• NEW: Serverless operation!
• NEW: Added a preference for enabling/disabling Direct Play.
• NEW: Added even higher quality transcode options for iPhone 4S/iPad 2. More Direct Streaming, more winning.
• NEW: Display all the shared servers in settings area.
• NEW: Added new translations for Catalan, Czech, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, and Hungarian. Thanks so much to everyone who has been helping out, and if you’d like to contribute a translation, please visit this site in Firefox.

• FIX: Improvements in Direct Play, more media should play without transcoding. If you’ve got media which is transcoding and shouldn’t be, please send us logs and samples, we want to hear about it.
• FIX: The letter index no longer shows black letters on a black background, which turns out to be quite hard to read.
• FIX: Crash when tapping to play a video.
• FIX: Rotation to landscape in remote view.
• FIX: Gesture area background color was odd.
• FIX: AirPlay Mirroring should work now.
• FIX: A crash in the details view on the iPhone.
• FIX: Better detection of non GSM iPhone 4 devices, allowing higher video quality settings to show up.
• FIX: The video player would sometimes continue playing in the background (audio only).
• FIX: When stopping video playback right away, sometimes it would display an error.
• FIX: Occasional black screen after playback, especially after multi-part media.
• FIX: In conjunction with the newest media server, fixes some channel content not playing.
• FIX: Occasionally the app would display the second level filters as a list.
• FIX: A few other miscellaneous crashes.

The update has just been approved by Apple, so it should be available shortly!

• NEW: [Mac] Support for automatic refresh rate switching. And there was much rejoicing.
• NEW: Add a way to specify a manual address for a media server, useful for working around network issues.
• NEW: When running without a server, search now returns cloud results.
• NEW: Add a global audio delay setting.

• FIX: CPU usage for software decoding greatly reduced for all codecs, fixing VC-1 “stutter” issue and playback on older machines.
• FIX: Allow selecting interface language in preferences.
• FIX: Enable down-mix volume boost preference.
• FIX: Enable speaker configuration preference.
• FIX: A hang in the home screen.
• FIX: Losing a server even though it was running on the same machine.
• FIX: Not enough buffering (and therefore playback issues) with remote transcoded media.
• FIX: Toggling full screen works on multi-display setups.
• FIX: Allow ESC to get out of a playlist.
• FIX: Add missing strings for shutdown timer.
• FIX: Change the audio settings dialog to show delay in milliseconds, it seemed more human-friendly.
• FIX: Crash clicking the “save as default” button in video settings.
• FIX: Make sure we stop remote transcodes when stopping playback.
• FIX: Update ffmpeg, fixes some artifacts with VC-1 and several other issues.
• FIX: Stop printing myPlex tokens to the logs.
• FIX: “Old-school” sources were disappearing after a restart.
• FIX: Posters/art weren’t changing when changed on the media server.
• FIX: Don’t play theme music if music is already playing or if video is playing in small window.
• FIX: Background music volume is always VERY LOUD (preference works now).
• FIX: [Mac] A crash when playing Flash/Silverlight videos followed by non-WebKit video.
• FIX: [Mac] Flash/Silverlight video occasionally displayed black & white garbage on the screen.
• FIX: Info button on iOS toggles OSD, and back button works as well.
• FIX: Multiple crashes when skipping around in videos.
• FIX: [Win] Crash on startup.
• FIX: [Win] A randomly occurring hang.

This release brought to you by the ever-vigilant, hyper-loyal, best friend of man and woman, Mr Barkley.

Since it has moved to shipping separately, the Plex Media Server is now a much better standalone application, with support for autoupdate and starting at login.

• NEW: Sparkle automatic update support. Because every application eventually gains the ability to send email and update itself.
• NEW: Easy way to make Plex Media Server start on login via menu item. Additionally, it deletes the old launch agent so the old media server doesn’t start.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs, as well as some issues with the transcoder. For some of these, you’ll need the next version of the iOS application (v2.1) which is making its way to the App Store.

