Plex Media Center

As you may already know, we’re huge fans of the Microsoft Windows 8 (née Metro) interface. We had a ton of fun writing the Plex app for Windows Phone 7, so when Windows 8 was released, we wasted no time in working to bring you a first class native application for the platform. We’d like to give you a quick visual overview, and then invite you to download it; it’s live in the Windows Store right now, at an introductory price of just $2.99!

I love the home screen for Plex on Windows 8. In my mind it’s a perfect amalgam of many of the visual idioms we’ve been exploring on many of the different Plex apps, but at the same time it looks like a (very lovely) completely native Windows 8 app. It’s got a background art slideshow, a gorgeous On Deck section, your myPlex queue, and much more. 

 The library areas will look familiar to those who have used the Windows Phone 7 app, as well as Plex/Web.

Note also that we’ve brought the incredibly powerful filtering system that first appeared in Plex/Web over to the Windows 8 app. It would not be a stretch to say that it’ll make its way to other Plex apps over time.

That’s just a quick overview, but I hope it conveys the love we’ve brought to this new platform. Let us know what you think!

My, it’s been a busy two weeks in Plexville, since the Plex/Sync launch. We are super happy with how the launch went; after working on it for literally months, in secret, in a damp basement (with Internet access), it was honestly hard not to have a bit of anxiety when we finally released it. But people seem to love it, and – normal first-release bugs aside – it seems to be working really well. We released three more media server updates over the last two weeks to address the most pressing issues, and now we’re pushing a new release out to everyone with all the collected fixes and a few more.

As usual, our beloved community sums it up better than we ever could:

A note for all you Android lovers, we’re closing in on releasing the first preview of PlexSync for Android. We know there are lots of you eager to sync your media to your droidy devices, and you’ll be able to do so in short order. Short. Like the dwarf guy from Game of Thrones. Winter is…almost here.

Plex/Web also continues to progress at an amazing pace. In the past two weeks we pushed couple of updates which added all sort of cool stuff like alphanumeric paging, which makes it even easier to browse giant media libraries:

And we’re also added some social features; you can manage your list of friends, and share to Facebook and recommend videos to your friends right from Plex/Web.

The other big news is that Samsung finally (finally!) approved the update of the Plex for Samsung app, which supports 2012 models. There’s an emoticon for that and it’s something like this: \0/

The new media server release is out, and can be downloaded from the usual spot. Here’s a list of the fixes contained within:

• (Non OS X) Automatically merge movies when appropriate.
• Fix a crash if there are any unexpected files in the transcode directory.
• Fix a crash when scanning photos with certain EXIF data.
• (OS X) Fixed an evil crash which occurred roughly once every day.
• Don’t allow clients to cache segments, fixes IE10 video playback issue.
• A few crashes that could be caused by proxies getting in the middle between server and myPlex.
• (PlexSync) Added iPad 4 profile, fixed iPad 3 profile.
• (PlexSync) Sync transcoder now works on 32-bit CPUs on Snow Leopard.
• (PlexSync) Allow DirectPlay sync with subtitles (e.g. MP4/TTXT).
• (PlexSync) Scrobble and library media addition/deletion kicks off sync worker. Fixes sync of recently added items.
• (PlexSync) We skip over any invalid sync items instead of completely failing.
• (PlexSync) Fix failed downloads of art/posters in some cases.
• (PlexSync) Synced media subsections weren’t always in the right order.
• (PlexSync) Video bitrate limit on ‘highest’ quality was removed.
• (PlexSync) Fixed broken XML in some sync profiles
• (PlexSync) Fixed an issue where the sync profile name was not constructed correctly.
• (PlexSync) Work-around that the client sent the wrong model name
• (PlexSync) Some sync profiles contained invalid transcoder options
• (Linux) Pass along LANG variable, to assist agents who need to read filesystem.
• (Linux) Crash signing out of myPlex or un-publishing server.
• (Linux) Add the photo transcoder in for ARM architectures.
• (Linux) Fixes for start-up scripts on Fedora and ReadyNAS
• (Linux) Upgrade Sync Transcoder to support progress information.
• (API) Fixes to /firstCharacter filters
• (API) Allow filtering filters by resolution/unwatched, fixes filter issue.
• (API) Don’t limit tag queries by metadata type if we have condition passed in.
• (API) Fix when filtering on unwatched in /firstCharacter endpoint.
• (API) Allow filter endpoints to use type in queries (e.g. album genres).

Not to be one-dimensional with the Barkley photos, but he really insists on his ocean time. I’m pretty sure his webbed paws are an indication that he’s a semi-aquatic mammal.