I just wanted to quickly cover a few of the known issues, and some frequently asked questions, in hopes of helping you with the new release.

myPlex

• Why don’t I have any thumbnails? Some of you are noticing that your server’s sections don’t look as pretty as mine do. Speaking frankly, my sections bring all the girls to the yard. The reason for this is simply that with the many thousands of people who connected their servers to myPlex for the first time today, the thumbnailing jobs are a bit backed up. We’ll be bringing more hardware online shortly to help.

• Why don’t I see/can’t I play my media on myPlex? myPlex is a cloud-based hub for your media, which helps connect Plex clients to Plex Media Servers, but it does not store your libraries (media or metadata).
• I am having issues logging into myPlex/the forums. In order to support single sign-on and scale, we are migrating over accounts from the forums to myPlex. This migration should be transparent and automatic, and it has been for thousands of people. However, a handful of you have had trouble, the primary situation being if forgot your forum password. If you need help, please stop by the Plex Chat and one of our friendly engineers will lend a hand!
• myPlex makes it too easy for me to watch my media, no matter where I am! Sorry, we’ll get right on that.

Known issues

• There appears to be a problem with iOS 4.x, where users are seeing a crash on start with Plex for iOS 2.0. We’re scurrying around to find a device with that version (we’ve all updated to iOS5), so if you’re having problems, the quick fix would be to upgrade, if you’re willing to do so.
• A minority of users are reporting stutter with nearly all video, which we’re puzzled by. We’re in the process of isolating the cause, and you can help by stopping by Plex Chat and sharing details of your setup, or adding to a forum thread.
• Transcoding qualities from the Plex Laika client were wrong (too low), and additionally, transcoding from a server which was not on port 32400 (an automatically mapped one rarely is) would fail. A fix for this one is available as 0.9.5.1; the updated clients are available for download now (no autoupdate for now, sorry!).

Security/privacy

IANAL but these are my common sense notes:

• All communication between clients and myPlex is fully SSL encrypted.
• myPlex doesn’t store any information about your media (files, hashes, etc.)
• myPlex stores five thumbnails from each section (when it gets around to it) but no metadata about items in your library (beyond what you see).
• myPlex acts as a hub, connecting Plex clients and Plex servers, but it is not involved in any communication between client and server (beyond facilitating it).
• myPlex stores URLs and metadata for queued items (obviously), and your progress viewing the items.
• When clients sign into myPlex, they send OS type and version, client type and version, and a unique identifier (random UUID on most platforms).
• myPlex loves you and respects you. myPlex doesn’t wait to call you. myPlex never forgets your birthday.

General tips

• Plex/Nine used to contain client and server together in a single package. For a variety of reasons, the new release has separated out the client (Plex Media Center) and the server (Plex Media Server). This allows you to quickly install just the client on a machine, for example. The new server can simply be dragged to Applications like the client.
• The old and new clients don’t interfere with each other and can both be used on the same machine.
• You can move between old and new server (and back again) without any trouble.
• One thing to note is if you had the old server starting automatically, you may want to disable this in Plex/Nine via Preferences > System > Plex Media Server if you’re going to run the new server.
• There is no need to re-scan, recreate your library, or anything of that nature when moving between server versions. Try the new one out! Make your dog use the old one!
• The new client will work with the old server, mostly, but you’ll be missing features (e.g. TV posters in On Deck/Recently Added). If the server is much older, the new client may not see its sections at all.
• The old client will work with the new server perfectly, but it might be a bit jealous.
• The new client is labeled BETA. It’s very new. Most things should work much better. Some things are still missing, incomplete, or broken.
• There is no auto-update for the new client or server yet, but it will be added soon.

And for Phill, who correctly pointed out in the comments that such a major release warrants an additional photo of Barkley: you, sir, are correct, and we’ve taken steps to remedy this most serious breach of protocol.

Without further ado, let’s explore the new releases. As many of you figured out from the initial teaser post, the word Laika was included. Laika is the codename for the next generation Plex desktop client. (For you collectors, another beautiful retro hint is here.) We chose the name as a homage to the Plex mascot Barkley (whose name roughly translates to Laika), and a tribute to the first dog in space.

