Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

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!

The crash reports filtered in today, and at the end of the day I sorted them into folders. There were literally 26 identical crashes when playing VIDEO_TS, which is a great sign that a lot of people are running into the problem. Thanks so much to the people who wrote a quick description. Feel free to add your email if you don’t mind me contacting you for further information.

Anyway, the release today (HTTP, Torrent, Source) fixes the most common crashes and hangs that I observed after a day of watching reports come in.

• FIX: Possible crash when adding or editing source.
• FIX: Crash playing VIDEO_TS files (the biggest one!)
• FIX: Code signing is done correctly, so it will behave with Leopard Firewall.
• FIX: Lots of crashes as a result of some optical drive code still being enabled by default.
• FIX: A *ton* of hangs doing various things (e.g. adding sources, stopping video). The problem was that the scanner thread (which sometimes starts when the program starts), creates a big-ass database transaction inside which it does tons of time-consuming things like network scraping. This means that (a) no other database operations can run, like saving where you were in a file for resuming when you stop, or setting content on a source and (b) if the scan gets aborted for some reason, you end up with nothing in the database! The transactional design is simply incorrect. For now I’ve simply disabled the transaction, which fixes all the hangs, but it *may* introduce other issues (but hopefully not). I’ll choose the devil I don’t know on this one.

OK, the following new release should fix the nasty regression with non-primary screens (HTTP, Bittorrent, Source). Enjoy, I’m off to bed.

OK, it’s been about three weeks since the last release, and we’ve been working hard. The most noticeable change in this release (HTTP, Torrent, Source) is the rebranding. The name of the app is Plex, its settings are in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex, the helper is called PlexHelper, it writes logs to ~/Library/Logs/Plex.log, etc. This means that when you start up Plex for the first time, you’ll have a blank slate. If you want to migrate over your old thumbnails and library, have no fear, Isaac has written up a handy guide to assist you with that. I personally sort of appreciated the clean slate, but that’s likely just me! Also, note that when first run, it will uninstall and kill any running XBMCHelper, so you don’t have to do anything to get that to work.

• REG: Skip to next video didn’t work, and trying to play a new video while a current one was playing caused the application to hang.
• FIX: Crashes while switching from full-screen to windowed mode (or vice-versa) when running scripts, like Apple Movie Trailers.
• FIX: Don’t hide the menu bar if we’re not displaying on the primary screen.
• FIX: Visualizations were getting the (de)amplified PCM data, which meant that volume affected the visualizations.
• FIX: The default audio latency has been re-calibrated, and should result in more accurate lip-sync.
• FIX: Crash on start on Russian systems (and possibly others).
• FIX: Crash when network goes away or is not enabled.
• FIX: Browsing photos with the Apple Remote didn’t allow for backing up a single level (thanks, Isaac!)
• FIX: Exiting DVD menu with Apple Remote now works (thanks, Isaac!)
• NEW: Remote helper now has Secure Input disabled by default, because it messed with VMware and Adobe Illustrator (among other things). You should still enable this option if (a) you have problems with Front Row starting along with Plex and (b) you don’t run any conflicting software.
• FIX: If you minimized Plex while playing a movie, things got weird when restoring, and lots of frames were dropped.
• FIX: Lots of bugs fixed with text subtitles, including missing or truncated subtitles at the end, errors in parsing that led to lots of jumbled subtitles all being displayed together, and subtitles getting lost after jumping backwards. Also, parsing subtitles use to be an O(n^2) operation, and it’s now an O(n) operation (i.e. much faster!) Thanks to everyone on the forums who helped with reproducing them and uploading subtitle files.
• FIX: DVD playback from optical media has now been disabled by default. Why? It’s too way buggy for us to leave it enabled with a good conscience (especially since it has caused crashes for people not even using the feature). If you really want to use it, you’ll have to add “<enableopticalmedia>true</enableopticalmedia>” into your advanced settings file. It’s on the roadmap, it will be fixed, but for now it’s disabled by default.
• FIX: Ryan fixed a problem with high sample rate AAC files (e.g. 96KHz) causing a crash. Sweet!
• FIX: The infamous “mouse doesn’t reach to the edges of the screen” has been fixed. Yes, in full screen mode the mouse doesn’t *quite* get to the bottom, but it’s close enough.
• FIX: Enrique fixed the OS X font loading to look in more places (/System/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts).
• NEW: Plex now replaces the default NIB shipped with SDL with its own, which means, among other things, all the standard ⌘ accelerators work, like ⌘-Q, ⌘-M, ⌘-H and, yes, even ⌘-F to toggle full-screen mode! It also means we get a new About box. The number in parenthesis is the GIT revision of the release. Yes, those are scantily clad ladies in the background, but I blame it all on the talented djh.

