Plex Media Center

Well, it looks like we’re getting the hang of the “release often” maxim, and hopefully you’re enjoying the frequent updates. Mostly bug-fixes in this one, with a slant towards DLNA. This has been deemed a beta-level release, so download from the usual place, or set yourself up for the beta AppCast. Here are the changes:

• NEW: Added a new advanced preference option to allow remote networks access to PMS without myPlex. You can designate a list of IP/netmasks which are allowed in. We’ll have more information about how to configure this here shortly.
• NEW: Add basic CORS support for web clients.
• NEW: (DLNA) Profile option to override device fields.
• NEW: (DLNA) DlnaDeviceDiscoveryInterval can now be set to 0 to disable device detection.
• NEW: (DLNA) Sections shared from remote servers now includes the server name.
• NEW: (DLNA) Support matching devices by other device properties than friendly name.
• NEW: (DLNA) Ship DLNA profiles with PMS builds instead of Framework builds.
• NEW: (DLNA) Emit icons using alternative resolutions.

• FIX: Skip publishing IP addresses from virtual interfaces.
• FIX: Be faster about extracting thumbnails.
• FIX: Fix the scanner hanging with 100% CPU scanning some evil AVIs.
• FIX: (Win) Fix crash when playing some Flash/Silverlight video.
• FIX: Notify HTTP clients that we close the connection.
• FIX: Only write the amount requested with HTTP range requests.
• FIX: Calculate bitrate for videos in a more accurate fashion.
• FIX: Scanner is smarter about need to reanalyze media.
• FIX: A few small memory leaks fixed in scanner.
• FIX: Crashes scanning some IMG/ISO files.
• FIX: Overeager timeout when waiting for transcoded content.
• FIX: iTunes plug-in crashes with invalid input key.
• FIX: (Linux) Crash related to VMware network interfaces.
• FIX: (Linux) rsync fixes.
• FIX: (Linux) DLNA crashes on certain systems with ancient compilers.
• FIX: (DLNA) Non-local servers will display server name along with section titles.
• FIX: (DLNA) PNs not being set for audio, fixes playback on PS3.
• FIX: (DLNA) Folders now show up in the folders view.
• FIX: (DLNA) Posters weren’t showing up on PS3.
• FIX: (DLNA) DLNA server now cleans up correctly when shutting down.
• FIX: (DLNA) Xbox now supports transcoded jpeg as icons and thumbnails.
• FIX: (DLNA) Set seek flags for audio/video (regression).
• FIX: (DLNA) Metadata for iTunes content now set properly.

We’re happy to announce the next release of the iOS application with some great new stuff.

• NEW: Social features! You can now add friends to your myPlex account, recommend media to each other, and post directly to your Facebook timeline. Tap account settings and go to the friends tab to send out friend invites. Hold down a media item to recommend it or share to your timeline.

 

From this page you can tap the Edit button to manage your friends list or invite new friends. (We’ll be streamlining this process, as well as adding new ways to find friends in the near future.)

So once you have a friend, you can recommend media to them, much like you would queue media for yourself. In the iOS and Plex for Mac/Windows players you’ll see recommended media show up alongside your queue.

In addition, you can now link your myPlex account to Facebook (see the social media section on your account page):

Once linked, you can easily post to your wall by choosing the Share action:

 

We’ll be adding these social features to other clients in upcoming releases.

There’s lots of other stuff as well in this release:

• NEW: Ability to clear cached images.
• NEW: The app can be launched via the plexapp:// URL scheme.
• NEW: Media can be deleted from the app (must be enabled on the server, requires PMS 0.9.6.1 or newer).
• NEW: Automatic video quality adjustment has been restored, allowing the app to select the most appropriate video quality for the current available bandwidth, up to a user-defined maximum. 
• NEW: Attempt to automatically select audio & subtitle streams for all parts when playing stacked media.
• NEW: Networked logging option (in advanced settings). Sends iOS and PMS logs to a centralized server in the cloud when enabled, to aid with support.
• NEW: A new look for settings.

