Without further ado, the fixes:

• FIX: A bug where Plex and the Plex Media Server could get out of sync and display the wrong contents for a directory.
• FIX: An issue when stopping music playback, where the GUI “clicks” don’t restore and the playing track is still selected.
• FIX: Photo thumbnails were broken for plug-ins (thanks to orr721 for the report!)
• FIX: Hitting the menu button during a blank slideshow causes a crash. (thank to Majkel and other for the report!)
• FIX: When a track fails to play, Plex jumps into (blank) Now Playing screen anyway.
• FIX: Sometimes the photo screensaver started going “crazy fast”.
• FIX: The new remote code logged too much.
• FIX: The duration didn’t show up in plug-ins.
• FIX: You weren’t returned to the main menu correctly from items added to your Favorites, or direct links to plug-ins in the Music section. Existing favorites will need to be removed and re-added. (James)
• FIX: The iTunes plug-in now sorts artists by the “sort artist” field in iTunes. This one is for Scott!
• FIX: Crashes with WebKit plug-ins that appear in the Music section.
• FIX: PlexHelper occasionally stopped responding (or responded incorrectly) to button presses.
• FIX: Sometimes Plex didn’t start after the first run. Believe it or not, this was an OS X bug, now worked around.
• FIX: Plex hung when using the mouse wheel to scroll through text (thanks to hqrs for the report!)
• FIX: Changed the servers in the TVDB scraper to use the load balanced ones. (many thanks to kruisje for the fix!)
• FIX: Fixed a crash loading some RAW files.
• FIX: DTS-to-AC3 was broken in the last release. Thanks to our audio doctor Ryan who fixed it and improved the AC3 trancoding in the process.
• FIX: When you select “previous track” it now does the right thing with streamed content: moving to the start of the track or the previous track depending on how far along the track is (awesome, James!)

OK, so I said there were just fixes, right? I lied! James, as usual, pulled out a great new feature or two out of his hat, and we hope you enjoy them.

• NEW: Plug-in preferences show up on the context menu for the plug-in itself.
• NEW: Auto-sourcing of remote Plex Media Server iLife plug-ins. Let’s say you have a laptop with iTunes music, or your wife’s iMac has iPhoto on it. No longer do you have to manually add the sources, or wonder if they’ll work when you click on them. With the new version, sources add and remove themselves auto-magically thanks to Bonjour. Make sure you install the new Plex Media Server on the remote machines.

I’ll leave you with a rare sighting of the Loch Ness Barkley.

Our friend Evan Schoenberg looked into the issue, and ended up filing a bug with Apple, who replied “this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering“. We had high hopes for 10.6.1, but unfortunately it didn’t help. There are rumors that 10.6.2 may contain a fix, but also rumors that the change in behavior was intentional.

Over the months, we’ve also gotten to know Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy, the popular and powerful remote control solution for the Mac. He has been extremely helpful to us, reviewing our remote code, suggesting improvements, and sending us sample code. He is, without a doubt, the foremost expert on the Apple Remote outside of Apple.

After investigating the problem, he decided a few weeks ago to provide a solution himself, in the form of a free alternative driver for the IR receiver which would provide reliable exclusive access to the Apple Remote across Leopard and Snow Leopard. In addition, he’s made available an Objective-C class which makes adding Apple Remote support to an application trivially simple.

The driver itself comes in the form of a preference pane, easy to install from the web site. Once installed, you’ll be able to use Plex perfectly in Snow Leopard with the Apple Remote, with no annoying loss of exclusive access that you may have observed under Leopard.

I can’t emphasis how great this development is, and how grateful we should all be to Felix. Please consider purchasing Remote Buddy, at around $30 it’s a great deal and an extremely powerful solution for those who like to customize the way the Apple Remote works with their Mac.

We are currently testing the integration of Felix’s code into Plex (many thanks to Evan for working on this!), and this is one of the reasons why 0.8.3 is taking a bit longer than expected.

Written by Dave Addey, the Home Star Runner allows you to watch such favorites as Strong Bad Email and Teen Girl Squad.

Written by David Bartle, the Barats and Bereta plug-is is pure comedy. Luke Barats and Joe Bereta began collaborating in 2003 at Gonzaga University where they were active in the theater department, broadcasting department, and led the school’s improv comedy troupe. Later that year they began making short videos to amuse their friends which were eventually compiled on a website.

Finally, also written by David Bartle, the Mars Hill Church plug-in allows you to watch sermons from Pastor Mark Driscoll and others from the Mars Hill Church.

