Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

I’ve got my brother and his wife in town for the next week, so I’m afraid that I won’t have much time for Plex, but I wanted to take a moment and wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here on the Plex team (for those of you who celebrate it). We appreciate all your kind words and support, and we hope you’re spending some quality time with your families and eating lots of good food! (If anything, think of us when you’re stuffed with dinner, have some wine in your belly, and sit down in front of the TV to watch a movie with Plex.)

You know that Programs section, that doesn’t really do anything except display that photo of the Windows laptop which sends understandable chills down your spine? Well, James has fixed that:

Like, oh my god. Support for launching external applications from Plex? Check! Full-size icon rendering? Check! Exiting Plex while the launched application is running? Check! Stopping the Plex Helper to allow the launched application to use the Apple Remote? Check!

Of course, any use of Front Row is immediately reported to the Plex Servers and your IP is banned for life from the site, but don’t let that stop you.

We’ve been talking about providing integration for a while now with iTunes and iPhoto, and with the feature I’m describing today, your wait is officially over.

The Plex Media Server is a standalone program that runs alongside Plex (or alone on any machine, it’s a Universal Binary). It serves up media from your iLife applications (iTunes and iPhoto today, Aperture and Lightroom shortly). Plex communicates with the Plex Media Server on the local machine, on your local network, or even across the world over the Internet. This means that you can play your friends’ iTunes playlists or browse their podcasts or photo albums.

FEATURE: Access to your media locally or across the network.

The Plex Media Server knows where all your iTunes and iPhoto libraries are, monitors them for changes, and reloads them seamlessly in the background upon update. Add a new album or two to iTunes on your server in the basement, walk over to your home theater setup, and the new albums will be there already for you to play. It’s also extremely fast, loading about 3000 tracks a second.

FEATURE: Hassle-free continuous access to all your media.

Without further ado, let me take you through the iTunes integration. There are lots of little details that enhance usability. Primary browsing is of course through Artists, Albums, Compilations, and Tracks. When you want to browse by Tracks, you pick the starting letter so you don’t sit there waiting for a 30,000 track list to display.

FEATURE: Designed for high performance, even across the network.

(Bonus points to anyone who can name all of the albums displayed.)

Podcast support is also excellent. Both the Videos and Music sections in Plex communicate with the Plex Media Server to provide Podcast browsing and playing. Anyone else out there a Fresh Air fan?

You can also browse albums by genre, or even by decade:

You can also see the albums you’ve added recently, as well as your recent plays by artist, album, or track. This is another example of where we’ve taken the basic iTunes functionality and enhanced it for Plex users.

All said, we think it’s very spiffy! We’ve had a lot of fun browsing friends’ iTunes catalogs over the network; the speed is excellent, and will be improved even further in future versions.

Support for iPhoto (thanks to James, who also added support for Bonjour in the Plex Media Server which will be put to good use shortly) is also rich. You can browse by Event, Album, Keyword, or Rating. Here we are browsing albums (sorry, most of my stuff is in Aperture):

And here we are browsing by keywords:

All said, we’re really excited about this new component to the Plex experience. We’re definitely going to be taking the Plex Media Server in some interesting directions in the coming year.

I’ll leave you with this photo of Barkley and his friend Manu, in which Barkley looks distinctly less clean-cut.

This feature has actually been a pet project of mine for quite a few months. You know, the kind of thing you work on when you have spare time left over from your spare time (which is to say, very rarely).

When I started the project I wasn’t even sure if it would be possible to get Plex to host iTunes visualizers. Getting the FFT code (spectrum analyzer) to match up more closely with iTunes’ was one of the more challenging parts. After countless hours, I’m happy to say that the feature now works well enough to be included in the latest development series.

Also, the visualizer wants to be able to draw to its own window, so no OSD is available when an iTunes visualizer is being used. Additionally, and this is kind of a bummer, the iTunes 8 visualizer appears to be “baked in” to the iTunes binary, so it’s not available for use inside Plex. However, Magnetosphere, which is the original version of the iTunes 8 visualizer, works great!

However, even with all the limitations, I’m pretty proud of the fact that it works as well as it does. It should hopefully provide the Plex community with better choices for a visualization mode that, as someone said on the forums “doesn’t induce seizures”.

These new features, cleverly conjured up by James, add some welcome pizzazz to the Plex experience.

The first allows you to put some tracks into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/Background Music/Main/ which are played while you are browsing around Plex. It’s a great way to personalize the media center to your taste. Personally, I think I’ll put some Zero 7 in there, or maybe some School of Seven Bells (great album, by the way). You can use MP3 files, or even DRM iTunes AAC tracks. Please feel free to leave a comment telling us what tracks you think would make great background music as I’m curious to hear your picks.

I really love this next feature. When I first showed Anna, she said “That’s f—ing cool”, and she’s not prone to swearing. Essentially, we’ve compiled (thanks to James and many contributors on the forums) a collection of high quality TV theme music samples (30 seconds or less, for reasons of copyright) and stored them on the Plex servers. When you scrape your TV shows, besides downloading metadata, Plex queries our server and if available, will download the theme music. The next time you browse into a TV show, the theme music will play. It’s really hard to explain how cool this is until you see and hear it. Once you browse into Lost, for example, and the ethereal theme for the show starts playing, you’ll see how the music coupled with the fan art really provides a more complete experience for the senses.

If you’d like to contribute to the growing collection of theme music, send the files (MP3, preferably, limited to 30 seconds, no need to fade in or out as that’s done in the code) to themes@plexapp.com. Please include the TVDB ID for the show.