The Plex desktop client has been largely rewritten, based on the latest stable release of XBMC. This means that it’ll benefit from all the great work that team has put in, and will have the updated skinning engine and player that Plex makes use of. This means that it’ll run smoother, and consume less CPU and memory. Media playback is also much better, with improved and more flexible A/V sync, support for optical media, and more. In addition, we’ve updated the core engine (the incredible ffmpeg) to the very latest code, which means there is support for 10-bit video (Hi10P), HTTP Live Streaming, and much more. We’ve also made it easier to keep abreast of future changes from both teams.

If you’ve been using Plex for a while, you’re no doubt aware of the Retroplex skin, which is one of the most popular third party skins. We’re pleased to announce that its talented author, Sebastian, has been working closely with us to modernize the default Plex skin for this release, and not a single pixel has gone untouched. It looks amazing, and I’m sure you’ll love it.

This new release of Plex fully supports myPlex, and is a “thin client”. This means you can download just the client, sign into myPlex, and you have instant access to all your media (and media shared with you), no matter where you are. The client can transcode or Direct Play remote media, including Flash/Silverlight video. Many of you have asked for this feature, and we’re incredibly happy to bring it to you. If you look closely, you’ll see there’s even an option for including shared libraries in the universal search.

We always strive to make our software easier to use, and one thing we noticed was that in regular usage, certain media consumption patterns emerged that we could take advantage of to make it much easier for people to get to their media more easily. For example, if I want to watch TV, I’m most likely to be interested in seeing the next unwatched episode of a show I’ve watched recently. Easy enough to explain, but in previous versions, you were stuck finding the TV show, going to the right season, and looking for the next unwatched episode. Honestly, I’d rather spend that time opening a beer.

It’s actually easier to explain with a screen capture.

I decided to watch some TV, so i scrolled down to highlight my Television section, and to the right, the media shelf fades in with two areas: On Deck content, and Recently Added content. Just last night, we watched the third episode of West Wing (no spoilers in the comments, please), so Plex is offering me the fourth episode. Two clicks away and I’m watching it, as opposed to (I just counted) fifteen!

A week or two ago, we finished the last episode of the first season of Walking Dead (if you haven’t read the graphic novel, you really should), and so it’s offering me the season premier for the second season. Unfortunately, I have to wait for a guy friend to visit to watch that, since Anna won’t go near zombies.

Before that, I got halfway through a Simpsons episode and then got distracted by zombies or shiny objects, so it’s offering me that half-finished episode next. And so on.

In the lower shelf, it’s showing me media that’s been recently added to this section of the library.

This context-sensitive way of offering media is, in my opinion, the single coolest new feature in this next release. We also use the shelves to display the recently added items to your media queue:

If you’re hovering over a channels menu item, it shows you the most recently used channels: again, we’re trying to help you get to where you’re going as quickly as possible.

There are lots of other little details I could go into, but there’s one more big one I want to share in the form of another screen capture. Drum roll, please…

That’s right, Plex is now officially available for Windows. We hired some amazing engineers who live and breath the platform, and they’ve not only gotten it running splendidly, they’ve added a few sweet touches like integration with Windows Media Center. That delicious new icon, by the way, which you’ll see in the new clients, was designed by the superbly talented Alexis, who does incredible work (he also designed all previous versions of the Plex icons).

Let’s switch gears over to the server side, where we’ve made lots of improvements as well. First and foremost, since we’re on the topic of Windows, I’m happy to announce that the new Plex Media Server supports Flash and Silverlight video. We’ve also fixed A/V sync and drift that occurred with Flash and Silverlight videos on OS X.

We’ve greatly improved the transcoder, fixing A/V sync issues, DTS distortion, transcoding over 3G, and another handful of issues, including interoperating with the Roku 2.

Here’s a list of the rest of the changes in the Plex Media Server for your perusal:

• Memory usage reading iTunes XML file greatly reduced.
• Added browsing movies by country.
• Allow browsing by collection in music sections.
• Fix for crashes when scanning directories without permission.
• [Linux] Fixes for inotify automatic scans.
• Improved reliability in network advertisements.
• Fix for date-based episodes not getting any metadata.
• Greatly sped up starting audio playback over slow connections.
• Fix 100% CPU usage on run first.
• Fixed unmatched items not getting local subtitles.
• Crash starting and and then quickly stopping Flash/Silverlight playback.
• [Windows] Fix unresponsive tray icon.
• [Windows] A few other crashes.
• Sped up recently added media queries.
• Allow Direct Streaming for up to 160kbps AAC
• Fix nested iTunes playlists.