We’d like to introduce you to our new Developer’s site, created by James with design help from the ever-talented Alexis.

We’re still fleshing out many of the areas of the developer’s site, but the development manual is online, the result of hours of work by James (Framework documentation) and David Bartle (site configuration documentation).

So if you’ve been waiting for documentation to tackle that plug-in project, or you simply could use a nice reference, check it out!

(And to all the brave developers who waded in without documentation and created some kick-ass plug-ins anyway: Namaste!)

• Apple Remote issue: Plex is not able to gain exclusive access to the device, which causes the system to see the button presses as well. Our friend Evan looked into this and reported it to Apple as an apparent bug. Apple replied “…this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering.” One of our clever users (FortyRock) came up with a workaround, which we recommend only if you’re comfortable editing system files. It should be noted that this apparent bug affected lots of other software, such as VLC, EyeTV, Hulu Desktop, etc.
• GMA X3100 issue: There are apparently corruption/color issues on systems with this chipset (more details here). There is no known fix or workaround for this issue as of yet.
• Digital audio (AC3/DTS) issue: There is an apparent issue with Core Audio that prevents digital audio from playing more than once successfully. We’re investigating the problem, and there is a workaround by user dannyv45 that has helped some people out.
• SMB connection issue: Plex appears to have problems connecting to a Snow Leopard SMB server. We’re investigating the issue.

So the bottom line is that if you have a system that you’re using exclusively for Plex, you’re probably better off staying with Leopard, as the new OS doesn’t bring anything in the way of advantages for Plex, and it brings a good handful of serious issues.

The one question we keep getting asked is “When will a Snow Leopard compatible Plex be released?”. Unfortunately – especially given the nature of some of the issues – it’s hard to predict. In the meantime, work continues on Plex/Nine and the next maintenance release of Plex/Eight…

Starting the batch, off is a FOX News plug-in written by Sander Spies. Watch breaking news, or your favorite news and commentary shows.

Written by Gordon Johnston, The Guardian plug-in features the latest news, sport, business, commentary, analysis and reviews from the world’s leading liberal voice in news.

Written by Jonny Wray, Bicycling Magazine is the world’s leading road biking, mountain bike, and cycling magazine. Find bike and gear reviews, cycling and mountain biking tips, training articles, expert biking advice, bicycle maintenance know-how, and a dedicated biking community.

Written by Gordon Johnston, Cranky Geeks features content from John C. Dvorak, whose crankiness knows no bounds. Dvorak is a contributing editor of PC Magazine, for which he has been writing two columns, including the popular Inside Track, since 1986.

Written by Gordon Johnston, Pixel Corps features video and audio shows from the from the guild, covering news and technical overviews from the worlds of media, video productions and Apple tech.

Trailer Addict, also written by Jonny Wray, features HD movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, clips and featurettes for upcoming, new, and classic films.

ARTE ist ein europäisches Kulturprogramm, das sich an alle weltoffenen und neugierigen Bürger in Europa wendet, insbesondere in Frankreich und Deutschland. Über ARTE+7 stellt ARTE Teile seines Programms der vergangenen sieben Tage online zu Verfügung.

ARTE est une Chaîne culturelle européenne qui s’adresse à tous les téléspectateurs curieux et ouverts sur le monde, partout en Europe et en particulier en France et en Allemagne. ARTE +7 permet de visionner certains programmes d’ARTE pendant les sept jours qui suivent leur première diffusion.

ARTE is written by Christian Sabor.

Written by Gordon Johnston, DL.TV is for tech fans, by tech fans. It features some of the most timely and honest views about what is going on in tech today!

Bandes-annonces, Extraits vidéos, Making-of, Trailer, Haute définition, Teaser, Podcast, Interviews

Allocine.com is written by oncleben31.

One last note: The plug-in authors should check the released versions, as they may include minor changes or fixes.

Major props to Scott for doing a brilliant job with this plug-in. He’s already hard at work at the next version.

The Netflix plug-in requires the latest version of Plex.

You also need the Silverlight plug-in installed.

SVT Play, written by Daniel Eriksson, Mattias Norlander, and Ivar Åsell, is a lovely plug-in for Swedish speakers. The content is available for viewing outside of Sweden, which is excellent news as well. These guys did a great job with the plug-in.

Note: You need Silverlight installed for this plug-in to work.

