Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Tomorrow morning, the XServe box that hosts our web site, forums, and blogs will be strapped into a baby seat and moved from its current location in downtown San Francisco to an undisclosed bunker location, where it will share space with Dick Cheney and his army of robot clones.

Even assuming the server doesn’t get shot in the face, we will still have a few hours of downtime in the morning. Things should be up and running and DNS propagated by the afternoon.

We have some exciting stuff coming up in the form of new Plex features which we’ll be detailing here in the coming weeks…

If you pick up the November issue of Macworld, you’ll notice that there’s a two page spread on Plex (thanks to migueld for tipping me off). I spoke with Gina Trapani months ago, and had all but forgotten about it. It’s a well written article, and hopefully we’ll see a bunch of new users show up as a result.

Speaking of users, we got our 2000th member on the forums yesterday. Congratulations to SMario for making Plex 2K, we raise our collective beers to you!

I’m getting a number of crash reports (a couple in the last few hours) from people running older versions (usually RC1 or RC2). In this specific case (playing .img files) and others the bug has been fixed in RC3.

Unless you’re running into a specific problem with the latest version, it’s probably a good idea to upgrade. You can always check the about dialog if you’re not sure which version you have.

(And yes, the next release is dropping within the next few days, just finishing up on some testing…)

I apologize for the lack of updates, I’ve had my parents-in-law in town, and as such haven’t had that much free time. However, we’re very close to the next release (lots of bugs fixed!) and we have some other exciting things coming up.

For starters, we are extremely lucky to have the talented (and fellow dog-lover) Alexis Gallisa helping us out with our branding. Have a look at the in-progress logo for Plex below. We wanted to play off the similarities between the words “play” and “plex” (especially taking into account a potential slogan: “Don’t Play it, Plex it!”) and the orange play symbol fits nicely with that. I’m sure the keen-eyed viewers will notice the additional play logo in negative space between the E and the X. Simply beautiful.

Once we get the logo finalized, you can be sure there will be t-shirts and coffee mugs available!

The next release will hopefully drop in the next week, and with some luck will be the first of our stable 0.6 series. We will release further minor bug-fix updates (0.6.1, 0.6.2) as we progress in parallel with the “unstable” 0.7 series.

We also have a couple of surprises for the stable series, as you’ll see in the next release or two.

What better thing to do on a perfectly sunny Saturday morning than migrate blogs? I can actually think of plenty of things, but Isaac convinced me this would be a perfect time, and thanks to his great support, we got the blog migrated and upgraded to the latest Wordpress. The old URL should send you to the new one, and the RSS feed (through Feedburner) is unchanged. Isaac and Ryan both have blogs now too.

I made a couple of tiny tweaks to the site in the process, my favorite of which is support for gravitars in the comments. Don’t have one yet? What are you waiting for?

I believe everything is now finally under one domain roof now, with blogs, forums, and wiki all at plexapp.com. Many thanks to Isaac for working tirelessly to make this happen in such a seamless fashion!

Hey, pretty cool, we got a mention in the Wall Street Journal on July 24th. I spoke with the reporter for a while, but unfortunately Barkley got left on the cutting room floor. The article is called “Feeding Your TV With Video From the Computer or Web” by Christopher Lawton, and he wrote:

Developers of … OSXBMC, which this month was rebranded Plex, say [it plays] more formats than rival products directly from Apple, such as Front Row and Apple TV. Apple declined to comment for this article.

OK, before this gets out of hand, a quick word. To paraphrase Michael Jackson: I’m a coder not a lawyer. I appreciate d4rk’s bring the matter to our attention (although next time, if you want to avoid getting into name-calling, just drop us an email).

The background: Smart Crash Reports, as mdpdb pointed out, doesn’t require linking against anything. We were linking against optional object files for the purposes of installing the reporter, as a convenience to our users. Kind of amusing, right, all the hubbub that results from an innocent effort to improve software quality? But I get it, slippery slope and all.

My amateur reading of the license would seem to imply that the XBMC team could simply issue a quick statement saying “We authorize the Plex team to call two function calls in Smart Crash Reports” and everyone would be happy and in compliance.

However, that’s not needed. Enrique came up with a patch an hour or so after we heard about the issue, to be included in the next RC, which will be out as soon as I get a chance.

I’m sorry for the mistake. Trolls, back under the bridge. Peace out.

I’m glad the new version of Smart Crash Reporter installed for more people, the reports are pouring in this morning. The good news is that the majority are clustered around the same few issues, so it definitely helps us focus our attention.

To the people who took the time to write in the crash report a quick description of what they were doing at the time of the crash, grazie mille!! That really helps. And if you said “no” to the installer but changed your mind, you can install it from here.

Thanks to the efforts of Isaac, we have the new Plex wiki up and running. The login is shared between the forums and the wiki, so you don’t have to create a new account. Come on in, check it out, feel free to add to it.

(The next release will be here shortly, by the way!)

We’ve decided to migrate our bug-tracking over to Lighthouse. It has some killer features, including great integration with email (file or reply to a bug over email), Github integration, tagging, an API, and great usability. Bottom line: It helps us keep track of and fix the bugs you report better than ever!

We’ve migrated all existing bugs over, and gone over them to make sure they were still active and valid. The one thing we couldn’t migrate over were the users, so we’d like to ask that if you filed bugs on Trac, come over to Lighthouse, make yourself an account (assuming you don’t already have one), add a cool-looking avatar, and “watch” your bugs. The number of people watching/commenting on bugs will definitely affect our prioritization.

When adding new bugs, please add lots of good tags to help us categorize them. We’re using version tags like @0.5.0b10 to mark when a bug was found or fixed.

For attachments, feel free to attach logs and such using Lighthouse, but for larger audio/video samples, please continue to use afp://dn-0.com/samples/Dropbox. We’ll eventually be using these samples for automated testing.

Lastly, as you’ve no doubt noticed, the forums have moved over to forums.plexapp.com. The blog will be moving over in the next week or two, and since we use Feedburner for RSS, it should be a seamless transition for those of you subscribed.