(Of course, all the new features, such as the “on deck” and recently added content are available via the HTTP API to the media server.)

Moving along to the mobile applications, we’ve spent an enormous amount of effort updating both the iOS and Android applications. Darrin will be posting tomorrow with details on the new version of Plex for Android, and on the iOS side, we closed over 150 issues and added full myPlex integration. Check out the new awesome home page, which is a great way to see an overview of your media (note the shared media and the queue from myPlex):

You will love the new iOS application. It starts faster, connects faster, resumes faster, and is much more stable than the last version. Here is a list of the most visible changes:

• myPlex support.
• All-new home screen.
• Alphabet indexing for quickly browsing through large media collections (yay!)
• Subtitle scaling.
• Audio boost for videos.
• Internationalized to French, Swedish, German and Korean, with many thanks to our translators. (Want to help us localize it more? Visit this link in Firefox, and we’ll incorporate for the next release. Klingon, please!)
• Much faster and more reliable connections to servers.
• Caching improvements, images cached between WiFi and 3G.
• Remember last filter (e.g. Recently Added) for each section.
• Display album art/track name on lock screen (iOS5).
• Support for photos via Plex Media Manager.
• Lots of other minor improvements all over the application.

As I hope you can see, this is an absolutely massive release. We’ve brought huge improvements to every area of our media platform. We really hope you’ll enjoy them!

Of course, the question you all have is: when it will be launched? Let me bring your attention to the two numbers on the teaser postcard: TEN, and ELEVEN. The number ELEVEN referred to the year, 2011, while TEN referred to this fine month of October. That means that you will all be playing with all these new toys very shortly!

We’ll leave you with these fine screencasts, put together by our very own Boots:

• myPlex (part 1)
• myPlex (part 2)
• Desktop Clients
• Mobile Clients

See you soon, with a photo of Barkley.

From the corner, Scott raised his head from his iPad, flicked an imaginary piece of lint off his shirt, and asked the room “So what do you all make of iCloud?”

“As long as it can store my Golden Eggs, I think it’s the most brilliant thing on the planet”, I replied, sending a boomerang bird shooting straight up into the air.

“Seriously, though”, Scott continued, “if Apple is doing it, it must be brilliant. Or different, or something”.

Those words stuck with me, and over the next few months we all worked long hours, behind the multiple levels of biometric security at the Plex Technology Lab. And now, we’re finally ready to reveal what we’ve been working on.

The Plex cloud services – we’ve called them myPlex – are designed to do three things to help make your lives easier:

1) An incredibly easy way for you to access your media remotely. One of the most common support questions we get involves connecting a mobile device to media stored at home. It’s a tricky process, and we’ve worked to make it ridiculously simple. Once you’ve created a Plex account (and if you have a forums account, you already have one), you simply sign in on the Plex Media Server, and on your Plex client (e.g. iOS or Android), and you’re done. Super easy, and super awesome. Even if you have multiple Plex Media Servers in multiple locations, and multiple mobile devices, myPlex keeps track of everything in order to give you a seamless experience.

2) A universal media queue. How many times have you run across a video and thought “I’d love to watch this on Plex later”? Or perhaps your aunt (the one who always sends you a birthday card with your name ever so slightly misspelled) forwarded you a YouTube video about cats that’s actually funny, and you want to watch it on your TV. Well, we’ve implemented a nifty bookmarklet that lets you save web videos (and soon other media as well) to your myPlex media queue. This queue is available on all myPlex-enabled clients, with all the features you’re already familiar with (stop on one client, resume on another), and on-the-fly transcoding when needed (say, for example, for watching that Flash video on your iPhone).

We support over 100 sites at launch (many thanks to Ian, Mike, Sander, Pierre, and others!), and the coolest part about it? The technology behind the media queue is based on our popular and powerful Plex Framework, which means that it’s easy for anyone to write one, usually in a few dozen lines of code. Oh yeah, and there is an API as well, for easy integration with third party software.