Someone in the last post commented on how Barkley looked a little too clean cut, so I’ll post this photo for comparison. That’s him opening up a can of tennis ball whoop-ass on his friend Manu. I think he gets NBC with his ears pointed like that.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet: That DRM music you got from the iTunes store, those 10,000 tracks you own, those 30,000 bottles of Pepsi you purchased in order to win them, those dentist bills for repairing the damage to your teeth from drinking the Pepsi, not in vain. No, my friends, you will be able to play them in Plex/Seven, and thanks to James for making it happen!

(And how, you might ask, would be the best way to play tracks from iTunes in Plex? Let’s just say that’s a topic of a future post. How future, you might ask? Not very.)

Barkley, while being a staunch anti-DRM canine, will still make an appearance for this feature.

Back when I was first getting audio output to work with the media center on OS X, I decided to use the PortAudio library. It’s portable, powerful, and I was already familiar with it, having used it on a previous job.

The downside to PortAudio turned out to be its lack of support for doing passthrough of encoded digital audio streams like AC3 and DTS. I always figured that a digital audio stream was just bits, and if the stream was set to the right bit-width and sample rate, encoded audio would work fine. It turns out I was only partially right; most receivers will accept this stream and lock onto the encoded audio. However, they’re only doing that because they’re being liberal about what they accept. The bitstream is actually lacking lower-level S/PDIF bits (meaning that they can’t be set at the application level) making it an official encoded audio stream. This meant that some receivers, acting by the letter of the law (like the one owned by poor fatez) refused to interpret the stream as encoded digital audio.

We first knew this was a problem around 8 months ago, which makes it the longest running Plex bug in history. The first person to tackle the problem was Brandon Golm. He worked extremely hard over several months on enhancing Portaudio with support for passthrough. However, the CoreAudio code in PortAudio isn’t the easiest to modify, and this approach (which I suggested and accept full blame for) didn’t end up coming to fruition.

Enter our resident Plex audio expert Ryan (who, incidentally, was one of the very first people to contribute code to the OSXBMC project!). Ryan took an interest in the problem and decided to approach it by porting VLC’s CoreAudio output module to Plex. After a enormous amount of hard work, the day finally arrived when he could claim victory:

First of all, thanks to everyone yesterday who took the time to comment on our first feature exposé for Plex/Seven! We really appreciate the feedback and kind words.

Since the very first time I used XBMC on my old XBox, I longed for the ability for it to auto-update itself. Now Plex has had Sparkle update capabilities for a while, but let’s face it, it wasn’t perfect. It would pop up a Cocoa window, and you’d have to change to windowed mode in order to finish the update. Your friends would mock you and your wife would eventually start seeing the FedEx delivery man. This left you feeling empty and yearning for a truly integrated update that you could complete while eating pizza and spilling beer on yourself, greasy Apple Remote in hand.

That day is here!

While he was at it, James also added support for low battery warnings on laptops. What a major buzz-kill it would be if you were just getting to the, let’s say, “climax” of the movie you were watching only to have your laptop go black with a dead battery. Bummer, right? Well, here’s what you’ll see instead:

When you see this warning, walk, don’t run, to the nearest power outlet and plug your poor starving laptop in.

This should give you an idea of how seriously we’re taking OS X integration in this next, post-stabilization phase of Plex development. Four more of the new features deal with OS X integration in some way, and we hope you enjoy reading about them!

First you write an application. Then at some point you decide there might be a few different ways a feature should behave. You add a setting. And that’s when things go downhill.

I’ve personally always had mixed feelings about settings. On the one hand, it’s obviously nice to allow people to configure an application to work the way they want it to. On the other hand, adding an option can often be the result of lazy design: I can’t figure out which is the better way, so I’ll just make it an option.

Apple takes an ascetic approach to configuration in its software. Front Row has exactly *three* settings, and many of its other applications have only a handful of configurable options. I posit that the reason for this is that they spend a lot of time working out the way the software should work by default, out of the box, for the majority of their users.

XBMC has historically been, to say the least, a settings-rich application. Dozens upon dozens of settings were available in the main program, and then many more are available only by editing an XML file (advanced settings).

After months of fielding issues from users on our forums, Isaac took it upon himself (with coding help from Enrique and lots of feedback from the team and testers) to revamp the settings in order to solve the following problems:

• Beginning users were often confused by the vast array of configurable options.
• Some settings were dangerous (i.e. you used to be able to turn off the event server and thus render your Apple Remote useless).
• Some nomenclature used in the settings wasn’t familiar to Mac users (e.g. “Pan and Zoom” instead of “Use Ken Burns Effect” for slideshows.
• Some default values didn’t make sense.
• Options were grouped strangely in some cases.
• Some settings didn’t do anything (except perhaps as a placebo effect).

As another example of how we’ve tried to make things easier for beginning users, Ryan’s new code makes the selection of audio devices much easier, by automatically detecting whether passthrough is supported by the device.

Additionally, keymaps have been simplified (thanks to Isaac and James). Each device’s mappings live in a separate file, and the keymaps are stored in the application bundle (but can still be overridden by the user, of course).

As a final example of how we’ve tried to pay attention to detail, you’ll notice in the screenshot below that a choice for Skin Colors doesn’t appear. That’s because the selected skin doesn’t offer color choices, so we felt that there was no sense in displaying an option that the user can’t change.

Please note that most of these changes are not set in stone. We are trying to find a balance between keeping advanced Plex users happy and at the same time making life easier for new users. If there is a setting that was hidden that you think is of great importance please take a minute to voice your concern on our forums.

We’ve all been coding until our fingers bleed, and now we’re almost ready to give you the fruits of our labor in the form of the new development series of Plex. The first release went out last night to our testers, and things are looking good.

Since there are so many new features, we’re going to detail them in blog posts, one feature per day. The first one will be posted later on today.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to show your plexy side, come visit our new web store that Isaac and Alexis set up, where you can pick up a Plex t-shirt or mug!