Can you feel the momentum? We’re back with a new media server release, and we’re just about ready to submit the next iOS version to the store. We’re calling this release stable (lots of fixes!), so you’ll see it show up as an autoupdate.

This is a big release for DLNA, we’ve fixed a bunch of stuff, and extended our configuration language to allow more devices to be supported.

(Also, we’ve updated the Plex for OS X download to fix the code signing issue that was causing the violent disagreement between it and the OS X firewall. Sorry about that!)

• NEW: Allow loading background art for individual seasons (as soon as agents support it). You requested it, we’re adding it.
• NEW: Also by popular request, we added a “By Resolution” filter for browsing your media in a new way. Great for finding whatever SD media you still have around, or for showing off that 1080p TV with some actual 1080p content (“My god, it’s full of pixels!”).
• NEW: Added the ability to do remote logging for easier support. This is a cool new feature which will make it much easier for us to observe log files in real-time while helping you out.
• NEW: Initial support for a new transcoding system we call “Quicksilver” which among other things, will soon provide greatly enhanced video quality for the Kindle Fire.
• NEW: (Linux) Builds are no longer compiled with Intel specific extensions, should work better for AMD users. There are still some of you out there using AMD chips, right? I mean, at least they don’t have floating point bugs.
• NEW: (Linux) Startup/shutdown improved, PID file is written to $PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR. Fixes shutdown issues on Synology.
• NEW: (Linux) We now offer a unRAID package thanks to Dirk Spittler. Now will you send us cool photos of your unRAID setups? Blue LEDs are worth extra points, as are cute kittens sleeping on the machines. Mmm, warm kittehs.
• NEW: (DLNA) Enable PN overrides in profiles.
• NEW: (DLNA) Support for AudioContainers, similar to VideoContainers.
• NEW: (DLNA) Add profile option to remap blank object ID requests.

• FIX: Some playback and browse issues in the 0.9.6 series related to database slowness.
• FIX: Database performance should be much faster overall in this release. Like, much faster, retrieving all 800 or so movies from my local server takes about half the time it used to. Give it a few seconds on start to optimize your database.
• FIX: Some media wouldn’t get a thumbnail image, if it was on the dark side (like full of vampires or something).
• FIX: Fixed redirects in channels, which was breaking lots of channel playback.
• FIX: (OS X) Fixed a new issue where occasionally the posters wouldn’t display in the media manager on initial scan.
• FIX: (Linux) Don’t write settings file every hour if nothing has changed, should prevent disks from spinning up for no good reason. Some hard drive company bribed us to add that bug, but you know, we just don’t roll like that.
• FIX: (Linux) Use system bundled rsync if available, otherwise fallback on bundled version.
• FIX: Better handling of sleep prevention.
• FIX: Scanner log was filling up with ‘ignoring atom of size 0′.
• FIX: Scanner could get stuck using up 100% of CPU.
• FIX: WMV MediaInfo profile/level not always read correctly.
• FIX: (DLNA) Generic transcodes to mpeg/mpeg2video didn’t work.
• FIX: (DLNA) Transcoding multichannel content to MP3 didn’t work.
• FIX: (DLNA) Generic transcoder failed to encode mpeg4.
• FIX: (DLNA) Server gave access to shared sections, but not myPlex owned sections.
• FIX: (DLNA) Add friendlier error message when port 1900 is in use.
• FIX: (DLNA) Fix stack corruption with seasons > 100 episodes.
• FIX: (DLNA) Apply actual mime types from spec.
• FIX: (DLNA) Identification mechanisms is now case insensitive.
• FIX: (DLNA) Implement friendly name matching for devices without unique user-agent headers.
• FIX: (DLNA) Episodes was displaying out of order.
• FIX: (DLNA) Add profile option to override icon size.