3) An easy way for you to share your personal media with friends. In this day and age, we generate huge amounts of personal media, our digital legacy of 0s and 1s. And now that you have them beautifully organized in the Plex Media Server, wouldn’t it be nice to share all your kid’s soccer videos with his grandparents? We’ve made it incredibly easy to share via the myPlex web site. With zero additional configuration, any myPlex-enabled client can browse and play the shared media.

All of these new features imply enhancements to the clients, and we realize that many of you are eager to hear about updates to the mobile and desktop clients. Stay tuned…

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.

The Web is in a constant state of flux, with sites changing and being redesigned. Wherever possible, the Plex Channels use the site’s API to ensure stability in the face of this change, but at this point we have nearly 250 channels, and we decided it was time to add some automation to the quality assurance process. Whenever we have a server sitting with idle cycles, I’m deeply bothered, since I feel those cycles could be spent doing productive work. Didn’t someone once say that the devil makes work for idle cycles?

Fast-forward a few weeks and that lazy server is hard at work checking all of the channels for failures and putting the results up on a giant board with ~ wait for it ~ colored status indicators! That’s right, we took the colors that the US Dept of Homeland Security established for its terror alerts (doubtlessly arrived at after months of study and millions of dollars of expense), and shamelessly stole them for our leaderboard. According to the image below, if you plan on using Webcomics, expect a backscatter.

What you’re actually looking at in the list above are plug-ins that have been fixed. When the tester detects a problem, it uses advanced heuristics similar to those used by HAL when he tried to kill that annoying Dave character to assign a point value to the broken channel (How long as the plug-in been broken for? How badly broken is it? Is it a popular channel?). After that, our enterprising group of ninja developers swoops in and fixes it, the tester verifies the fix, and gives points to the developer who fixed it.

The points accumulate, and every month, the people with the top three scores have lavish amount of praise and modest cash prizes (enough to feed a healthy gadget obsession or impress a significant other) heaped upon them.

The first round just ended, and we’d like to take a few minutes to meet the winners. Amazingly, given the total number of points accumulated, there was a tie for first place (if that’s not the definition of bi-winning, I don’t know what is). Without further ado, let’s meet the first 1st place winner, Pierre (twitter: @pierredn), who had some beers with us during the San Jose Plex meet-up and who is an all-around super cool guy.

Pierre, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m an electrical engineer by trade living in California. I’ve always loved computer programming and tinkering with computers, so Plex was a match made in heaven with its open plug-in architecture. Now the only thing I need is a bit of time to enjoy watching TV/Movies/Media ….

How long have you been using Plex?

I have been using Plex since May 2009 when I read an article about it, I was very intrigued and jumped right in. It was love at first sight and although my media library was pretty small at first due to the awkwardness of the media managers I used to use, it has now grown to a respectable size since Plex makes it so easy to manage all the different files you may have. After a few months of ramping up, I saw the lack of plugins in my native French language, started writing a few and offered to help. I haven’t stopped ever since. I now dream in Python.

What’s your favorite feature and the one thing you’d like to see changed/added in Plex?

favorite feature in Plex : Plug-ins! They helped me cut the cord on cable TV and save a ton a $$ every month. I now only watch what I want to watch and they help me stay connected to foreign media all the way to my bed with the great iOS app ….

one thing to change : more support/content for live events / sporting events – not entirely a Plex feature but that would the last step toward completely replacing traditional broadcasts and streaming absolutely everything.

Tied for first place is Sander, from the Netherlands, who has been Plexing for years and is one of the nicest and most helpful guys you will ever meet.

I’m a 30 year old guy, addicted to coffee, film festivals and TV shows such as Fringe, Twin Peaks, The X-Files and La Femme Nikita. I have a background in interaction design and usability testing, but my interests also include (new) web technologies and everything that’s got to do with (digital) video and film. When my Windows/MediaPortal PC died a little over two years ago, it didn’t take long for me to decide to switch to the Mac after I discovered Plex. Four months later I wrote my first plugin (for the Dutch Film Festival website). My favorite Plex feature is the automatic collection of metadata. Although I personally don’t like the media flags, I really love the background art and preview images that are shown for all my movies and shows. But the metadata settings is also a part of Plex that I see a lot of (non-English speaking) users struggle with and it could use some improvements.