• FIX: A few bugs around signing up for and recovering passwords for myPlex inside the application.
• FIX: The myPlex-linked media manager page didn’t allow adding sections from outside the local network.
• FIX: In some cases episodes were being incorrectly stacked (which made it seem like they were being ignored). Perform a deep scan (option/alt + click on refresh) to fix incorrectly merged episodes.
• FIX: Improved metadata loading for date-based series.
• FIX: On Deck was not working in some cases, or provided incomplete data, especially for people who watch way too much TV.
• FIX: Don’t allow shared users to affect view offset or status until they get their own account.
• FIX: Some Aperture photos wouldn’t display properly on iOS.
• FIX: Make all shared library content look unwatched.
• FIX: Use a new way of computing unique media server identifiers given that many Hackintoshes have the same serial numbers. If you have a hackintosh (you naughty person), you may notice duplicate servers in the iOS app or myPlex; simply delete the old one.
• FIX: [Win] Some media took too long to start in the transcoder, leading playback to fail. Faster startup in general.
• FIX: Better support for transcoder session starting, along with v2.1 iOS update fixes some channel content failing to play.
• FIX: When manually specifying myPlex port, don’t send new information to myPlex every 10 minutes.
• FIX: A few transcoder related crashes.
• FIX: A hang and a few crashes playing Flash/Silverlight video.
• FIX: Even more improvements to Flash/Silverlight A/V sync.
• FIX: [Win] Failure to start the media server due to iTunes file permissions.
• FIX: [Win] A few setup/installation issues.
• FIX: [Win] Don’t fall asleep while transcoding.
• FIX: [Win] Issues relating to a system install of Python.
• FIX: [Win] Crash on exit, another crash on start-up.
• FIX: [Linux] Crashes related to automatic scanning.

Also in the mix are a few enhancements to the media server’s API. Thanks to the logging API, you’ll notice that the transcoder now sends lots of information over to the media server’s log, which means that it’ll be much easier for us to understand why a particular file isn’t producing the optimal results.

• NEW: Allow specifying encoding for subtitle stream (used in Roku client).
• NEW: Export the updatedAt attribute in the root XML to facilitate manual discovery.
• NEW: Add a new /log endpoint, useful for clients to remotely log to the media server’s log file.

I’ll detail the changes to the clients in the next post. Downloads are available off the main page, and Linux releases will be up very short. We realize that many of you have been waiting, especially for a new Synology builds, and we’re super pleased to let you know that we’re just wrapping up completely automated builds for all our Linux and NAS releases. So I promise, this is the last release you’ll have to wait, and you won’t have to wait long, in any event!

In order to symbolize your patience in awaiting this release, I asked Barkley to sit there with a tasty organic oat cookie on his paws for 4 seconds. Note the drool on his right arm.

As you all know, unless you’ve been living under a tech rock, Google is pushing out Google TV 2.0 with support for Google Marketplace, and Plex is one of the 50 companies launching an app with the release. The media support in the new version is quite rich (e.g. you can play a 1080p MKV file without a problem), and at $99 we think this will be a really great device for Plex.

Darrin, who leads the team who made it all happen, has more details in his post over here.

Note that as part of the release process, we’ve added new forums (for myPlex, and the new “Laika” client). There is also an amazing amount of documentation on the new release. There are a lot of new moving parts, so we’re sure there may be a few rough edges. Please let us know about them, and we’ll get them smoothed out.

Most of all, though, we really hope you enjoy the new release!

One more thing; as I’m sure you’re aware of, there is a Plex client for Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players. Thousands of people are using it, and it’s quite nice; I picked up a compatible Blu-ray player for under $99 which does 1080p and optical audio out. Oh, and it’s a Blu-ray player.

Anyway, during the Laika development cycle, we worked with the amazingly talented author of the client, Daniel, as he updated the Samsung client to support new Laika features, and upgrade the look and feel of the application. I think the results are stunning:

This is all built in HTML5/CSS and Javascript. Pretty nice, right? The release will be available as early as tomorrow, and he’s working on fleshing it out even more beyond support for video. If you’d like to see it in action, you can check out this screencast Boots put together. It’s a really nice validation of the powerful HTTP/XML API that the Plex Media Server provides.

One more note, the Linux releases will be updated shortly, it takes us a bit of time to build for all the different platforms/NAS devices. You’ll be happy to know that our Linux engineers are working on completely automating the process.

Lastly, a HUGE thank you to all the Plex Ninjas who helped us test this release. Your tireless dedication to helping us track down and resolve issues in the new code, document the new features, your friendly and helpful 24-hour presence in Campfire, all of it was just simply awesome.

