Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it! What’s better than a free-range organic turkey? A new Plex/Seven release!

We really appreciate all the feedback on the first in the Plex/Seven series. We have new features in the works, new ideas, and a great deal of enthusiasm and energy for this new series. So much so, in fact, that we’ve postponed the Plex/Six stable series release briefly to bring new a new installment in the Plex/Seven series. The good news is that hopefully we’ve fixed many of the issues keeping people away from Plex/Seven.

The release can be downloaded via Sparkle, HTTP, or torrent, or built from source.

• NEW: Aperture support. James and I had a bet on who could finish first, I took Lightroom and he took Aperture. I’m sure you can guess who won. Same killer features as iPhoto and iTunes, including automatic reloading of databases, and access across the network.
• NEW: Ryan greatly enhanced the CoreAudio driver, cutting out lots of old crufty code in the process. Not only does this fix the problem with fuzzy audio at low volumes and incorrect playback speed, but it also add some features that audiophiles will appreciate. The legacy XBMC code was performing a bunch of useless format conversions, whereas his new code converts from source format directly to 32 floating point, which is the CoreAudio native format. This means you can now play back 24-bit 96KHz media, at full fidelity. Ryan explains more in his blog post.
• NEW: James enhanced the Programs area of Plex. Workflows can be added to the root-level menu, folders can be added as sources, workflows can be selected by navigating into folders. (Plex quits when starting workflows, releasing control of the Apple remote). Additionally, you can run Applescript scripts from the Scripts menu, or by mapping them directly to keys in the keymap files. This opens up lots of possibilities!
• NEW: The Plex Media Server generates thumbs for artists, per request (picks an album thumb).
• FIX: Lots of people had been asking for volume control via Apple Remote. While there’s nothing we can do about encoded digital audio volume (AC3/DTS) there are plenty of people who listen to music and videos in stereo. Hence, we’ve remapped some of the keys in an attempt to improve matters (and fixed a related bug in the process). The new mapping is as follows: up and down control volume in full-screen. Since the buttons are quite limited on the Apple Remote, we removed FF and REW and replaced them with big skip forward and back when holding left/right keys. This makes some logical sense, as hitting right takes a small skip forward, while *holding* right takes a larger step (and similar with the left button). Try it out, let us know what you think.
• FIX: Really slow stream buffering of some Shoutcast streams.
• FIX: Lots of Plex Media Server bugs fixed, including crash on Apple Lossless files, glitchy sound on start of track, incorrect play speed, crash at end of video podcast, and crash with no iPhoto libraries.
• FIX: We now disable UPnP client by default, because it causes crashes (e.g. when waking from sleep). You can also now go into network settings and disable it.
• FIX: Disable PlexHelper when launching EyeTV client (James).
• FIX: Crash when in TV shows and theme music enabled (James).
• FIX: Playing DRM tracks from Plex library now works (James).
• FIX: Crash when skipping to the next track when playing a DRM music track with an iTunes visualizer enabled.
• FIX: James fixed setting a source to be the default. For example, you can set the iTunes Plex Media Server source to be the default, and you’ll go directly there from the main menu.
• FIX: Volume no longer affects visualizations.
• FIX: A ton of iTunes visualizers fixes, including not showing new track information, crash when scanning for visualizers, support for new Disco iTunes visualizer, and iTunes visualizers not being offset/sized correctly for calibrated screens.
• FIX: Some fixes for keyboard layout switching (thanks to Roman) and updates to KinoPoisk.Ru scraper.

The latest scrapers and some XBMC fixes have also been included.

Here’s Barkley doing his “kangaroo” trick.

I feel like I cheated you all, because we promised a release today and it’s taken us until now to fix some last minute issues and package everything up. Technically, it’s still Nov 16th, but I do realize that it will be Nov 17th for almost everyone else on the planet! My sincere apologies.
Without further ado, then, we’d like to present to you the first release of the Plex/Seven series. You know what’s in it, come take it for a spin. A few notes:

• Delete or move aside your old Application Support/Plex folder. Too many settings and other things have changed. Yes, you’ll have to rescan everything, but look on the bright side, you’ll get TV Theme music and the latest Fan Art. I recommend renaming the folder so that you can easily jump back to Plex/Five if you need to.
• There are bugs. This is the first release of a new development series. Some things that used to work are quite likely broken. Remember, the Plex/Five series (soon to be bug-fixed into the Plex/Six stable series) underwent 22 releases to reach the level of stability it’s currently at.
• Come join the forums. From the number of hits we’re getting to the Sparkle AppCast, we think we have quite a few users who aren’t forum members. We’d like to invite you to join, either for friendly support or simply for the great Pet Photos.

