running without a server, search now returns cloud results.
• NEW: Add a global audio delay setting.

• FIX: CPU usage for software decoding greatly reduced for all codecs, fixing VC-1 “stutter” issue and playback on older machines.
• FIX: Allow selecting interface language in preferences.
• FIX: Enable down-mix volume boost preference.
• FIX: Enable speaker configuration preference.
• FIX: A hang in the home screen.
• FIX: Losing a server even though it was running on the same machine.
• FIX: Not enough buffering (and therefore playback issues) with remote transcoded media.
• FIX: Toggling full screen works on multi-display setups.
• FIX: Allow ESC to get out of a playlist.
• FIX: Add missing strings for shutdown timer.
• FIX: Change the audio settings dialog to show delay in milliseconds, it seemed more human-friendly.
• FIX: Crash clicking the “save as default” button in video settings.
• FIX: Make sure we stop remote transcodes when stopping playback.
• FIX: Update ffmpeg, fixes some artifacts with VC-1 and several other issues.
• FIX: Stop printing myPlex tokens to the logs.
• FIX: “Old-school” sources were disappearing after a restart.
• FIX: Posters/art weren’t changing when changed on the media server.
• FIX: Don’t play theme music if music is already playing or if video is playing in small window.
• FIX: Background music volume is always VERY LOUD (preference works now).
• FIX: [Mac] A crash when playing Flash/Silverlight videos followed by non-WebKit video.
• FIX: [Mac] Flash/Silverlight video occasionally displayed black & white garbage on the screen.
• FIX: Info button on iOS toggles OSD, and back button works as well.
• FIX: Multiple crashes when skipping around in videos.
• FIX: [Win] Crash on startup.
• FIX: [Win] A randomly occurring hang.

This release brought to you by the ever-vigilant, hyper-loyal, best friend of man and woman, Mr Barkley.

It’s been just a short month since our last major release, and we’re back with a bunch of bug-fixes and enhancements that taste great, yet contain no tryptophan, no side of mushy mashed potatoes, nor any boring conversation from Aunt Millie. We hope all our US users had a great Thanksgiving weekend!

Since it has moved to shipping separately, the Plex Media Server is now a much better standalone application, with support for autoupdate and starting at login.

• NEW: Sparkle automatic update support. Because every application eventually gains the ability to send email and update itself.
• NEW: Easy way to make Plex Media Server start on login via menu item. Additionally, it deletes the old launch agent so the old media server doesn’t start.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs, as well as some issues with the transcoder. For some of these, you’ll need the next version of the iOS application (v2.1) which is making its way to the App Store.

• FIX: A few bugs around signing up for and recovering passwords for myPlex inside the application.
• FIX: The myPlex-linked media manager page didn’t allow adding sections from outside the local network.
• FIX: In some cases episodes were being incorrectly stacked (which made it seem like they were being ignored). Perform a deep scan (option/alt + click on refresh) to fix incorrectly merged episodes.
• FIX: Improved metadata loading for date-based series.
• FIX: On Deck was not working in some cases, or provided incomplete data, especially for people who watch way too much TV.
• FIX: Don’t allow shared users to affect view offset or status until they get their own account.
• FIX: Some Aperture photos wouldn’t display properly on iOS.
• FIX: Make all shared library content look unwatched.
• FIX: Use a new way of computing unique media server identifiers given that many Hackintoshes have the same serial numbers. If you have a hackintosh (you naughty person), you may notice duplicate servers in the iOS app or myPlex; simply delete the old one.
• FIX: [Win] Some media took too long to start in the transcoder, leading playback to fail. Faster startup in general.
• FIX: Better support for transcoder session starting, along with v2.1 iOS update fixes some channel content failing to play.
• FIX: When manually specifying myPlex port, don’t send new information to myPlex every 10 minutes.
• FIX: A few transcoder related crashes.
• FIX: A hang and a few crashes playing Flash/Silverlight video.
• FIX: Even more improvements to Flash/Silverlight A/V sync.
• FIX: [Win] Failure to start the media server due to iTunes file permissions.
• FIX: [Win] A few setup/installation issues.
• FIX: [Win] Don’t fall asleep while transcoding.
• FIX: [Win] Issues relating to a system install of Python.
• FIX: [Win] Crash on exit, another crash on start-up.
• FIX: [Linux] Crashes related to automatic scanning.

Also in the mix are a few enhancements to the media server’s API. Thanks to the logging API, you’ll notice that the transcoder now sends lots of information over to the media server’s log, which means that it’ll be much easier for us to understand why a particular file isn’t producing the optimal results.

• NEW: Allow specifying encoding for subtitle stream (used in Roku client).
• NEW: Export the updatedAt attribute in the root XML to facilitate manual discovery.
• NEW: Add a new /log endpoint, useful for clients to remotely log to the media server’s log file.

I’ll detail the changes to the clients in the next post. Downloads are available off the main page, and Linux releases will be up very short. We realize that many of you have been waiting, especially for a new Synology builds, and we’re super pleased to let you know that we’re just wrapping up completely automated builds for all our Linux and NAS releases. So I promise, this is the last release you’ll have to wait, and you won’t have to wait long, in any event!

In order to symbolize your patience in awaiting this release, I asked Barkley to sit there with a tasty organic oat cookie on his paws for 4 seconds. Note the drool on his right arm.

Hello again, myPlexians! (myPlexers? myPlexites? Hmm…) Andre here again, back from working hard in the myPlex fields with a juicy harvest. As part of our ongoing efforts to make adding videos to your queue as easy as possible, we have set up a newer, friendlier way. Every myPlex queue now has an email address. To find out what your queue’s email address is, just visit the queue help page. The email address on that page is unique, and adds videos only to your queue. Keep it to yourself, since anyone can add videos to your queue if they know that address.

How is this email address useful to me, you ask? Well, it’s actually pretty cool. On certain types of mobile devices that are pretty popular nowadays, like iPhones, and iPads, and those Android thingies, it’s hard to use bookmarklets. Setting them up is a pain, finding them to use them is a pain, and it’s pretty much just a pain all around. What those convenient and tiny computers all share, though, is a button that lets you email a link to the page or video. That button is now the beautiful integration point for your myPlex Queue! Just email the link to your queue’s email address, and you’ll be able to watch the video later from the comfort of your very own Plex.

To make things even easier, you can add your queue’s email address to your address book, with a name like “myPlex Queue”. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to remember (or copy and paste) your queue’s email address whenever you want to queue an item over email. Now that you can email items to your queue, it’s easier than it’s ever been to queue up videos to watch later on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and any other device that supports myPlex.

Since those devices all put the name of the video in the subject line and a link to the webpage in the body, myPlex tries to take the title from the subject and the link from the body of the email. We didn’t want to limit you, though, so we’ll also look for URLs anywhere in the email subject or body. In fact, you can even queue a few URLs at once by sending all of them in a single email. We’ll add each one to your queue.

We hope you enjoy the new feature, and we’ll keep you posted as we continue working hard to add more. As always, we love to hear how your feedback as you use myPlex to watch your media when and where you want it.