Peace out, friends. Love from Barkley and the team. Click Get Plex on the web site to download the new releases.

• NEW: We’ve added a preference to disable media file deletion, and we’ve defaulted it to off, for the sake of safety (yes, Bruce, we’re listening). If you want to enable the option, please head to your friendly neighborhood web-based media manager at http://localhost:32400/manage and enable it:

• NEW: There is a new API endpoint /library/optimize which, as you might expect, optimizes the library database. Useful in clients or cron jobs.

And the fixes:

• FIX: When refreshing a library section because changes to folders were detected, we wait until the changes stop before kicking off the scan, so that we don’t scan partial/locked files.
• FIX: Custom artwork with spaces in path was not displaying properly.
• FIX: This is an amusing one because it’s been there for a long time and nobody noticed. When doing a new scan, every 16th movie wasn’t displayed in the media manager (it was scanned, it just didn’t show up until you switched sections). Thanks to louisd for noticing it!
• FIX: Our friend diamondsw helped us debug an issue where certain MKV files were failing to play on mobile devices.
• FIX: Boots has been reporting this one for a while, there was an occasional hang in the media manager when scrolling quickly.
• FIX: The was an issue scanning if your username had an apostrophe in it.
• FIX: A (rather rare) crash in refreshing/timed updates.
• FIX: [Windows] Sign all Python extensions. Apparently some of the AV products are coming up with some false positives on the media server, and the hope is that this might improve things.
• FIX: [Windows] When exiting, don’t hang waiting for system bundle.
• FIX: [Windows] When OpenSSL DLLs were installed into system, PMS system bundles wouldn’t start. This would cause the “no agents” issue.
• FIX: [Linux] You can now use the environment variable PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR to specify where all of the media server’s user files go (library, plug-ins, logs, etc.)
• FIX: [WIN32/Linux]: If multiple copies of a piece of media are found, load metadata for all copies.

Because you’ve all been so awesome, as always, you get two photos of Barkley. Yes, he’s on his back a lot. No, he’s not lazy.

The recent paucity of blog posts has not been for a lack of anything to talk about, nor for a lack of desire to write, but rather from the sheer volume of other things that I’ve had to do. Quite on the contrary, I love writing prose instead of code, and the sense we all have is that Plex is rapidly picking up speed: Just in the last month or two, we’ve grown our team, we’ve worked with Verizon on their in-car telematics solution (Plex in the back seat, anyone?), and are working with Netgear, Cisco, and Synology in order to make sure the Plex Media Server runs well on their NAS devices and is easily available to their customers. And that’s just skimming the surface…

We’re also in the process of making some major enhancements to our platform, and along the way to unveiling that, we decided to make an interim release. Fixes! New stuff! Rejoicing!

I also want to take a moment and point out that if you’re looking for real-time conversation about Plex, there are two great resources: Our Twitter feed is a great way to get questions answered, and see what we’re up to, and our public Campfire chat room usually has some Plexians in there who are happy to help you or just chat. I personally hang out there quite a bit as well, as I enjoy meeting and talking with Plex users from around the world.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the changes in this release, which I’ll group into a few different areas. The releases can be downloaded directly from the Plex home page (direct download links). After a day or two, we’ll enable auto-updates, and the Linux/NAS builds will appear shortly, as it takes a bit of time to build and package them.

By Popular Request:

• NEW: Support for deleting files in the library. Lots of people wanted this one.
• NEW: Initial support for Photo library sections. This means that the Plex Media Server can serve up your photos without needing to use iPhoto/Aperture, which of course doesn’t exist on Windows or Linux. We’re in the process of adding support to all the clients (e.g. next version of iOS/Android apps will add support, next firmware update for LG TV will add support), but Plex for Mac already supports it in this release. I like this one personally because it means that the Plex Media Server is now complete in the basic types of media it can scan and serve up.

• NEW: Automatic audio boost when mixing down multichannel to stereo for mobile devices. No, you’re not hard of hearing.
• NEW: If subtitle files are dropped in next to a piece of media, they will be picked up on-the-fly without a need to rerefresh the item or section.
• NEW: Support for SUB/IDX subtitles in Plex for Mac. They’re chunky evil bitmaps, but we love them. Sort of.
• NEW: Support for DTS > AC3 transcoding in transcoder (useful for LG TV, ATV2 and others).