Last, but not least, I personally want to thank the entire Plex Team and community. The developers (Enrique, Isaac (yes, he’s coding!), James, Ryan and myself) are congealing into a seriously productive tight-knit team; it’s awesome working with you guys. The Plex testers (Miguel, Shaun, Mark M, Phunky, Mark D, Danny, and all the others) have worked hard to get the kinks out, and we really appreciate all the help. Alexis has been improving the Plex icon, tweaking the DMG art, improving the wiki look and feel, designing merchandise, and we’re very lucky to have someone so talented on the team. Jay has been working incredibly hard writing documentation to be ready for the release (an open source project with documentation???). Ben, Scott, Mike B, it’s awesome having you guys always around and willing to lend a hand. The community is brilliant, thank you all for being so friendly and supportive to our new and existing users.

And of course a special thanks to Cayce for providing the funding, bandwidth, and server to allow us to host all of the different Plex web locations.

Here it is: HTTP, Torrent, Source. Enjoy!

This is Barkley at dusk with his friend Manu.

Way back when I was just starting the port to the Mac, and the program was just as likely to crash on you as play a video, I dreamed of a day when it would be stable.

In the last months, we have made 22 releases of the 0.5 series of Plex. We’ve tried to fix all the most serious bugs, and add some OS X flavor to the application in the process (not to mention all the bugs that the XBMC team has fixed). I haven’t had a crash in a long time in my own personal use, and even the bug and crash reports have slowed.

Of course, there are still problems, and still bugs. No software is ever perfect. But we feel like we’ve reached a point where it works “pretty darn well” and we’d like to formalize this by ending the 0.5 development series, and releasing 0.6. Assuming nothing got screwed up in this release, we’ll make a couple of last-minute tweaks and fixes and release as 0.6.0.

Our long-term plan with Plex was always to stabilize, then enhance. First get it working well enough, then make major architectural changes.

At the same time as we’ve been working on the 0.5 series, we’ve also been staying up late at night, working hard on new stuff. Really cool new stuff. In the coming week or so, I’m going to be posting here with details on the *NINE* enhancements to Plex that have been completed. These enhancements will be included in the first release of 0.7 (the next development series). To summarize:

• v0.6.x: This will be the new stable series. If you fear change, and just want to enjoy your media in the safety of a stable release, use these. We’ll make bug-fixes, include the latest MediaStream, but nothing too scary.
• v0.7.x: If you like living on the bleeding edge, skiing down double-black diamonds, and jumping out of planes with parachutes, this is probably the series for you.

Here are the changes in this release (available from the Plex home page, and from Sparkle shortly):

• NEW: You can now configure the way the H.264 decoder does deblocking. Some will you will know this is the “skiploopfilter” setting in ffmpeg. Some will wonder if I’m speaking English. The bottom line is, if you allow the decoder to skip doing deblocking, it’ll be less intensive for the CPU. I’ve found that if you configure it to skip all deblocking, the “killa” bird sample uses about 20% less CPU and plays at a higher frame rate. Bottom line: your mileage may vary, but it may help you with hard-to-play content.

• NEW: Support for the Home and End keys in lists. Also support for using the A/Z keys to skip to the next/previous letter in lists. Jonathan Marshall added support for this last one a while ago, cool dude that he is, so we added a mapping. Also, Isaac added a new mapping for people using Snatch on their iPhone. You’ll have to whack your Keymap.xml file in ~/Application Support/Plex/userdata to get these features.
• NEW: We have included the latest MediaStream skin (no doubt out of date by tomorrow), along with the associated code fixes so that you don’t have to hit escape 23 times to return to the main menu from the Movie/TV sections. You can see some documentation for the new settings in this version of the skin here (many thanks to Jayman978!)
• FIX: We dimmed the wrong screen when you were running with a multi-screen setup and Plex was on the second screen.
• FIX: Some MP3 tags caused a hang. This includes the “Burial” album, so bretonh will be pleased.
• FIX: Refreshing movie info from NFO in VIDEO_TS folders caused a crash.
• FIX: Storing a TV show in multiple places (e.g. some seasons in one place, some seasons in another), whether by multi-path sources or different sources led to duplicates.

We’ve of course included all the latest XBMC fixes as well, including the latest UPnP and MythTV code.

