Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

UPDATE: IOSPIRIT has resolved the issue with the Candelair driver causing issues with Leopard booting. New driver version is up on their site and will be available via built-in update shortly.

We realize it’s been a little while since the last release, but hopefully the wait will have been worth it. We’re thrilled to serve you up a fresh new version of Plex (download here) with lots of bug-fixes and a few little enhancements. First up, the fixes:

[French users, be sure to read through oncleben31's blog post on the new scraper included in this release here.]

• FIX: On Snow Leopard, 5.1 audio had issues. We’ve cleaned up the code, fixed the problems, and it now runs great on 10.6. Many thanks to Ryan for all his work on this one.
• FIX: We fixed an issue with the new caching system that could cause some MKVs and other files to stutter when played over the network.
• FIX: Video playlists work again.
• FIX: Multi-part videos display thumbnails again.
• FIX: Crash reading GPS EXIF data from photos.
• FIX: Fix for crash when displaying subtitles (Thanks, Billy J!)
• FIX: A few crashes in the Media Server (custom iTunes genre artwork, and playing Netflix movies).
• FIX: First WebKit play on a fresh install didn’t work.
• FIX: App Store would sometimes not show up on a fresh install.
• FIX: GForce visualizer for iTunes causes Plex to crash.
• FIX: TVDB image issue (thanks to Poldi!)
• FIX: Posters issue in IMDB scraper (thanks, Jay!) and issue with cast lists (thanks to Todd G!)
• FIX: DTS downmixing method reverted to use libdts. People who listen on headphone *may* be happier.
• FIX: Make keyboard backlight feature optional (James). You can access this setting in the advanced Cocoa preferences area under the Videos tab.

To summarize, Plex should now work pretty well on Snow Leopard, and hopefully most of the annoyances and issues in the last release have been fixed. Moving right along, what other tasty nuggets await in this new release?

• NEW: James revamped the Plex shutdown options, adding a beautiful UI that allows quitting, sleeping, or powering off after a specified time. Check out the screencast below to see it in action. Press ’s’ anywhere in Plex to go directly to the Quit menu. On the Quit menu, press ‘c’ on the keyboard or hold the Play button on the Apple Remote to bring up the quit timer. There are also options to Sleep and Shutdown in the Quit submenu. Press ‘c’ or hold Play on the apple remote with Sleep or Shutdown selected brings up the timers for both of those as well.
• NEW: One of the longest-running complaints about Plex has been the low volume when listening to downmixed 5.1 audio. We’ve added three levels of dynamic range compression (in Preferences > System > Audio): Normal, Large, and Huge. These settings apply only to AC3 and DTS downmixed audio, and the Large and Huge settings can introduce (usually subliminal) clipping. This one is for you, Aayush!
  
• NEW: Captions for iPhoto photos, and EXIF comment tag also used for captions.
• NEW: We’re using Felix’s new Apple Remote code (thanks to Evan for integrating it!). This provides, as Apple would say “improved compatibility”.
• NEW: Toggle full screen option on dock menu (thanks to Billy Joe).

Along this release comes a new improved version of the Plex Media Framework used to write plug-ins, and enhancements to the Plex Media Server itself.

• NEW: Support for one-click install of plug-ins. You can now easily install plug-ins off the web without having to copy files all over the place.
  
• NEW: Support for auto-refresh in directories.
• NEW: Context menus in plug-ins.
• NEW: The ability for the HTTP cache to auto-update itself.
• NEW: Rating support for plug-ins, with support for community/system ratings as well as user ratings. This feature was used to great effect by David B in the upcoming update of our Netflix plug-in. Here’s an unrated movie and us rating it via the context menu item.
     

  And here’s the movie with our rating.

  
• NEW: Upgrade Plex WebKit libraries to 4.0.3.
• NEW: Allow passing back User Agent (makes Apple Movie Trailers work again).

As has become custom in these parts, Barkley sends his greetings.

It wasn’t until I was over at a friend’s house playing with Plex v0.8.1 that I realized how much better this new version is. We’ve targeted two major causes of user interface delay (beach balling) in this release (starting streams and browsing through directories) and the results should make your experience much better than it used to be. As always, many thanks to the talented group of plug-in developers who keep expanding the content tree, as well as help us track down bugs!