In third place is Ryan McNally, who has also been with us for years; he’s written an iPhone app for Plex, and tons of plug-ins.

Ryan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

a/s/l: 29/male/Toronto, Canada

Likes: Curling, golf, Python and Objective-C. Really bad zombie movies. The black stuff. Comics that would put CCA censors into conniptions. Those forms of rock commonly described as ‘Hard’. Animation.

Dislikes: Allman braces, lower_case_variables_with_underscores, Flash Player for video streaming. Java apps on OS X. The perversion of the noble potato for wussy fruit drinks. Clown shoes.

Claims to Fame: Wrote the first mobile app to connect to the Plex Media Server. Some of his plug-ins have been downloaded over 9000 times. Charlie Sheen had to go into rehab after doing a hit of /him/.

How long have you been using Plex?

Since it was called osxbmc. Remember when it was called Plexsquared? And Sean was like “Drop the squared. It’s cleaner.” and we were all like “What the hell would you know Sean? Your p2p network is polluted and ‘Cry me a River’ is downright creepy.” And then we changed the name and went water-skiing with nude supermodels? At least that’s how I remember it.

What’s your favorite feature?

The media server is the best thing to happen to web media since H.264. One day people will wonder how we ever accessed web videos (or videos as they’ll call them) without it.

…and the one thing you’d like to see changed/added in Plex?

Well I’m not one to suggest changes to other people’s work but I’ll give it a go: I’d love to be able to write pms handlers for new file types (pdf, rar, cbz, epub to photosets/video streams) and webhosts (hotfile, nntp); create arbitrary metadata schemas (for comics, ebooks, magazines); and HID+streaming (GameCenter). I still have collections that aren’t managed by Plex. They laughed when I suggested ebooks in iTunes. Now it’s big business for Apple. I don’t want six apps to handle my entertainment. I want one, one good one. I think you know which one I’m talking about.

Many congratulations to our winners, and best of luck in the next round to all the others who participated! (By the way, the monthly competition is open to any developer who has at least three Channels/Agents accepted into the official Plex repo.)

So there is this tab on the iOS application that has been blacked out (or “red-ed out” to be more precise about it) in previous posts.

Unfortunately, in a true comedy of errors, I did a horrible job of keeping it a secret. In the first post, I left some images on the server that didn’t have the button blocked out, and one clever person found it by typing in URLs. He was kind enough to send me an email about it to let me know, and I removed the images (thanks, Charles!).

Last night I was so tired when writing the blog post that I left the button completely unobscured in not one but TWO separate images. Twenty two comments poured in mentioning this fact (which I left unapproved, of course).

So just in case there’s anybody out there who doesn’t yet know, the feature which we’ve been trying to keep secret is this:

Yep, that’s it. Search. It’s a really boring feature, actually, we have been trying to replace it with something much cooler over the last few days, but we ran out of time.

Or did we?

This is not your grandmother’s search. This is an ass-kicking, search-as-you-type, tri-winning sort of a search. Forget tiger blood, this is pure 100% velociraptor blood.

So where are these results coming from? Well, it searches the Plex Media Server you’re connected to, obviously. But we went a step further, and made it search all Plex Media Servers in your house. And really, why stop there? We also made it return results from online sites as well. Through the magic of our friends at VideoSurf, it returns results from YouTube and Vimeo.

The search functionality is extremely pluggable, so you’ll see new providers come online very shortly, as well as the ability to add your own custom providers, should you so choose.

But really, why stop at the mobile apps? Why not extend the feature to the desktop client as well? Excellent question.

So there you have it. Plex now has a rich (and fun!) universal search feature, which searches all the local media in your house, and online media, in one unified interface. You can search from either your mobile device, or the comfort of your couch.

Pretty cool, right?

To summarize, the transcoder gets you your media, streamed in real time, regardless of what the player device is or what the speed of the connection is to the server.

There are two downsides to transcoding. First of all, it can take quite a bit of CPU on the server machine. Second of all, transcoding implies a decode and then a subsequent re-encode of the media, which is a lossy transformation, meaning the video quality will be degraded (although usually not perceptibly at higher qualities).