I’ve taken to opening up fresh coconuts in the back yard with a big machete. The coconut water is supposedly really healthy, and if I’m feeling inspired, I make fresh coconut milk from the pulp for a Thai curry. Barkley loves both the milk and the pulp, so mostly I just lop the coconuts in half after drinking the water and give them to him.

Top two reasons why I shouldn’t have released 0.5.20 quite yet:

1. I was heading out to a long dinner party, virtually assuring that there’d be a problem I couldn’t address for many hours and beers.
2. I changed things after the testers did their work. Bad me, no biscuit.

Two changes in this release:

• FIX: Crash on entering settings menu. Elan kan’t kode.
• FIX: Restore screen backlight level on exit.

The new release is available in the usual place. Will you forgive me if I post another photo of Barkley? This is him watching as his buddy Poots does tricks at the behest of our friend Heather. French Bulldogs can fly.

*** Hold off on this release for now, there’s something borked with the settings ***

First of all, I want to make a big shout out to our forum members (citizens of Plexville). We just passed 10,000 posts, and we’re just a hair’s breadth away from 2,000 members. It’s a friendly, productive, helpful community, and we like it that way. A warm welcome to the new members, and a sincere thanks to everyone who helps out, we couldn’t do it without you!

We’ve been busy working on some awesome new features for the upcoming 0.7 development version, but we wanted to step away for a moment and fix some of the lingering bugs in the 0.5 series before we declare it stable. You can find the download on the home page or via Sparkle, as soon as I update the appcast.

• NEW: We now turn off the backlight on displays that are blanked, many thanks to James. I hear the sound of happy Mac users rejoicing.
• NEW: The menu button brings up shutdown menu instead of just exiting, as requested, holding play zooms into photos, and holding menu returns to normal zoom. Also, the escape key has been made to act just like the menu button on the remote. Thanks to Isaac for these improvements!
• NEW: Added the ability to cycle through the available displays. This works in windowed or full-screen modes, and you can use the new ⌘-Shift-→ and ⌘-Shift-← keyboard accelerators to do it. Fun! Plus, ever time I connect things in XCode’s Interface Builder, I get little shivers of pleasure.
• FIX: Weather conditions are correctly localized (thanks, Enrique!)
• FIX: James fixed a small bug with the display brightness setting.
• FIX: The audio device is now saved and restored correctly in all cases. Seriously.
  
• FIX: The problem affecting video with some LOL releases (and others) has been fixed (thanks to elupus for the fix to ffmpeg).
• FIX: A rare bug causing a crash when blanking displays (thanks, Enrique!)

Since Isaac has made tweaks to the keymap and advanced settings, unless you’re an expert user who has made your own edits, you’ll want to delete advancedsettings.xml and Keymap.xml from ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/ so that the new defaults can be installed.

As usual, we’ve also pulled fixes from the XBMC code, including shoutcast fixes by the ever-productive vulkanr, the latest scrapers, the usual assortment of brilliant stuff by jmarshall, and more (RTMP fixes, etc.). I also pulled r15344 as requested by chitz.

This is a photo of Barkley with his brother (i.e. littermate)Johann. We met him by chance at the dog park we used to frequent in Pasadena after noticing the striking resemblance.

Alright, a fresh new release for your enjoyment. A few tasty new items, and some bug fixes reported by our most excellent community! You can download from the home page, or via Sparkle (within a few minutes).

• NEW: Our newest Plexville code master, Jam, added the ability to modify the panel brightness for applicable LCDs (iMacs, laptops) via the settings. Lots of other really cool things coming very shortly from him.
• NEW: Greatly simplified settings. Isaac worked really hard to come up with sane default settings, and also to move lots of the more esoteric settings from the UI into advancedsettings.xml. We’ve found that new users tend to run into the same things (e.g. disabling remote events and thus breaking Apple Remote). Plex now ships with a well commented advancedsettings.xml file which will get installed into your Application Support folder if you don’t already have the file. If you want to change settings that no longer appear in the UI, you can either edit the items in the advanced settings file, or remove from them there to make them appear in the UI again. Isaac did an awesome job at choosing reasonable defaults.
• NEW: Revamped the full-screen toggling (⌘-F) to make things more Mac-like. If you go into full-screen and quit, next time it will start in full screen. Also, if you drag the window over to another screen and hit ⌘-F, it’ll go to full-screen on that display. Quit and restart and it’ll be full-screen on that display. In summary, it should act much more intuitively. Thanks to migueld for pushing me on this one, we had lots of new users (rightly!) confused.
• FIX: Certain MKV files could cause crashes.
• FIX: Multi-channel AAC files could cause crashes (with AC3 transcoding). Ryan nailed this one.
• FIX: A regression displaying non-US charsets (e.g. French). Thanks to Soner and others who helped bring the problem to my attention.
• FIX: A regression scanning/refreshing movies in VIDEO_TS folders.
• FIX: Improvements to the German translation of MediaStream (thanks, Spacemessage!)