If you’re just joining us, you can find helpful and friendly support on the forums (welcome 10,000th user!), or follow us via Twitter. Heck, you can even follow Barkley on Twitter. Or buy us a beer via the donate link at the right.

NEW: This has been a popular request for those of you without surround receivers. We’ve added a new setting that links OS X sound volume with Plex sound volume. This means that you can use your Apple Remote for *all* of your volume changes, including all the WebKit plug-ins. (For those of you with surround receivers, you’ll continue to use your receiver’s remote for all of your volume changes.)

NEW: This is one that’s bothered me for ages. Setting the cache size in Megabytes is really silly, because the amount you want to cache depends on the bandwidth of the content. For example, if you set it high, your Apple Movie Trailers might play without stuttering, but then that low bandwidth FLV would take forever to buffer. With this version, we’re introducing Bandwidth-based Caching®, which dynamically adjusts the size of the cache depending on the needs of the stream. The result: lower bandwidth streams start faster, and higher bandwidth streams play with less stuttering. Also as a consequence, the cache settings now look quite a bit more simple. You simply specify the number of seconds of media that you would like to cache.

NEW: Maverick214 on the forums submitted a great patch for displaying the end time for videos. Always nice to know how much longer you’re going to be tortured watching So You Think You Can Dance.

NEW: Do you like having your cake and eating it too? Do you like the Now Playing screen, but wish you could induce epileptic fits in your pets with the visualizer at the same time? Luckily for you, Scott was stuck on a plane, armed with a laptop and he hacked together this perfect marriage. Not for you? Simply select the “Hide Now Playing in Visualizer” in the Skin settings.

NEW: James cleaned up the shutdown options for Plex. In the skin settings, you can select which of Quit, Sleep, or Shut Down appears on the main menu. If you want to access the other choices, you simply hit “right” to pick another option. If you have your Harmony remote mapped to something custom, you can use the actions Plex.Quit, Plex.SleepSystem, and Plex.ShutDownSystem.

Remember how when Windows 3.0 came out, it really sucked, and it wasn’t until 3.1 that Microsoft got things right? Well, I’d like to think of this release (download here) as being the “Windows 3.1″ release of Plex. We’ve fixed a lot of issues, and this version should be much more stable than the previous one. Additionally, the people who were staying with v0.7.13 because of issues with BluRay rips in subsequent versions can now download this version without fear.

• FIX: Idle CPU reduced greatly. On an iMac we went from 24% to around 9.8%. On a 1.83GHz Mini we went from 38% to 16%. Al Gore is happy.
• FIX: Hang when playing WebKit content after 5.1 content.
• FIX: A few issues causing App Store/plug-ins to disappear.
• FIX: Hang on exit (when Media Server Scrobbler was enabled).
• FIX: Cannot play/browse AC/DC (and other artists with funky names) from the iTunes library. Heavy metal fans rejoice!
• FIX: Scrobbling plays of AAC files to the Plex Media Server wasn’t working.
• FIX: Crash on start when Plex Media Server was run on a computer without Plex.
• FIX: Intermittant lack of audio when starting 5.1 videos when background music/themes was enabled. (We also disabling the fading, which was not helping.)
• FIX: VC-1 apparent regression in ffmpeg 0.5 which caused much higher CPU usage and related problems. Ryan and I resolved it by reverting to an earlier version of the codec. Thanks to Peter for bringing the issue to our attention, and to Aaron for help in tracking it down.
• FIX: View Slideshow context menu items weren’t enabled for top-level photo plug-ins.
• FIX: Jay and Isaac tweaked the default settings for IMDB to make sure the best quality posters are returned.
• FIX: James made some tweak to Now Playing. The flip time is now configurable in the Advanced Settings Cocoa UI (Make it flip every 5 seconds! Make your child and/or pets motion sick!) Additionally, the background is more in line with look of MediaStream.
• FIX: We’ve defaulted the automatic audio stream selection to false, as we think that default makes more sense (Thanks, Isaac! You can turn it off manually yourself in the video player preferences.) We also fixed an issue with the auto-selection of subtitles if the auto-selection of audio streams was disabled.
• FIX: We pulled the latest libdcr code which decodes RAW images (it fixes some pink-hue issues with newer cameras).
• FIX: As forum user “someone” reported, the German strings were botched in the previous version.
• FIX: Sébastien Vaast kindly send us updates to the French translation.
• FIX: We fixed a possible crash with Javascript seek bars in site profiles.
• FIX: Relative coordinates on “thumb” seek-bars were broken, many thanks to Robert Nio for reporting the issue and testing the fix.
• FIX: We pulled the latest XBMC UPnP code, in hopes this would help with some problems reported on the forums. We also pulled a fix related to the sendkey HTTP-API command, and a few other fixes.