I’ll start with a shout out to our users in Britain, who will be overjoyed to see an iPlayer plugin. We’ve got at least one more British plug-in in the works as well. James has been working on this plug-in for a while, and it’s a real labor of love. With BBC iPlayer you can catch up with shows from the past seven days that you’ve missed or want to watch again, or watch episodes from an entire series with Series Catch-Up. Shows are available from all BBC TV channels and radio stations, and BBC Wales content shown on S4C. Inside Plex, you can view the most popular iPlayer content, highlights selected by the BBC, and browse by channel, day, genre or format, or use the search feature to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Next up, we have a couple of new ones that I know will be heavily in my rotation. Daniel Metz, Isaac and Scott created plug-ins for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Tons of content, and lovely organization.

James also whipped up a plug-in for Geekscape, which was requested by phunkysai, long-time Plex tester and all around good guy.

Next up, anyone with a TiVo is going to love this one. Written by Yoav, and described in more detail here, this plug-in lets you stream shows directly off your TiVo. Brilliant work! As one happy beta user commented “Thank you very much, this app runs beautifully”.

Last, but not least, we have another beautiful photo blog available on your TV, called Aperture Priority. There is some great tilt-shift photography on there.

You’ll note that the last menu item at the top level is a help screencast that walks you though the plug-in, which Isaac made. Please watch it if you have any questions. The only other tricky bit besides logging in through Safari is that we’ve added special controls for this plug-in: Hitting “right” moves to the next track, hitting “up” gives the track a thumbs up, and hitting “down” gives the track a thumbs down. (Sometimes you have to hit the key/button twice).

Hopefully it’s a fun new addition to the content available in Plex!

This cat and mouse isn’t benefitting anyone.

The final thing I’ll say is that there is a ton of other content available on Plex via Joost and other plug-ins, and there will continue to be more and more as time goes on.

If you prefer to get your politics directly from the White House, Chris Tarczon (author of the popular IGN plug-in) wrote a plug-in which gives you access to Obama’s weekly addresses (in HD!) and other White House content.

And for those of you who don’t care a whit about (American) politics, but like your rock indie flavored, install the Pitchfork TV plug-in, which provides access to a *ton* of content, including band interviews, live performances, music videos, and more.

We’ve also released an update to the CNET plug-in so that the “Today on CNET” section actually reflects the current date.

James added Academic Earth, a brilliant site with thousands of lectures from the best professors in the world. This one was requested in the forums.

We received a submission for an IGN plug-in from Chris Tarczon. Chris obviously “gets” our framework and did a great job with it. There is a ton of gaming-related content here.

James also did a plug-in for The Escapist, which houses a collection of gaming-related shows, reviews and entertainment content.

Scott and Isaac whipped up a plug-in for The Onion, a hilarious site with fake news.

And finally, we received another user submission from Chris Barnes for his wife’s photoblog site. She’s a talented photographer, check it out!

We also released updates to Hulu (display more season/episode data), Google LIFE (update for site change), and Revision3 (added thumbnails).

We hope you’re enjoying consuming all this content as much as we’re enjoying bringing it to you!

So run, don’t walk, to install the latest update and then head over to the App Store to pick up the NPR plug-in.

James also deployed some updates for the App Store plug-in itself. There’s now an update history section where you can browse through the plug-ins you’ve installed and the latest release notes for each one.

If you have automatic updates enabled, you’ll get the new App Store without any further ado, otherwise select Check For Updates to install manually.

If you’re looking to write your own plug-in, have a look at the installed ones in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins. If you’re writing a plug-in that works with a Flash or Silverlight site, you’ll also need to add a site configuration into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Site Configurations (see existing ones in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins/SiteConfigurations.bundle/Contents/Resources). The Plex Media Server automagically picks up changes so you don’t need to restart it while you’re developing, although you may want to run it inside Terminal to see the debug output.

I promise that we’ll have tutorials and documentation in short order, but these plug-ins are very easy to write, especially if you know Python and understand XPATH. We also have a new forum for the discussion of plug-in development.

Let’s see what you can come up with!

I’m really beginning to think that things between us won’t work.

I have to admit that I’ve been cheating on you for a while now. I’ve been spending time with USENET. She’s old, she’s unattractive, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but she does offer me one simple thing that you don’t: unencumbered access to ad-free media.

It didn’t have to be this way. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve never been a good listener. You seem more interested in your friends the Advertisers than me. And you’re terrified that I’ll steal your content, without realizing that (a) I already am and (b) you could offer me so much more.

