Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

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.

You may have already heard, but if not, it gives me great pleasure to announce our partnership with the CenterStage group. We’ve been in talks for a while, and it feels great to be able to announce this publicly.

If you do nothing else, check out the amazing Flash demo of the interface design. That, my friends, is the interface that’s being developed for Plex as we speak. Enrique has already been hard at work at enhancing the skinning engine. I’ve seen some really early demos, and they look amazing. There is lots of work to do, but the end result will be a lovely front-end experience that looks great.

We’ve added a forum on our site to discuss this partnership, and I’m sure we’ll have more related announcements in the coming weeks and months.

We’ve created a new poll to try to get to know you better. The better we understand how you use Plex, and how you *want* to use it, the better job we can do prioritizing our work, and focusing on the things that you care the most about.

We really appreciate all the responses we got to the last survey. As someone pointed out, we made the mistake of not asking you which remote control you’d really like to see supported (as opposed to just having you pick one from a list). We’ve corrected this, and we’d love to see what you have to say about this and lots of other things at this new survey.

Thanks so much in advance for your responses!

A warm welcome to the new visitors! Please come visit the forums, which are hosted on a more beefy machine (which lives in someone’s bathroom, but that’s another story).

As most of you know, we’ve been searching for a new identity since we split from XBMC. Names aren’t easy to come by, and domain names are even harder. We received some great suggestions from our user base (Meteor Center, Media Hugger, etc.). Ultimately though, we wanted a name that was easy to communicate, a bit more abstract, and less tied to media or center.

The one name that stuck was Plex. I like it because it evokes “cineplex” and the suffix means “comprising a number of parts” which the application certain does. In mathematics, you use the suffix to mean “ten to the power of the number” (e.g. oneplex = 10).

Because there are no four-letter domain names left (seriously, try to find one!) we decided to square the plex, so to speak. Think of either plex^2 or plex squared (the beta logo below tries to connote the word “plex” inside a square that might represent a TV screen). The domain names are plex2.com, plexsquared.com, and plexsquare.com for good measure. They are not active yet.

In the coming days, we’ll be working on the rebranding process, including the application packaging, logo, web domains, etc. In the longer term, we have some exciting things in the skin department as well. Stay tuned, and thanks for all your support; we really are lucky to have such an great community.

Among some of the cool things coming in the next beta is an (optional) different method for entering full-screen. Many of you have requested compatibility with Growl, Exposé, Spaces, Cmd+Tab, and Cmd+Ctrl+Esc. I’ve resisted doing this because, among other reasons, supposedly there is an OpenGL performance hit in windowed mode (makes sense, right, because in “real” full-screen mode the driver is free to do whatever it likes to optimize for OpenGL output). However, OpenGL is not our bottleneck, and well, the people have voted. It will be optional, of course, for those of us who prefer to watch their movies without an OS update or new mail notification blocking out gratuitous nudity.

Among the people who may appreciate this change is Erik O., who has had trouble for quite a while with vsync not working in full-screen mode (while it works fine in windowed mode).

The next beta should be wrapped in the next week. Lots of tasty bug-fixes and improvements…

OK, I wanted to track down two issues quickly, and I didn’t feel like it was worth making a whole new release (yet, at least). This binary (please uncompress with “bzip2 -d” and replace OSXBMC.app/Contents/MacOS/XBMC) should fix the following two issues:

• FIX: Greek characters (and really any non-ASCII characters) in a file name in the results of a smart search made the file not show up. How excessively anglo-centric of me.
• REG: People reported that 720p MKV files showed excessive frame droppage and trouble skipping around. I *believe* I’ve fixed it, but I’d like confirmation.

You can find the new binary here and the source has been pushed to GitHub. Please let me know if these issues are fixed.

As an aside, I used the magic of “git bisect” to help me pinpoint when exactly the regression was introduced. It’s like a time machine that keeps cutting the search space in half and you simply recompile, test, and tell it if the problem exists or not. Simply magnificent.

I know this isn’t a formal release, but perhaps you’ll be quicker to forgive the regression if Barkley makes an appearance.

OK, seriously, how am I supposed to focus on coding when this monster is hanging about three feet away from my door (which is open to let in the breeze)? It’s so big that I found Barkley in its web this morning, poor pup, and when I tried to shoo it away with a broom, it broke the handle over one of its leg pairs.