We’ve been taking Barkley more and more to the pool as he continues his recovery from his CCL injury. So far he’s doing great and is really happy to get in the water.

First of all, happy Mother’s day to all the Plex moms out there! (Remember, Plex Dads, a new Plex release is not a substitute for flowers or a nice call.)

We’re very pleased to announce the first release of our stable Plex/Eight series. It’s been a long road, but we’re quite happy with the stability, especially given the massive amount of new functionality. You can download it here.

We’ve already started work on the Plex/Nine series, and you’ll be seeing lots of change between here and the official “1.0″ release. We know what areas need the most work (the library, usability) and we have a few surprises up our sleeve which we hope you’ll enjoy.

We’d like to give a really, really big shout out to our growing community of plug-in developers. The response to the new Framework has been tremendous, the plug-ins are flowing in, and we’ve gotten great feedback from everyone. Thank you all very much! As promised, James and I are heads down on documentation and will have something for you to look at very shortly. We’re also working on some updates to the App Store to improve the “regionalization” which will make it easier for our users around the world to get to the plug-ins that work for them. A pox on content providers who limit the content to only certain areas of our little blue planet.

This release consists primary of bug-fixes, but we’ve added the usual treats. As Chuck Norris said, “Anything else would be less than civilized”.

• NEW: Have you ever been annoyed by a video playing with subtitles even though the audio track is in your native language? Or having to look through all the 24 subtitle tracks in the MKV just to find the one in your language? Annoying, right? Plex/Eight auto-manages subtitles and audio tracks based on your language setting (i.e. the OS X language setting). For example, if your language is set to English, videos with English audio tracks won’t display any subtitles, whereas a foreign film will display English subtitles. If the language is set to Portuguese (Olá amigos!), an English film with lots of subtitles will auto-pick the Portuguese ones.

  Likewise, for those of you encoding dual 5.1/stereo tracks in your MP4 files, Plex will pick the AC3 track if the receiver is AC3-capable and the tracks have language tags.

  These options are both on by default, and they will not override per-video settings. Also, note that some video files don’t have language information for the audio and subtitle tracks. The code tries to be clever, but it’s not magic.

• NEW: James whipped up a cool animation for the Now Playing screen. Those of you with Plasma screens can now rest easy. The animation triggers every two minutes. Drink some nice red wine and stare at the screen.
• NEW: There are more and more of you using the Plex Media Server to stream your iTunes libraries to Plex, and a common request was to update the play counts and mark podcasts as viewed. In Plex/Eight, Plex now “scrobbles” plays to the Media Server, which updates the iTunes library (note that since it uses AppleScript, you’ll need to have iTunes running on the machine where the Plex Media Server is, and it will be started by OS X if it’s not). This feature is off by default, and you can enable it in the Media Server section of the preferences.
• NEW: Anamorphic zoom mode. Falk Husemann submitted a patch to change the 16×9 zoom mode to work with projectors which have anamorphic lenses attached. You can read more about this sort of set up here. You can enable this new mode by setting <anamorphiczoom>true</anamorphiczoom> in your advanced settings.

And the fixes:

• FIX: Sometimes album art didn’t show up in the Now Playing window.
• FIX: Remote fanart (e.g. iTunes) wasn’t showing up.
• FIX: Very slow start/skipping tracks for music. We made some improvements to the Media Server, and the ever-skilled jmarshall committed a nice related fix which we pulled. You won’t believe how much faster it is.
• FIX: Speaking of performance, a big shout out to Jens Kleemann, who has been working for a while on analyzing and improving the performance of Plex. A few weeks ago, he told me that one of the main sources of the idle CPU usage was in some code that was locking and unlocking a mutex. He even sent over a patch that did less locking, and Plex took less CPU with the fix. Now this didn’t seem right to me, as a thread that is blocked on a mutex doesn’t consume any CPU. One night I looked over the mutex code, and I noticed a line of debug code that got the thread’s Mach port. I’d put this line in when I was trying to track down a threading issue *ages* ago, and it wasn’t used anymore. Except, as it turns out, it was responsible for consuming about a quarter of Plex’s CPU usage when idle. So a big thank you to Jens, and a big apology from me. Just think how many trillion of instructions your computers have executed for no good reason because of me. I might actually be responsible for global warming.
• FIX: We’ve changed the thumbnailing code for photos to use a single thumb instead of four, by popular request.
• FIX: Nikolas Stephan kindly submitted a patch so that Last.fm scrobbling works with tracks played from the Plex Media Server.
• FIX: Nikolas Stephan also submitted a patch which allows selecting folders for the photo screensaver, apparently something which used to work.
• FIX: We restart the Plex Media Server when we quit after 5.1 play (or upon restart after a crash). This is needed to work around a CoreAudio/WebKit issue, and you would have seen this issue as WebKit videos playing back without audio.
• FIX: We automatically remove empty iLife sources, so if you don’t have Aperture, it won’t show up, for example.
• FIX: GlimmerBlocker no longer prevents WebKit plug-ins from working.
• FIX: The new wider list view works with the “hide thumbs” option.
• FIX: Some SSA subtitles (e.g. Chinese) didn’t render correctly.
• FIX: James made some fixes to background music; the volume level of the background music shouldn’t be quieter than regular music, and fixed a couple of problems with it not restarting properly. Also, it’ll fade out when starting a video.
• FIX: The fonts have been fixed in the Now Playing window for the Original font set.
• FIX: A possible crash in the Plex Media Server.
• FIX: Better keyboard mappings for the Now Playing window and Mira (thanks to marklight!)
• FIX: We pulled the latest IMDB scraper from XBMC (thanks to aaron and Jay for testing it out!) and this should fix it bringing down incorrect posters when the IMPA awards option is on.
• We also pulled a good bunch of code fixes from XBMC. (No Aeon fixes, sorry.)

Next up will be a big release of new and enhanced plug-ins, and then back to work on Plex/Nine.

Today also happens to be Barkley’s forth birthday. We brought him to the beach for the first time since his injury around five months ago. He swam, caught a few waves, and then rolled around in the sand in pure delight.

We’re coming to the end of the Plex/Seven series, so we’re primarily focused on bug-fixes, but we did find the time to add a few new things for your enjoyment. Many, many thanks to all the people who helped out with this release. In the next few days, we’re going to release a few new plug-ins (and updates to existing ones) that make use of new features/bugfixes in this release, so be sure to update as soon as you can! The release can be downloaded here.

• NEW: One of the complaints we’ve heard is that the visualizers available with Plex, while cool, sometimes cause seizures in kids and household pets. Others say that it leads them to look forward to 4:20 PM. In any case, James and Mike B (of MediaStream fame) teamed up to bring you a sexy new option: The Now Playing visualizer. Select it just as you would any other visualizer, and take it for a spin.

• NEW: We’ve added support for ratings in Plex Media Server content. So in the next revision of the Netflix plug-in, for example, you’ll now see star ratings, as you will in another new plug-in that will be released shortly.

• NEW: Do you ever find yourself struggling to shuffle a playlist, or play an album straight through, by displaying the playlist, toggling settings, and then switching back, having forgotten what you were doing in the first place? James added a convenient Shuffle item on the context menu to make that struggle a thing of the past. Together with the new Now Playing visualizer, we’re hoping you find music playing just a little bit easier this release.

• NEW: New iLife art (thanks to the talented tassitassi). You see some of it peeking out from the screenshot above. (Note: you’ll have to whack your existing cached art at ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/Thumbnails/Programs/Fanart/)
• NEW: Our friend Kent has been hard at work on analyzing our user data. Among other things, he’s discovered that our Swedish users rock! There are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country. He compiled this data by looking at the Sparkle update requests. To make his job a bit easier, we’ve added a token to each update request that’s unique for each computer. We’re sending a one-way hash of the computer’s MAC address, which when broken down into plain English means that (a) we’ll be able to figure how many total computers are running Plex and (b) we can’t use the data to obtain any information about your computer.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in this release:

• FIX: The context menu was broken for the Favorites section.
• FIX: We weren’t saving the ’show extensions’ setting correctly in advanced settings.
• FIX: James fixed a long-standing (since Plex/Five) scraper hang with tvshow.nfo.
• FIX: We got a patch from rgrove (thanks!) that ensures that LAN cache settings are used for SMB shares.
• FIX: Caching was disabled, which caused no end of trouble playing back Internet content.
• FIX: We added Lanczos back to the OSD upscaling menu.
• FIX: We increased the size of the default fonts. I have to personally apologize for that, apparently I ate too many carrots as a baby.
• FIX: Crash/hang when exiting after playing a video.
• FIX: Also a longstanding bug, the occasional lack of GUI sounds after playing videos (thanks to Kent for helping me track this down).
• FIX: The Plex Media Server is a Universal Binary again.
• FIX: Ryan helped me fix a DTS->AC3 transcoding channel mapping bug.
• FIX: A Plex Media Server crash (when stopping a WebKit video shortly after starting) was fixed.
• FIX: We’ve made the list view give more room to text. After all, scrolling text is hard to read.

• FIX: Stopping a video with 5.1 audio could be a bit slow.
• FIX: The clock could display letters (e.g. “kk:49″). Thanks to Daniel for helping me track this one down.
• FIX: James made the thumbnail searching code respect the dvdthumbs advanced setting (so you can add support for Front Row style preview.jpg files).
• FIX: Double speed playback of 22KHz audio in videos (e.g. some FLV video).
• FIX: Enhanced the caching of directories to work well with the Plex Media Server (much quicker backing up to parent directories).
• FIX: Isaac fixed a few confusing strings.
• FIX: Improved Russian strings (thanks to friendly).
• FIX: Blurry fanart. Thanks to tassitassi for bringing it to my attention and to jmarshall for the fix).

We also added a few new Media Server plug-in features and fixed some bugs:

• NEW: Support for typing a string in the site config (requested by Rick, useful for authenticating into Flash sites).
• NEW: We allow specifying a dead zone in the seek bar site config, which can help make a tooltip disappear after a seek.
• FIX: Preferences weren’t being correctly escaped, which could lead to problems logging into Netflix, for example.

Here’s Barkley on Makena beach, gutting a beached whale.

We’ve been working hard for the last month and I’m really happy to finally be able to announce this next release (download here, but please read the release notes first). Besides the usual bunch of new features and bug-fixes, this release brings with it support for the next major release of our Media Server plug-in API, and this means that you’ll be seeing lots of new content in the App Store this week (and hopefully provides extra incentive to upgrade quickly!)

• NEW: Cocoa UI for advanced settings. Why should you have to edit XML files? You shouldn’t, and now you don’t have to, because the most important advanced settings are easily accessible in this advanced settings dialog that James added. The dialog is accessible via Plex > Advanced Settings… in the menu bar.

• NEW: This all started with a giant bug that Youngcho Kim posted detailing improvements that would help Korean users. Seeing as I like 돌솥 비빔밥 as much as the next guy, I read the bug, thought about it, and we decided that a lot of his suggestions were really excellent for all non-English first time Plex users. So we’ve done a few things:
  • Plex respects the language setting in the International preference pane. Whatever language your OS X applications start with, Plex will start with (assuming there’s a translation).
  • Plex respects the units setting (Metric/US) also specified in that preference pane, and these are used to determine the units for temperature and speed.
  • Plex uses the date and time formatting specified in that pane as well; for example, MediaStream uses the short time format for its clock, which you can easily configure it in a number of different ways. More importantly, it will use whatever format you have configured already.
  • Plex auto-selects the font based on your language, so if your language is configured in OS X to be Chinese, for example, it will use Arial Unicode automatically.
  • If you really want Plex to be running with different language/units than OS X, you can specify this in advanced settings (<language> tag, e.g. “en” or “it”, and <units> tag, e.g. “metric”).

• NEW: Evan Schoenberg was kind enough to add support for the IRKeyboardEmu virtual remote, which provides support for his awesome Rowmote app for the iPhone.
• NEW: SMS jump support for Harmony, to make it easy to jump around in lists (thanks to aaronjb!)
• NEW: Ryan updated our ffmpeg to v0.5 from the XBMC source, and added the new version of libfaad2 and some other patches which provide support for more formats. See his blog post for more details. The new ffmpeg adds support for WMAv2 and lots more.
• NEW: We’ve enhanced support for .dfont files, to allow specifying font variants; the skin now uses Helvetica Neue by default, except for languages whose character sets aren’t supported by that font, which use Arial Unicode. We’ve also moved to using mixed case, which we think is more readable than all-caps. (We’ve left the original font-set as “Original” for those who prefer it).

