Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

A one-click method to gather up information about your Plex configuration and submit it to us online? A great tool to help us diagnose and solve your problems with the application? Written in Cocoa? Auto-updating? It might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. Head over to James’ blog post as he introduces the new Plex System Reporter tool, and download it for yourself.

Hey, We just released 0.7.6 but Elan is on his way out the door. I’m here to leave a quick note for everyone. Elan will be back shortly with some cute pictures!

–Isaac

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

Isaac added a bunch of foreign (to us, at least) language forums so that those of you who feel more comfortable conversing in your native languages can do so surrounded by fellow speakers. Please let us know if we missed any, or have any misspellings in the titles.

We can’t tell you how much we appreciate the overwhelming response to our request for mirrors. Isaac worked his ass off on some scripts, and now the whole thing is automated. Adding or removing a mirror is trivial, and you should never get a bad link even if mirrors go down. What this should translate to from your perspective is FAST Plex downloads!

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

Exactly one year ago, I made the following post to the XBMC forums:

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!

We’ve had so many thousands of downloads of Plex in the last couple months that the cost of hosting via Amazon’s otherwise excellent S3 service is starting to really add up. Cayce has been kind enough to support us with the S3 hosting since the beginning, and we really appreciate it, but we’d like to move to a more affordable, and more geographically distributed solution. We’d like to know if there are people out there with a fast network connection and bandwidth to spare who would be willing to help us out in hosting Plex.

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!

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”.