Plex Media Center

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Plex! We have a couple releases for you, but first let me start with some general updates (and seriously, what is it with my addiction to bulleted lists?):

• If you’ve experienced an issue with TV scans missing posters or other artwork, somewhat randomly, this has been fixed; we’ve been experiencing increasingly heavy traffic with all the new users, so we had to bulk up our infrastructure!
• Movie matching should be more accurate and much faster; we now have a fully automated system which improves the agent matching over time based on the anonymous data sent back. Pretty cool, right?
• We’ve pushed quite a few updates to the agents to fix non-ASCII poster/subtitle filename issues on Linux, metadata for personal show scanning, and a number of other issues.
• We released a new version of Plex for Android, with fixes and a few new features. The update for Google TV is coming shortly!

We also have a new Plex Media Server release for you, with a number of improvements, which can be downloaded from the usual place (and shortly from auto-update):

• NEW: Added (advanced) preference for specifying location of Aperture/iPhone XML paths. The preference is ApertureLibraryXmlPath for Aperture and iPhotoLibraryXmlPath for iPhoto. Yes, we’re going to have an easy way to get at these advanced preferences soon.
• NEW: (Linux) Allow syslog logging via environment variable PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_USE_SYSLOG. This has been requested for ages.
• NEW: (API) Massive performance improvement for players that ask for paged data (e.g. for Roku). If you have large library sections, you’ll notice a big change; with 1000 items, the page requests are 6 times faster.
• NEW: (API) Added /library/sections/X/{sorts|filters} endpoints for advanced filtering.
• FIX: Sidecar (e.g. SRT) subtitle files work again. Sorry, that was a bad regression.
• FIX: (Windows) Upload speeds from the server were artificially slow in some cases. We’d gotten sporadic reports over the months that upload speeds seemed limited, and we finally managed to track down the issue. The upload speed will now max out your connection, and will take much less CPU as well.
• FIX: A crash when scanning for plug-ins when permissions are wrong.
• FIX: (Mac) Fix some Aperture photos not displaying properly.
• FIX: Library timeline could generate blank items occasionally.
• FIX: Web interface didn’t show added and deleted items properly when scanning.
• FIX: Don’t pass back bogus blank content ratings.
• FIX: (Linux) DLNA icon and server name were missing on some platforms.
• FIX: When overwriting plug-ins, files that don’t exist anymore are deleted.
• FIX: Handle 302 as well as 301 redirects in the image transcoder.
• FIX: When scanning files that had already been scanned, they didn’t end up with thumbnails.
• FIX: Certain image formats (TIFF, BMP, PCX) didn’t get thumb nailed.
• FIX: Fixed sleep prevention, OS X (and possibly Linux) should sleep now.
• FIX: (Windows) Fixed a crash on start.
• FIX: (Synology) DLNA to PS3 wasn’t working.
• FIX: (DLNA) Memory leak in DLNA server process.
• FIX: (DLNA) Fixed PS3 audio dropouts by transcoding to stereo for now in the profile.
• FIX: (DLNA) Fixed evaluation of limitations.
• FIX: (DLNA) Fixed AAC audio not playing to PS3.
• FIX: (DLNA) Build-in profile now supports Samsung SmartTVs (thanks, holzi!)

• FIX: Update RTMP to 2.4
• FIX: Fix for connectivity issues when PMS isn’t running locally (thanks to elwertk).
• FIX: Playback of interlaced H.264 content (MBAFF) was broken (thanks to elwertk).
• FIX: Use the same user agent as earlier in Plex/Nine.
• FIX: Add the Plex language and version headers.
• FIX: When forced transcode was enabled, playback could fail for local files.
• FIX: Support for chained indirects in channels.

And last, but certainly not least, Barkley sends his (slobbery) love!

I know what you’re thinking: “How can they keep releasing updates so frequently?” Is it overclocked CPUs? Human cloning? Performance enhancing Kombucha drinks? Well yes, but that’s not the real secret. The real secret is that our team has this incredible passion for creating the best media solution ever, and we are tireless. We’re also spread out around the world, so our company chatroom is always buzzing with excitement and code commit messages around the clock (we love you, Campfire and Github!). This is the most amazing team I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and it feels too fun to call it “work”. Thanks to all of you for your continued support and love, we’re going to keep bringing you updates (the next iOS release is sweet, and about to head to Apple!) and lots of new stuff.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the new release (which we’ve deemed a beta, due to the massive changes, available here or use our BETA AppCasts):

• NEW: Massive performance improvements in scanning engine. We took things apart and put them back together again, and scanning should be much faster. Like much faster. You’ll notice it especially when scanning item-heavy sections like music. Speaking of music, we just pushed an much-improved Last.FM agent as well. Oh, and we also pushed a new Scanner which fixed an issue reading ID3 tags. So lots of love for music this release.
• NEW: Support for Virtual Scanners. Up until now, Plex Scanners have been limited to scanning the files directly, but with Virtual Scanners you can be much more creative. We’ve included an example (the Plex iTunes Scanner) which is a quick and easy way to scan in your iTunes collection much more quickly than using the regular music scanner. In under 50 lines of code, too.
• NEW: Other metadata loading/saving performance speedups.
• NEW: Location header exposed to CORS requests.
• NEW: Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderDefaultDuration) for specifying default duration for Flash/Silverlight videos. Useful for videos that exceed two hours in duration.
• NEW: Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderTempDirectory) for specifying the temporary directory for the transcoder. Useful for all those with SSD drives.
• NEW: (DLNA) Add support for device matching on serial number and manufacturer fields. Really, guys, did you implement the spec in a slightly different way on purpose? Just to mess with us?

• FIX: Music scans refreshed artists/albums for no good reason, again and again. Think of it like a nervous golden retriever which kept poking the dead squirrel. Bad dog. Sit. Stayyyy.
• FIX: Minor fixes and memory leaks in the Quicksilver transcoder.
• FIX: Do scanning depth-first instead of breadth-first. Details matter.
• FIX: Make sure we return not-deleted media items before deleted media, fixes iOS playback failure in some rare cases.
• FIX: Pass back the correct deletedAt time in the metadata item.
• FIX: Be careful not to overwrite good GUIDs, could lead to episodes losing poster/status when replacing SD ones with HD, e.g.
• FIX: A case where certain audio files could fail to analyze, causing repetitive analysis during audio scans. Points for persistence!
• FIX: Fixed a deadlock when calling into the system bundle early in startup.
• FIX: Fixed a hang scanning DVR-MS content. We’ve been doing lots of work lately to get those files to scan in properly, we’ll be pushing new scanner/agents shortly! Thanks, Ian, you know who you are.
• FIX: Pass more hints along to agents, useful for WTV work.
• FIX: Browsing by rating wasn’t exactly right.
• FIX: Failure to log in certain cases on OS X.
• FIX: (DLNA) Getting metadata can result in empty parent ID.
• FIX: (DLNA) Lack of posters on PS3 (really fixed this time, so sorry).
• FIX: (DLNA) Tweak to album art for XBoxes. (XBoxen?)