The new MediaStream 0.91 is included also, with lots of good stuff. There is a newer version out there, but we haven’t gotten though testing it yet with Plex.
We’ve also pulled the usual updates from XBMC: New scrapers, bug-fixes, better mouse hiding/displaying code from jmarshall, dropped frame code from elupus (look how few frames are actually dropped now!) and of course d4rk’s new plug-ins for iPhoto/iTunes (nice job!).

It was a beach day for Barkley this last weekend.

My sincere apologies for a bug that crept in with the DTS to AC3 transcoding feature which prevented DTS from down-mixing correctly. If you use usually connect Plex to a surround receiver supporting DTS you would not have been affected.

The problem has been fixed, and I’ve uploaded the new release. The good news is you should be able to use Sparkle to do the update for you.

This is Barkley catching guava fruit in his mouth. He loves guava, pineapple, papaya and avocado, and on occasion we’ve caught him eating freshly-fallen mango out in the yard.

I know you’re getting tired of downloading these endless Plex releases, so I’m very pleased to announce that this should be the last release you’ll have to (manually) download. We’ve included the oft-requested Sparkle update system into Plex. I’m hoping it will make it much easier for people to stay up to date! The default setting is for it to check daily.

The changes in this release (available from the home page)

• FIX: A silly and evil regression that prevented DVDs and other MPEG2 content from playing correctly, and caused crashes in DVD menus.
• NEW: Ryan added support for transcoding DTS audio to AC3 audio, for those who have slightly older receivers. If you want to enable it, change the audio output mode to be Digital, enable AC3 passthrough, and disable DTS passthrough. We also worked together to fix a bug where audio settings weren’t saved correctly, especially for people with external devices. Ryan rocks. If I post a link to his blog, will that inspire him to make his first post?
• NEW: Included the latest MediaStream skin (lovely work, guys, as always!). Added the Plexalicious Unicode fontset to hopefully help our international users.
• FIX: A potential compatibility problem with Remote Buddy (thanks, Felix!)
• FIX: Removed all the remote event settings from being visible, since people were mostly just using them to hurt themselves by turning off the server (and thus rendering their Apple Remote inoperable).
• FIX: Scott (aka Superpea) made a stunning foray into coding and sent me a fix for a problem where a remote library (FTP/XBMSP) was behaving really badly because it kept trying to create video thumbnails remotely. Bad thumbnailer! No biscuit. Nice work, dude!
• FIX/NEW: Resolution settings work much better with multiple profiles now. When you log into a profile that profile’s resolution kicks in. Create a profile for each of your 7 TV sets, and then log in to the right profile as you carry your laptop around.
• FIX: I pulled all the fanart fixes from XBMC that were required because of the initial fanart server melting down. I’d hate to see that person’s bandwidth bill!
• FIX: Fixed an annoying bug where the last thing you entered into a text box showed up (thanks spiff!)
• FIX: Updated the German translation of some skin entries (thanks, Arthur!)

Pulled the usual fixes from XBMC and one nice feature from jmarshall, who added the much-requested enhancement to resuming in videos, and some background processing of downloads of thumbnails and fanart. Nice job, man, you always make it look easy.

I’ll leave the last word to Barkley.

Hopefully this release will cure most of the serious issues with the last one. Downloads and source at the Plex home page. Thanks to everyone for their kind comments and thorough bug reports, and a warm welcome to all the new users!

• FIX: The issue with using Remote Buddy.
• FIX: DVDs don’t play over SMB (and other non-local protocols).
• FIX: Crashes when thumbnailing MPEG2 files.
• FIX: Annoying popup asking to locate screensaver (99% sure).
• FIX: Hebrew characters should work again (i.e. be the right way around).
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailers thumbs don’t display.
• FIX: Going to full screen without visualizer doesn’t work (thanks, jmarshall!)
• FIX: Problems playing RAR files.
• FIX: Fixed a crash after playing an unplayable file.
• FIX: Cursor sounds work correctly until you play something.
• NEW: Latest version of MediaStream! We’ve added an experimental skin fontset called “Unicode” which uses Arial unicode for all the fonts, it may help international users.
• NEW: Mouse is turned off by default.
• NEW: Default username for web server is “plex” not “xbox”.