• FIX: The frame rate limiter was buggy, which caused the app to use more CPU than it should when idle *and* hidden. The video frame rate display has also been slightly smoothed.
• FIX: The application is now code-signed, which means those having trouble with the Leopard firewall should see better results now.
• FIX: BMP files (such as those found in the multi-GB backpack torrent for Aeon) didn’t load correctly.
• FIX: Smart Crash Reporter has been updated, and should now install correctly on more (all?) systems.
• FIX: The ‘a’ key now goes to the next audio language track when viewing videos. Thanks, Isaac!
• FIX: A crash setting fan art in Aeon.
• FIX: RAW files (CR2) have been re-enabled, as the bug that made loading them really slow has been fixed. Superpea and other photographers will definitely appreciate this.
• NEW: Two new visualizers have been included, waveform and spectrum.

As usual, we’ve also cherry-picked stuff from the XBMC team, including:

• Lots of fixes by the ever-talented jmarshall, including fixes to background loading in skins, fanart and more.
• Some fixes by d4rk to OpenGL handling around visualizers and an off-by-one error with textures.
• Some scanning/thumbnail fixes by tslayer.
• A fix to prevent the “buffering” dialog from displaying for too long, and a bogus thin line showing up in textures by elupus.
• Other miscellaneous fixes.

It’s been super hot lately, and Barkley’s been spending lots of time sleeping on the relatively cool wood floor.

The Forth of July, at least for most Americans, conveys visions of charred flesh on a grill, alcohol poisoning, and finger-amputating pyrotechnics. I do plan on partaking in every one of these cherished institutions, but first, a new release (HTTP, BitTorrent, Source)!

Please read through these notes carefully, as there are certain things that have changed and you’ll want to know about them.

• FIX: Fixed an annoying regression which caused some videos to play too quickly. Hopefully it helped you cruise through wife-selected gems such as “So You Think You Can Dance”.
• NEW: There is now support for “watered down” full-screen mode, and it’s enabled by default. This should provide compatibility with Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, Cmd-Tab, Cmd-Control-Esc, etc. Plus all three of you who use Remote Desktop to control it will be happy that the annoying tearing is gone. Also in this new mode, screen blanking has been improved, you can modify your settings on the fly without restarting. If you’d like to use the old mode, you’ll need to edit ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/AdvancedSettings.xml like this:

• NEW: Don’t allow disabling caches, as this could lead to problems.
• NEW: Enrique added support for Smart Crash Reports. This means that whenever you get a crash, you have the option of sending us the crash report. Simply click on the “Report…” button, and then in the bottom right, you’ll see a button for “Send to OSXBMC & Apple…” (which is enabled after the system configuration is gathered). Please, please, please, use this, we’ll get the crash reports, your bugs will get fixed, and then we’ll all drink beer and watch fireworks. Note also that the first time you run it, you’ll get a dialog asking if it can install Smart Crash Reports. (Note: I’ve heard this doesn’t appear on all machines, not sure why that is yet.)