In thinking of me as an untrustworthy thief, you’re missing some great opportunities. There is a holy trinity of things I want desperately from you, because I can’t get them anywhere else: availability, quality, and metadata. By availability I mean give me access to full catalogs of content. More is more. If I can’t get it from you, I’m going to have to go elsewhere, and you don’t want that. Secondly, give me quality: why would I go to you for SD content when I can get HD content elsewhere? Why would I go to you for ad-laden content when I can get ad-free content elsewhere? Lastly, give me rich metadata: reviews, related content, recommendations, transcripts, and credits. And give me an API interface to that data. In return I will give you my money every month, and I’ll rub your feet at least once a week.

I see you getting nervous, looking down at your shoes. Don’t you get it? I pay $30/month for my illicit relationship with the old hag, and she doesn’t offer me any meaningful part of the holy trinity – let’s face it, though, she only has to be better than you, and that’s not hard. She offers spotty availability, unreliable quality, and a paucity of metadata. The money I’m giving her could be in your pocket.

I would say that we needed counseling, but before that, I think you need to educate yourself a bit about basic economics; learn about concepts like tiered pricing and price discrimination. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that you’ve put your content online, but you’ve done it in a way that’s nearly useless to me. You want to offer it free, with ads? Great, but for the love of God, offer a subscription model where I can access it without the ads. Charge me a bit more and give me higher resolution content. A bit more and I get access to metadata for remixing your content.

(Remember two important things: (1) If you don’t give me what I want, I will go elsewhere and (2) You have the ability to give me things that I can’t get elsewhere.)

To reiterate: You have to stop being scared that I’m going to steal your content, because I’m already stealing your content. Your goal should be to get me to give you the money I’m already giving to others.

I’ll leave you with a win-win proposal. Sit down and run the numbers, and figure out how much I’m worth to you per month as a pair of eyeballs to your Advertiser friends. Double that amount, and that’s how much I’ll pay you for access to your content without any ads. Triple it, and that’s how much I’ll pay for high resolution, unencumbered content with metadata.

So please, take some time and think about things. I really think we could be great together.

–Isaac

(oh and while she’s not the superstar that Barkley is, here’s Maggie!)

At this point we have 23 active mirrors, and that should be enough. We’ll definitely keep all the contact information for everyone who emailed, in the event that we look to add more mirrors in the future.

We would like to thank the following people, on the active mirror list, for their generosity:

• Juggeli (Finland)
• Roopesh Sheth, Family, and Pets (USA)
• Anonymous (USA)
• Anthony ter Neuzen, Theatre Projects, (The Netherlands)
• Michel Rabozee, aka Mickey (Belgium)
• Elias Vaattovaara, University of Oulu (Finland)
• James Garrard, 3wires.net Hosting (UK)
• Torfinn Nome (Norway)
• Cato
• Nicolas Hyvernat (France)
• Nick Peelman, Peelman.us (USA)
• Steve (USA)
• Nicolas Hyvernat (France)
• Andreas Schlicht, media byte Hosting (Germany)
• The Computer Society at Lund University and Lund Institute of Technology, <http://www.df.lth.se/> (Sweden)
• Liquid Gravity, Inc <http://liquidgravity.com> (USA)
• Lars-G. – dev.n0ll.com
• Aris Biscevic
• Martin Månsson (Sweden)
• Ron Dutt (USA)
• Karl Söderström
• Michal Waissmann, Sok Media (USA)
• Rune H.
• Vivek Iyer
• neuro, zensoft.net

Thank you all very much, and also many thanks to all other other people who responded with offers for hosting.

Edit: Looks Like Elan forgot a to mention a couple of our mirrors! I’m using my ninja skills to hop in here and add them for him (–Isaac)

Again me with the edits! I just added a late comer to the list neuro, zensoft.net

One year later, we have a great media center that feels at home on the Mac, a talented group of developers and designers, t-shirts, a website, a canine mascot, and most importantly, a thriving community of great people. Many, many thanks to everyone who helped along the way, I’m incredibly excited to see what the next year of Plex brings!

In order to make this easy, we’ve written a few scripts that monitor mirrors, and round-robin between “active” mirrors when providing download links to the Sparkle update checker. So if you have fiber to the curb, but you can only provide us with bandwidth on the weekends, that’s still valuable. Even so, we’re looking to start with a good handful of fast always-on servers.

Other features we’ll likely add are country correlation to provide the closest server, and transfer speed monitoring. Our goal: To get Plex to you, via auto-update, wherever you are, as fast as we possibly can.

So if you can spare us some bandwidth, please us know by dropping us a line at mirrors at plexapp dot com. Please let us know how much bandwidth you would be able to allocate to Plex downloads.

Many thanks!

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.

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”.