We also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from the XBMC code.

Here’s Barkley giving himself a good back scratch in the back yard.

First of all, a huge thank you to our group of testers. We recruited 10 people who know Plex inside out and are major contributors to the forums, and they were kind enough to spend time putting the new release through its paces. So ChoccyHubNub, jayman978, phunkysai, jeremymc7, Mikey, Vengeancegoon, teh.hippy, Cranial Lethargy, BigBadWolf, and Sirreef, you all rock! (Frosty, I didn’t was to harass you because I know you’ve been busy.)

Second thing, we’ve slightly tweaked the way we do version numbering. What we’d like to do is ensure two things: that you always have a stable version of Plex to download (which gets bug-fixes), and that you have access to more bleeding edge versions (with new features). To this end, odd version numbers (0.5.x, 0.7.x, 0.9.x) will always be bleeding edge versions, and even version numbers (0.6.x, 0.8.x, 1.0.x) will be stable versions. This is identical to the system that Linux used to use. This is the 14th release of the 0.5 series, and I hope it proves stable enough so that we can release the first of the 0.6 series soon.

You’ll also note new branding, new icons, splash screen, DMG background, all courtesy of the talented Alexis Gallisá. He’s worked hard not only on the branding, but the new Plex website (where you can find download and source links).

Last, but not least, you’ll note that we have said goodbye to Project Mayhem III as a default skin. Team Razorfish has very graciously allowed us to use the lovely MediaStream skin as the default skin for Plex. Note that if you have any problems with the skin, or feature requests, please report them on the Plex forums!

NOTE A few things for this release: You’ll probably want to delete your local copy of MediaStream if you have it installed in Application Support/Plex/skin (so as to avoid having two copies). Similarly, you’ll want to move Project Mayhem III into Application Support/Plex/skin (if you want to keep it around). Also, in order to obtain full fanart support (automatically scraped fanart), you’ll want to follow the procedure outlined by Isaac here, or else blow away your library and start over from scratch. Isaac, you rule, thanks for all the help getting this release out the door!!

• NEW: Ability to configure the number of recent video and audio items returned in library mode.
• NEW: Fatal errors are displayed in a popup dialog box, instead of causing the application to crash.
• NEW: Our newest contributor, Pundy, added the ability to sleep the Mac directly from the shutdown menu. Nice job!
• FIX: Annoying crash reading replaygain tags from MP3 files.
• FIX: Hang exiting the app using the dock menu, or with Applescript.
• FIX: Using “Open With…” to open media files with Plex should work again.
• FIX: Cmd-F works to toggle full-screen mode even if you’ve remapped the backslash key.
• FIX: Starting Plex with the screensaver active will turn it off.
• FIX: Manually browsing for subtitles exits the player.
• FIX: Crashes in ffmpeg playing various files (e.g. MS-DVR samples, King of Queens sample, Odd Couple sample).
• FIX: Locking bug in SMB resulting in crashes (fixed nearly simultaneously by my buddy vulkanr!)
• FIX: Crash on startup if you had multiple RSS feeds (this took about ten frustrating hours to track down).
• FIX: Apple Remote causes Front Row to start/system volume indicator. I believe this one is finally nailed. Thanks to the people who tested it.
• FIX: RAW file threading issues, leading to some loading of RAW files to fail.
• FIX: VIDEO_TS directories stack correctly and allow direct playing, thanks to dtmetz!
• FIX: DTS music files (thanks to spiff) and AC3 music files now play correctly, although only the former in 5.1.
• FIX: We call the Crash Reporter installer as an external entity so as to properly comply with the GPL. Thanks to Enrique for throwing a patch together so quickly. He also fixed a bug relating to installing the Plex helper.
• FIX: The XBox360 controller can now scan through files properly with the left thumbstick and exit with the big “X” button.
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailer plug-ins now install properly.
• FIX: The Apple Remote menu key (and backspace key) were unable to get you out of an empty movie/TV library.

Of course we’ve also pulled lots of good stuff over from the XBMC tree including some Bluray-related enhancements (find and use DTS-HD streams, by elupus), fanart and skinning enhancements (spiff and others), and fixes including the annoying ff/rew hang bug, fast text scrolling (jmarshall, who also fixed a ton of bugs), and lots of Python stability fixes by vulkanr: you rock, Python (and lots of other things) would not be stable without you!

And here’s your Barkley!