• NEW: The XBMCHelper is now installed into ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC, so that people don’t have that problem upgrading the application because the file is in use. The helper is automatically upgraded if needed as well.
• FIX: The helper settings section has been renamed “Remote Helper” since it handles more than the Apple Remote.
• FIX: We no longer prevent you from using the helper if you’ve installed Remote Buddy. There should be no problem using the two together, although to be honest, I don’t use it myself. Many thanks to the developer for working with us on this one.
• FIX: That annoying problem where the Apple Remote brings up both Front Row and OSXBMC *should* be fixed. More like “worked around” actually, because it’s a bug in OS X. The side effect is that when the helper is running, it’s possible that applications like Quicksilver (who capture keys) won’t completely work. I say “possible” because (a) I haven’t tried it and (b) I don’t use Quicksilver while watching movies.
• FIX: Crash on startup for case-sensitive partitions. Thanks to Brent for helping me track this one down.
• FIX: A regression that prevented images from loading over SMB (does nobody use the app to view photos anymore?)
• FIX: Removed all the broken resolutions from the screen settings. We’ll get back into changing screen modes at some point, probably at the same time as we switch refresh rates for different media.
• NEW: Apple Movie Trailers script was updated to the latest version (thanks, Nuka!)
• FIX: The default port for the web server has been changed to 3000.
• NEW: Latest version of ofdb scraper was included.
• FIX: The keymap has a new entry for switching between audio languages in full-screen (the ‘a’ key). Also, the ‘c’ key works to obtain a context menu in the file manager view (which is needed to eject optical media). To obtain these new settings, you’ll need to whack your old Keymap.xml file.
• NEW: When starting from scratch, a default sources.xml is installed which provides people with some basic sources for photos, music and video. Many thanks to Isaac for these last four items!
• FIX: The smart folder code has been reworked a bit. It’s *possible* that some of the scanning issues that Jeremy was running into will be fixed. If not, it’s probably not the fault of smart folders.
• FIX: I’ve increased the latency by a few milliseconds in the Portaudio code to hopefully reduce or get rid of underflows entirely (resulting in audio dropouts). Please see if you notice any improvement, and check the log if you’d like to see what latency it’s using. N.B. The change will be subliminal (e.g. on my system the latency went from 1.5ms to around 9ms.)
• FIX: Who says we don’t save the best for last? That annoying bug where the app hangs when canceling a video that’s buffering (e.g. YouTube or AMT or FTP)? Fixed!

Some good stuff cherry-picked as well:

• Vulkanr got DVD playing working. So you should be able to insert a DVD into the drive and watch it play. To eject, go to the file manager and use the context menu. If it doesn’t eject right away, try again. Brilliant stuff, vulkanr! He also fixed another Python crash.
• Jmarshall fixed the <blackbarcolour> setting, and lots of other little things.
• Charleydoes fixed a crash on exit and a slow query.
• Spiff added .ogv/.oga file extensions.

We’ve had some really hot days, and not a lot of rain. Barkley’s favorite place has been our friend’s pool.

I dropped Anna off at the airport this morning; she’s on a two week trip to the mainland to visit family. Plus, it’s been raining all day. These two things conspired to keep me inside all day wrapping up the release. (That’s not entirely true, a couple of friends came over with a lot of beer and I spent the better part of the afternoon in an alcohol-induced stupor. But I digress.)

Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, torrent, source). I’m hoping that we can get this 0.5 release wrapped up and move on to the new and interesting things coming in 0.6. (Translation: please don’t report any more damn bugs for this version!) The next beta will be a release candidate.

• NEW: AC3 encoding. This is a killer new feature that allows your receiver to play full surround sound from “unsupported” formats, like AAC and FLAC. My hat is off to Ryan Walklin who got it working in record time. I know, we’re supposed to be stabilizing things for 0.5 final, but this was just too damn cool not to work in. Go play some Apple Trailers and then throw your Apple TV out the window.
• FIX: The infamous and incredibly annoying “CAPETag” bug, manifested by a crash in the middle of music playlists (randomly, of course).
• FIX: GIF image loading was kind of broken. I’m surprised nobody noticed. I guess everyone’s pr0n collection has moved to JPEG? Boobs do look better in 24 bit color.
• FIX: A crash with keyboard layouts (thanks to Enrique and Roman).
• FIX: Text subtitles with more than two lines would have missing lines.
• FIX and FIX: Lots of fixes to smart folders. We now run asynchronously and timeout after a while if nothing has been returned. Memory handling has been fixed (thanks, Enrique!) so it doesn’t crash when scanning a smart-folder-source to the library. And we respect the folders scope when executing the query.
• FIX: Switching between full-screen and windowed mode has been fixed to return to the same windowed resolution.
• FIX: Hugely reduced latency with controllers (XBox360/Apple Remote). The difference is unbelievable with the XBox360 controller, it should be indistinguishable from a wired controller at this point.
• FIX: Crash when displaying SSA subtitles in some cases. Thanks to Bad Mr Frosty and Parag for helping me track this down!
• FIX: Minor changes to the way we do vsync, not sure if it will improve things for people having trouble, but it won’t make things worse.
• FIX: Revert the logarithmic volume change. Not sure if it’s a Mac thing or not, but it just made things really quiet for the majority of the volume range.
• FIX: Crash on exit when exiting when a script is running.
• FIX: Some erroneous references to /opt/local in the libraries we ship in Resources.
• FIX: 187.avi was getting stacked with 300.mkv, and I can assure you that the latter really doesn’t play well after the former. Although, come to think of it, Samuel L Jackson yelling “This is motherfucking Sparta!” would be pretty awesome.
• FIX: The XBMCHelper is now killed again when you disable it in the settings.
• NEW: Enrique added support for CoreFoundation’s exception handling, so that we better log those sorts of errors.
• FIX: Enrique fixed a few more memory leaks and built the latest libcdio to fix a crash.
• NEW: (Bonus subtitle-lover’s feature) Rather than just being able to select the lowly Arial font (or whatever you tossed in the media/Fonts directory in your application package (and come on, who does that?) you can now pick from a large number of Apple-supplied fonts. Seen below is Georgia Bold. Please let me know if you have an answer to the question posed.