• NEW: Improved fanart images for iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture, thanks to Aargh-a-Knot.
• NEW: Support for Plex.MoveToNextScreen and Plex.MoveToPrevScreen actions, as requested by Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy.
• NEW: Finished up localization support in Plex and the Media Server so that plug-in localization works. There was already support for it in the framework, but it needed a bit of plumbing.
• NEW: James enhanced the photo text overlay so that (a) it hides after 10 seconds and (b) you can toggle it with the ‘info’ command (’t’ on the keyboard, menu on the Apple Remote). We’ve tweaked the keymap in slideshows to be more consistent with other sections, so pressing menu displays information, holding menu returns you to the browser. Additionally, hold left and right zoom out and in, and hold play displays photo EXIF details. Also, if you just don’t want to see the overlay at all, you can hide it in the skin settings.

Lots of good fixes in this release as well.

• FIX: Allow specifying “always on” vs. “on for SD content” for software upscaling (we’ve also allowed you to select the algorithm used in the advanced settings dialog).
• FIX: If you have audio linking to system output, it restores the original setting when exiting.
• FIX: Improved support for SMI subtitles (pulled from XBMC).
• FIX: Backing up from App Store or Help brings you back to main menu.
• FIX: When upgrading, helper and Media Server sometimes didn’t get restarted. This one was driving me crazy.
• FIX: Apple Remote could drop key-presses when system was loaded (many thanks to Evan Schoenberg for the fix, this has been annoying many for quite some time).
• FIX: When using an HTTP proxy (like Glimmer Blocker), the Media Server wouldn’t play Flash content.
• FIX: Huge speed increase starting plug-ins in the Media Server on startup.
• FIX: Signature on Media Server should always be correct now, eliminating firewall warnings.
• FIX: iPhoto album ordering now exactly matches iPhoto.
• FIX: Many things restored to Mediastream which were taken out in the last version (allow hiding Movies, TV Shows, and the Quit items, back back background image folder settings, restored “hide thumbs in list view”, and put back the library button in music files).
• FIX: Sometime when displaying a slide show, moving to the next image would simply exit out of the slideshow (nice find, James!)
• FIX: HD Homerun should work now.
• FIX: Stillness sent an encoding patch and scraper updates for KinoPoisk.ru (thank you!)
• FIX: Seasons and episodes views will now display correctly for first-time users, thanks to Isaac.
• FIX: We were missing a key mapping for deleting individual video bookmarks.
• FIX: Ryan, our resident audio wizard, fixed an issue with static noise when skipping forward in an AAC 5.1 file.

And lots of changes in Plex Media Server land:

• Support for new V1 of Plex plug-in Python framework. Major cleanups and enhancements, if you thought the first version was easy to use, you’ll love what James has done with this version. We’ll have great documentation available shortly.
• Support for plug-in preference panes (and support in the V1 framework for adding preferences).
• Support for conditions in simple seek bars (i.e. for specifying that played color is *not* a given color).
• Support for sending key presses to WebKit plug-ins in site configuration.
• Support for setting cookies in site configuration.
• Support for WebKit plug-ins that change frame size.
• Support for specifying relative coordinates for cropping and mouse events (e.g. 10 pixels from the right).
• Support for Javascript seek bars, and Javascript conditions.
• Support for site configurations reading values from a plug-in’s preferences (useful when performing authentication).
• Allow manually locking plug-ins on a page, useful with authentication and some misbehaved sites.

I’ll let Barkley have the last word, as usual. Seriously, who sleeps like this?

We’ve got lots of things “cooking” but we wanted to make a quick release (download here) to fix Hulu as well as provide some important enhancements to the media server.