• FIX: Subtitle scaling is now uniform, no more giant subtitles. No, you don’t need a different prescription for your glasses.
• FIX: Anamorphic videos were not Direct Streamed.
• FIX: More videos in general Direct Stream (level, nitrate, segment size issues).
• FIX: Improved selection of subtitles with “shown with foreign audio” setting.
• FIX: The SD MKV A/V sync issue.
• FIX: A few bugs on Lion, Plex should now be Lion-ready (which answers this question)!

Platform Parity:

Over time, we want to tend towards platform parity, where features are available on all systems, whenever possible. We’ve taken some important steps towards this:

• NEW: [Windows] iTunes support! (We’ll also be adding support for Linux, for those who have their iTunes XML stored on their Linux-based NAS devices.)
• NEW: [Windows/Linux] Support for timed and automatic library refreshes.

Music:

We’re working hard to improve support for music inside Plex, and have made a number of changes in the core, music scanner, and agents, including:

• NEW: Support for “Various Artists” (compilations) in music sections.
• NEW: Initial support for multi-disc albums in music sections.
• FIX: Much improved matching, far fewer false matches.

Other:

Even just with the above, this would be a pretty awesome release, but hey, there’s actually a lot more.

• NEW: Faster transcoder startup.
• NEW: Much faster TV and music metadata loading.
• NEW: [Windows] Authenticode all binaries (hopefully preventing AV software from freaking out).
• NEW: [Windows] Configure firewall on install.
• NEW: Listen on new multicast group in GDM to avoid Windows 7 networking bug.

• FIX: Issue where Vorbis streams were not transcoded.
• FIX: Better logging for Python scanner errors while scanning.
• FIX: [OS X] Database migration progress dialog didn’t always work properly.
• FIX: Many fixes for GDM networking code.
• FIX: [Windows] Scans stopping without completing.
• FIX: [Windows] Server could become unresponsive.
• FIX: [Windows] Conflicts with user-installed Python.
• FIX: In certain cases, iOS app wasn’t showing channel images.
• FIX: Unmatched items could become rematched, and items matched to a different agent could go back to the default agent.
• FIX: [OS X] Cocoa media manager no longer jumps back to the grid when you are viewing details during a scan.
• FIX: Hang when remotely playing one file followed by the next on Plex for Mac.
• FIX: [OS X] Directory names are served up in precomposed UTF-8 on OS X (instead of decomposed).
• FIX: [Linux] Crashes reading certain JPEG files.
• FIX: [Linux] Image quality wasn’t as good for posters.
• FIX: [Linux] Advertise on the real IP, not localhost.
• FIX: [Linux] Playing files > 2GB failed.
• FIX: [Linux] Fanart was scaled too small.
• FIX: [Linux] If HOME was set to /, cache path wasn’t computed correctly.
• FIX: Disable IPv6 on Linux/Windows by default, seems to cause problems in some cases.
• FIX: Extreme memory usage or crashes analyzing ISO files.
• FIX: Some crashes on shutdown, and also sped it up.
• FIX: Don’t add the “All Episodes” directory if we don’t have any (e.g. in watched tree).
• FIX: When refreshing older media libraries, bring remote media (poster/art) references local.
• FIX: [OS X] Massive memory leak switching sections in the Cocoa media manager.
• FIX: Offer even higher bitrates over 3G.
• FIX: Issue with media streams in the database that could cause a transcode to fail on start.
• FIX: A handful of other small bugs and crashes.

XML API:

Along with the new core features and fixes, we keep enhancing the Plex Media Server’s API. There are new clients appearing all the time, the most recent of which is for Samsung TVs and Bluray players (I’ve tried it, works great!), and we like to provide a rich HTTP interface for these clients. Full documentation for the API will be available shortly.

• NEW: Media XML contains width and height for video and photos.
• NEW: New endpoint GET /library/sections/X/allLeaves (returns all tracks, episodes, etc.)
• NEW: New endpoint DELETE /library/metadata/X
• NEW: Ability to search by filename.
• FIX: Clipping bug in the container paging API.
• FIX: Files with ‘%’ characters were not encoded correctly in XML.

Because it’s been such a long time, and this release has so many awesome fixes and enhancements, you get a bonus photo of Barkley.