I’m quite pleased to say we’ve addressed both of these issues in this release.

First of all, we’ve introduced a feature we call DIrect Play, and here’s how it works: During the media analysis phase, the Plex Media Server looks at certain attributes of your media (resolution, bitrate, etc.). When a client requests a piece of media, the server looks at the client’s capabilities, compares them to the media parameters, and makes a determination as to whether or not the file can be directly played on the device. For example, if you have a properly prepared MP4 file, it’ll play without any transcoding on an iOS device. Tiny CPU usage, and no loss in quality. If you had a movie in MKV format and also encoded it for mobile devices (and both versions scanned into your library), the media server is smart enough to mark the specific version of the file as playable by the device.

This is all well and fine, but the media might not be in the right format in the first place, and encoding multiple versions of a file is a pain. For this reason, we’ve introduced a feature called Direct Streaming, As you might know, the current standard for web video is H.264 (regardless of how Google tries to undermine it); this codec happens to be the most common inside an MKV file, and also the most commonly supported on mobile devices. Android and iOS devices support decoding H.264 in hardware directly.

What you might not know is that the iOS devices (especially the latest generation, including the ATV2) have incredibly powerful little chips inside them for decoding video. Even though the specs say they are capable of 720p, it turns out that they do a good job with a lot of 1080p content as well. So when a client connects to the Plex Media Server, it describes its capabilities, and if the file falls within the acceptable range, the video is simply copied over to the new format (a process known as re-muxing). This again means that there is very little CPU used on the server side, and no loss in quality in the video. Streams start up nearly instantly, and seek quickly. All of this without the need to jailbreak, or use any private APIs.

Having the transcoder and these two new technologies, along with a set of heuristics built into the Plex Media Server, means that we are in a position to optimally deliver your media to all your devices: If you’re on a powerful enough client, with a high enough bandwidth connection, the media can be Direct Streamed over. On a lower bandwidth link, or on less powerful devices, full transcoding kicks in. (By the way, both of these features work with online media as well.)

I’ll leave you with this set of two screenshots, showing a 1080p movie, playing with Direct Streaming on an iPad. I can’t show you in a screenshot, but it started playing almost instantly. First one to name the movie in the comments gets a pet monkey.

Finally, we’ve added some additional quality settings, both for use in transcoding, and for help in determining whether or not Direct Streaming is applicable; for example, if you set the quality to 320kbps (a bad Wi-Fi link), it won’t try to Direct Stream a movie that’s 5Mbps.

To summarize these new features in a sentence: Your media is optimally and effortlessly available on a wide range of client devices, over any connection.

Without any further ado, let’s start from the beginning, as you’re setting up your media. You’ll notice a new preference area for language which looks like this:

This lets the media server know enough about you so that it can make intelligent decisions about which streams to pick when playing media. For example, it’s not going to show subtitles if the audio stream matches your preferred language. Of course, you can also set the stream selection manually in the clients, but with selection this smart, you might never need to!

We’ve also added rich support in the framework for metadata agents that can retrieve subtitles. Next, we enhanced the OpenSubtitles agent to add preferences for subtitle languages (up to two, for those bilingual couples) to retrieve for media. We expect that many such agents will crop up, as different regions in the world seem to have affinities for different subtitle sites.

The Local Media agent now detects and picks up and “sidecar” subtitles you might have sitting around with your media, during a refresh. Finally, the media analysis picks up any subtitle streams that are multiplexed into your media. This results in information about all subtitles (local files, online sourced ones, multiplexed subtitles) being unified and stored in a single place. Of course, the really cool thing is that the stream selections for your media are stored in your library on the server, so all clients (iOS, Plex for Mac) will have the same settings. I can change it here:

And then it shows up here (the Mac client):

Alternatively, I can set it over here:

And then watch it over here:

Pretty awesome, right?

Mobile devices (including third party ones, such as the ATV2 client) have support for subtitles in SSA, SRT, and SMI formats, and we’ll likely add support for others over time.

(Also, we fixed the issue browsing for subtitles on the Plex for Mac client, just in case any of you still want to do that.)

Of course, it also looks sexy on an iPad!

