Plex Media Center

It’s been just a short month since our last major release, and we’re back with a bunch of bug-fixes and enhancements that taste great, yet contain no tryptophan, no side of mushy mashed potatoes, nor any boring conversation from Aunt Millie. We hope all our US users had a great Thanksgiving weekend!

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.

I know it’s been a rather busy week here at Plex, but we have one more exciting bit of news for you that we wanted to share. As you know, we really like giving you a choice of platforms and devices on which to enjoy your media, and we’re adding a new one to the list today: Google TV.

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.