The Plex Media Server is written in highly portable C++ code, and we’ve had versions of it running on Linux quite a while now. However, there are many flavors of Linux, and it runs on many different architectures, so we wanted to make sure we had an easy build and packaging system, which I’m proud to announce, we now do.  Open up a Linux terminal, type a single command, and from scratch, source is downloaded, git repositories are cloned, compilers grind away, and a few dozens of minutes later, you have a package ready for uploading, while you idly pick Chinese food out of your beard.

We’re targeting three Linux flavors with this initial version: Ubuntu 10.01, Slackware 13.1 (unRAID), and ReadyNAS (Intel CPUs). Because of the way we’ve built with minimal external dependencies, it’s quite likely that these will run on a wider range of systems (say, Ubuntu 11.x). The only known external dependency it has is Avahi, which is required to provide Bonjour-based discovery. Unless you install and run Avahi, the server will not show up automatically in all Plex clients.

The Linux version of the Plex Media Server can run on any speed CPU, but of course if you’re planning to transcode, you’ll want at least a dual-core 2.4GHz CPU or so. It can run fine on systems without much memory too, a quiescent Plex Media Server only has about 16MB resident.

Note that we’re still trying to determine the best way to package the releases; more dependency on “system” libraries, less shared libraries, etc. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and our build and packaging system is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a range of options. In the meantime, however, take this preview release for a spin!

Because of the first take on the packaging, and also because this is the very first release for Linux, we’re putting it on the new Plex Labs page. This page is going to be the home base for some of our more experimental projects, things we want to get into your hands to play with before they’re completely finished. The Linux Plex Media Server is the first project from our labs, but rest assured lots of other crazy/cool stuff will pop up in there before long.

Many of you already know Barkley, the official Plex mascot/media hound. He just celebrated his sixth birthday and he’s been a wonderful friend and companion ever since we got him as a tiny little puppy.

On the other end, a wide variety of clients are available to consume content from the Plex Media Server. Our philosophy is not a “one size fits all” ~ the interfaces are tailored to each specific client, and there are a range of options, depending on your particular needs and budget. If you purchase a 2011 LG Smart TV, a Plex client is built in at no additional cost. On the other end of the spectrum, you can run our flagship client on a Mac Mini connected to your TV. Indeed, many of you run multiple Plex clients in your home and take advantage of the centralized management features to seamlessly switch between them.

Today, we’re proud to announce the addition of a new line of Plex clients: The Roku Streaming Players. These are awesome little devices, starting at just $59 for a 720p version, and $79 for a 1080p version. That’s less than the cost of a few beers over a weekend, or maybe even a single night, assuming you like waking up with tattoos and tigers. I personally have one in our guest bedroom, to rave reviews.

The Roku client, written by the talented and charming Jonny Wray (twitter: jonny_wray)  is available right now, for those of you who already have Roku players. Simply log into your Roku account, select Add a Private Channel, and enter “plex” for the channel name.

The Roku client is considered beta, and supports only video content at the moment, although photo and music support will be added in the future (what can we say, we were super excited to share it with you!).  The devices have great video playback capability, and they support Direct Streaming, which means high quality video without transcoding in many cases.

Give the new client a try, and let us know what you think in the new Roku forum!

• NEW: We display the warning icon on shows/seasons/episodes and artist/album/tracks so that you can see more clearly which media is missing. Also note that if you dislike this feature, you can always disable it in the Library preferences by enabling “Empty trash automatically”. We enable it by default because we never want to delete any of your data without you knowing about it first.
  

• FIX: We’ve updated the transcoding engine to fix a number of issues, including 3G video playback being audio only (thanks, Chris!), improvements in threading (1080p content should work more smoothly), and according to one tester, DTS-MA now mixes down correctly. Thanks also to mitch969 and others on the forums for all their help testing!
• FIX: A few fixes for for the web-based media manager, including a fix for changes to collections not saving, sections not disappearing from clients when deleted via the web manager, and fixes for the “Match using” and un-match functionality.
• FIX: When an episode is renamed, make sure we reload metadata if the episode or season number changed.
• FIX: If a slideshow screensaver is active, playing content via the iOS or Android remotes turns the screensaver off (thanks to Man for bring this to our attention).
• FIX: A fix for Turbo Scanning where if you edited a library section (to add a new directory, or when moving media, for example), you would need to perform a deep scan to pick up the changes.