First, a few quick things I forgot to mention in the last post:

Easy media moves: One of the nice side effects of the soft deletion feature is that it’s much easier to move your media around. You could do this in the last version, but it’s much simpler now, since the media can disappear for a while between scans, and nothing is lost.

Poster/Art downloads: Another tweak we’ve made is to download the full resolution poster and art files during a refresh, in order to ensure that even if the site goes down, the media is always there for you.

Massive refresh on the iOS application: It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll let graphics do most of the talking in this post. It’s actually hard to exhaustively list all the changes, since the application has been so thoroughly overhauled.

This first set of screenshots shows off the new grid view, and improved UI around channels. It turns out that “plug-ins” is a rather technical term (who knew?), segregating them by class wasn’t a great idea (people tend to only use a handful), and getting from installation to channel was way too clunky. So we’ve worked on cleaning up and streamlining the experience, and we’ll be bringing this improved flow to the desktop client as well.

So what’s the edited out tab button in the middle? You’ll just have to wait and see…(anyone care to guess?)

We’ve eliminated the second level menu from library browsing, and replaced it with a filter button, which should, again, improve efficiency. Yes, we will be bringing that change over to the desktop client as well, although not in the next release (patience, grasshopper). Yes, there are unanswered questions about the third image.

The iPad version is a huge improvement over the last version as well, with rich new views and tweaked typography. It looks great, and feels responsive, this is really your media as you’ve never seen it before.

  

Oh yeah, and a few more things people have been asking for: TV Out, and Airplay. And even more things: playing multi-part media, and image caching. And yes (more on this later) subtitles and audio stream selection.

We’re aiming to submit to the app store within the next few days, so it should be in your hands very shortly. Even with the all the new features, this is a free upgrade for all current users. Thank you all for your support, and we hope you love the new version as much as we do!

The Flash 10.x bug has been fixed. You can now install the latest and greatest Flash release with Plex, and no longer do you have to worry about security issues and hopping between versions. This one makes me personally happy because if I had a beer for every person posting about “audio with no video” (the symptom of a 10.1 or 10.2 install), I’d be very drunk.

We don’t refresh media for no good reason. In the last release, we refreshed items every two weeks. This could lead to posters changing (if more popular ones trickled up) and any unlocked metadata changing. We no longer do this. If you do want a refresh, either right-click and select Refresh Metadata or shift-click when refreshing a section (which initiates a forced refresh of the section, downloading new metadata for all items).

We don’t delete media from the library during a scan. Originally the library was designed to stand in stark contrast to iTunes-style media management, where there is no way to “scan” for media, and deleted media just sits there, eventually imbued with an exclamation point when you try to play it.

(Don’t worry, no actual Death Cab For Cutie tracks were harmed in the making of this blog post.) The first versions of the Plex library took the opposite approach, being quick to remove media from the library as soon as it disappeared during a scan. The problem with this approach is two-fold: For starters, lots can go wrong during a scan, from someone removing a drive in the middle of an automated scan, to a temporary permissions problem. Although we take pains to detect offline media, it’s hard to be perfect. Secondly, now that we allow metadata editing, the “value” of the metadata is greatly increased, and losing it is much more painful.

In order to solve this problem, we’ve introduced something called soft deletion. During a scan, if a piece of media appears to be missing, we flag it as such, but don’t actually remove it from the library. You’ll get a graphical indicator of this, and – at your leisure – you can decide to go ahead with the deletion by emptying the trash for the library section.

Note that – for no good reason, because it’s an awesome movie – I’ve removed Evil Dead II and ran a scan. If I move it back, and rescan, the warning icon will go away, and I’ll have lost absolutely nothing in the process. Note that if you like the old behavior, you can simply enable the “Empty trash automatically” option.

Scanning is much faster. Those of you with really large libraries will be happy to hear that we’ve greatly sped up the scanning process. A scan of my Television section used to take about one and a half minutes, and with Plex Turbo Scanning it now completes in 6 seconds. Music sections, in which scanning is more expensive due to tag reading enjoy an even greater speedup.

Hopefully this gives you a small taste of what’s coming up! There are about six total posts in this series, so if you haven’t heard about your favorite feature/bug yet, there is still hope.

James has been out here working from the Maui office for the last six weeks, and in between all the late nights and coding, we found some time to go cliff jumping.