I also cherry-picked some fixes from the linuxport branch, most notably:

• A crash opening context menus (yuvalt).
• Crash in Python selecting list items (nice one, vulkanr!)
• Better thread-safety in DLL trackers (charleydoes)
• Fixes to AC3/DTS buffering (elupus)

With these changes plus the crash on exit from the list above, Python support should actually be pretty solid, or at least getting there!

My sincere thanks to our community, you are all awesome. Almost 450 users on the forum, over 2000 posts, simply brilliant. We’re getting top-notch bug reports, and people are being really helpful and friendly.

Without further ado, your Barkley.

Family in town, not much time, but I wanted to get a new release out there. Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, Bittorrent, source):

• REG: Switching between windowed and full-screen mode when watching a video now works again.
• NEW: The genius known as bmfrosty realized that all Leopard installations come with Arial Unicode, so I’ve put some code in to intercept requests to Arial and redirect to the system-installed Unicode version. This means no more need to download and install the font for all you international folk, it should work out of the box! Simply select Arial as the skin font, and it should work. We’ll be putting more work in here shortly, including allowing you to pick more system-provided fonts.
• FIX: You can now add Smart Folders as sources.
• FIX: Some memory leaks playing sounds and loading images (thanks to riquedafreak!)
• NEW: We’ve upped the minimum cache size in a few cases to be more realistic for HD media. Still lots of improvements to be made in this area, but if you’re having trouble with frames dropping or jerky playback, make *sure* your cache settings are high enough.
• FIX: I’ve included a patch by crocodile that apparently fixes streaming from a Dreambox.
• FIX: The default on-screen time for the song information has been raised from 2 seconds to 10.
• FIX: New ffmpeg libraries to include a fix by elupus relating to seeking in MKV files.
• FIX: A patch by Roman Sokolov has been included which apparently helps out with Cyrillic input, switching keyboard layouts, and allowing hot-keys to work. I’m not completely clear on the fixes because, frankly, I don’t type in Cyrillic, but the patch was clean.
• NEW: Another part of the same patch, we now allow the desired URL encoding to be specified in a scraper. We default to UTF-8, and the new KinoPoisk scraper that’s been included in this release specifies CP1251.

Areas to test:

• Cyrillic/international keyboard input, Russian movie scraping.
• Smart folders.

Here’s a screenshot with Greek language enabled, using the system-supplied Arial font.

And finally, your moment of Barkley:

Assisted by the lovely Stella Artois, I worked a while this evening fixing some bugs. The result can be found here (HTTP, torrent, source):

• FIX: For ages now we’ve had trouble with large subtitles and the lovely Aeon skin (cases with fonts having point sizes great than 50). Well, no longer. Thanks to jmarshall for pointing me in the right direction on this one.
• REG: Amazingly nobody noticed, but playing movie trailers with the AMT plugin caused a crash. Luckily, before anyone complained, it’s now working again.
• FIX: Better behavior with switching between full-screen and windowed mode in terms of fonts and skins resizing correctly.
• REG: Caching A/V ratios tweaked, fixes frame dropping problem introduced last version. I tried a bunch of HD trailers and got frame dropping only when my pathetic connection couldn’t keep up.
• NEW: Bumped up maximum allowable cache size in certain cases.
• FIX: TIFF loading crash reported by superpea, fixed by upgrading to the latest version of libtiff.
• FIX: ProjectM was updated to 1.1 by malloc64 (nice work, mate!), and I recompiled for OS X. I ran into some problems on GMA950 (go figure), but worked around them. It *should* now work and not display garbage on the lower third of the screen. More tweaks may be needed, but I think it’s much better than the old one.

We’ve seen these racquetballs before, haven’t we?