• FIX: Hulu playback was broken when the site exploited a bug in our code, which has now been fixed.
• NEW: Support for variably-sized Flash/Silverlight content (and also for sizes changing on the fly). You can now specify negative values in the site configuration for cropping, mouse operations, and in seekbars. A negative X or width value indicates the number of pixels from the right, and a negative Y or height value specifies negative pixels from the bottom. (Specifying 0 for width/height means “the entire width/height”, this should help for sites such as Vimeo.)
• NEW: We’ve moved the Plex Python plug-in framework into a plug-in named Framework.bundle (great idea, James!). Among other things, this fixes the issue with the code signature breaking on the Plex Media Server and the Leopard firewall getting upset about it. This also allows us to have multiple concurrent versions of the framework for backwards compatibility. We take this sort of thing very seriously, as we want you to be able to write plug-ins without fear of them breaking with API changes.

Also, we’ve had lots of developer interest, and we’re now working with a few people on some upcoming plug-ins. In order to prevent duplication of effort, we’ve added a page to the wiki which lists the plug-ins that are in progress. We’ll be adding more to that page (Isaac threw it up quickly from memory), but please add to it if you’re working on a plug-in; you can provide your forum name in the contact section so that others can contact you to help out.

There have been some plug-ins developed which will likely not find a place in the Plex App Store, such as the 18+ plug-ins. We’d still like to encourage good organization and structure for these “unofficial” plug-ins, so Isaac has created a wiki template for you to use. If you have one of these plug-ins, please add a page to the wiki for it, and either upload the zipped bundle to the wiki or add an external link to it. You can then add a link to the new page on the unsupported plug-ins index page. Thanks very much!

This is one of my favorite photos of Barkley. I’m not sure why he was sitting like that on the stairs, but he looks quite regal.

A couple of fixes in this one, which you can download here.

• FIX: Silly regression which resulted in you being left in an empty directory after installing from the app store (and a few other cases).
• FIX: Improved compatibility with certain Flash sites.

Here’s Barkley pondering the perennial question: To Eat or Not to Eat?

Lots of good stuff fixed in this release, and we’re happy to bring it to you. You can download this release here.

• FIX: Crashes in Plex Media Server with Safari Adblocker and other similar plug-ins.
• FIX: Pulled a fix from XBMC for variable framerate FLV files (important for a new plug-in).
• FIX: Crashes in Apple Movie Trailers with 5.1 audio (integrated Ryan’s excellent audio fixes).
• FIX: Some of the menu shortcuts were broken (thanks to migueld for pointing this out).
• FIX: Some other crashes in Plex Media Server with badly behaved or misconfigured sites.
• FIX: Much improved Swedish translation, with many thanks to atrus.
• FIX: Updated to the latest Amazon scrapers (thanks to John Lockwood).
• NEW: Support for executing Javascript inside plug-in site configurations (as an action).

And some really nice new stuff. James and Isaac worked hard on usability for this release. First of all, we’ve made it easier for you to get to the App Store:

They also renamed some of the top level menu items, and added favorites, since with the ever-growing amount of content, favorites can be very helpful (use the context menu to add items to your favorites):

And finally, you know how most applications have this thing called “Help” where you can go to seek assistance inside the actual program? Novel concept, right? Well, James whipped up a plug-in, Isaac populated it, and now you can browse helpful screencasts without leaving Plex:

One minor note: we really want to express our gratitude to all the websites we support. They have really been helpful, as the changes they make to their sites have ended up assisting us greatly in finding and fixing bugs in our code, as well as enhancing the flexibility of the plug-in code and site configuration files. Hulu works again in this new release, I’m happy to say.

Here’s Barkley, artfully dangling some sandy drool.

We just pushed a new release out which improves compatibility with some Flash sites, and to go along with it, Scott prepared a new version of the Hulu plug-in with some nice enhancements, including more fanart, better thumbnails, flattened movie hierarchy, and more results returned for specific shows.

Besides the known issue of the Plex Media Server not working with Safari Adblocker, if a plug-in stops working, it’s likely that the structure of the site changed. This doesn’t happen very frequently with most sites, but it’s a definite possibility. When this occurs, an entity we call the “Campfire Robot” springs into action automatically and tracks us down to let us know, and shortly thereafter we can push an update.

As such, if a site stops working, the best thing to do is to check the App Store for updates. If you have automatic updates turned on, check your install history to see if an update got installed while you were getting coffee.

To answer your question, no, we rarely sleep.

Here’s another of Barkley and Anna from the San Francisco series: