We really appreciate all the feedback on the first in the Plex/Seven series. We have new features in the works, new ideas, and a great deal of enthusiasm and energy for this new series. So much so, in fact, that we’ve postponed the Plex/Six stable series release briefly to bring new a new installment in the Plex/Seven series. The good news is that hopefully we’ve fixed many of the issues keeping people away from Plex/Seven.

The release can be downloaded via Sparkle, HTTP, or torrent, or built from source.

• NEW: Aperture support. James and I had a bet on who could finish first, I took Lightroom and he took Aperture. I’m sure you can guess who won. Same killer features as iPhoto and iTunes, including automatic reloading of databases, and access across the network.
• NEW: Ryan greatly enhanced the CoreAudio driver, cutting out lots of old crufty code in the process. Not only does this fix the problem with fuzzy audio at low volumes and incorrect playback speed, but it also add some features that audiophiles will appreciate. The legacy XBMC code was performing a bunch of useless format conversions, whereas his new code converts from source format directly to 32 floating point, which is the CoreAudio native format. This means you can now play back 24-bit 96KHz media, at full fidelity. Ryan explains more in his blog post.
• NEW: James enhanced the Programs area of Plex. Workflows can be added to the root-level menu, folders can be added as sources, workflows can be selected by navigating into folders. (Plex quits when starting workflows, releasing control of the Apple remote). Additionally, you can run Applescript scripts from the Scripts menu, or by mapping them directly to keys in the keymap files. This opens up lots of possibilities!
• NEW: The Plex Media Server generates thumbs for artists, per request (picks an album thumb).
• FIX: Lots of people had been asking for volume control via Apple Remote. While there’s nothing we can do about encoded digital audio volume (AC3/DTS) there are plenty of people who listen to music and videos in stereo. Hence, we’ve remapped some of the keys in an attempt to improve matters (and fixed a related bug in the process). The new mapping is as follows: up and down control volume in full-screen. Since the buttons are quite limited on the Apple Remote, we removed FF and REW and replaced them with big skip forward and back when holding left/right keys. This makes some logical sense, as hitting right takes a small skip forward, while *holding* right takes a larger step (and similar with the left button). Try it out, let us know what you think.
• FIX: Really slow stream buffering of some Shoutcast streams.
• FIX: Lots of Plex Media Server bugs fixed, including crash on Apple Lossless files, glitchy sound on start of track, incorrect play speed, crash at end of video podcast, and crash with no iPhoto libraries.
• FIX: We now disable UPnP client by default, because it causes crashes (e.g. when waking from sleep). You can also now go into network settings and disable it.
• FIX: Disable PlexHelper when launching EyeTV client (James).
• FIX: Crash when in TV shows and theme music enabled (James).
• FIX: Playing DRM tracks from Plex library now works (James).
• FIX: Crash when skipping to the next track when playing a DRM music track with an iTunes visualizer enabled.
• FIX: James fixed setting a source to be the default. For example, you can set the iTunes Plex Media Server source to be the default, and you’ll go directly there from the main menu.
• FIX: Volume no longer affects visualizations.
• FIX: A ton of iTunes visualizers fixes, including not showing new track information, crash when scanning for visualizers, support for new Disco iTunes visualizer, and iTunes visualizers not being offset/sized correctly for calibrated screens.
• FIX: Some fixes for keyboard layout switching (thanks to Roman) and updates to KinoPoisk.Ru scraper.

The latest scrapers and some XBMC fixes have also been included.

Here’s Barkley doing his “kangaroo” trick.

• Delete or move aside your old Application Support/Plex folder. Too many settings and other things have changed. Yes, you’ll have to rescan everything, but look on the bright side, you’ll get TV Theme music and the latest Fan Art. I recommend renaming the folder so that you can easily jump back to Plex/Five if you need to.
• There are bugs. This is the first release of a new development series. Some things that used to work are quite likely broken. Remember, the Plex/Five series (soon to be bug-fixed into the Plex/Six stable series) underwent 22 releases to reach the level of stability it’s currently at.
• Come join the forums. From the number of hits we’re getting to the Sparkle AppCast, we think we have quite a few users who aren’t forum members. We’d like to invite you to join, either for friendly support or simply for the great Pet Photos.

Last, but not least, I personally want to thank the entire Plex Team and community. The developers (Enrique, Isaac (yes, he’s coding!), James, Ryan and myself) are congealing into a seriously productive tight-knit team; it’s awesome working with you guys. The Plex testers (Miguel, Shaun, Mark M, Phunky, Mark D, Danny, and all the others) have worked hard to get the kinks out, and we really appreciate all the help. Alexis has been improving the Plex icon, tweaking the DMG art, improving the wiki look and feel, designing merchandise, and we’re very lucky to have someone so talented on the team. Jay has been working incredibly hard writing documentation to be ready for the release (an open source project with documentation???). Ben, Scott, Mike B, it’s awesome having you guys always around and willing to lend a hand. The community is brilliant, thank you all for being so friendly and supportive to our new and existing users.

And of course a special thanks to Cayce for providing the funding, bandwidth, and server to allow us to host all of the different Plex web locations.

Here it is: HTTP, Torrent, Source. Enjoy!

This is Barkley at dusk with his friend Manu.

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”.

The first allows you to put some tracks into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/Background Music/Main/ which are played while you are browsing around Plex. It’s a great way to personalize the media center to your taste. Personally, I think I’ll put some Zero 7 in there, or maybe some School of Seven Bells (great album, by the way). You can use MP3 files, or even DRM iTunes AAC tracks. Please feel free to leave a comment telling us what tracks you think would make great background music as I’m curious to hear your picks.

I really love this next feature. When I first showed Anna, she said “That’s f—ing cool”, and she’s not prone to swearing. Essentially, we’ve compiled (thanks to James and many contributors on the forums) a collection of high quality TV theme music samples (30 seconds or less, for reasons of copyright) and stored them on the Plex servers. When you scrape your TV shows, besides downloading metadata, Plex queries our server and if available, will download the theme music. The next time you browse into a TV show, the theme music will play. It’s really hard to explain how cool this is until you see and hear it. Once you browse into Lost, for example, and the ethereal theme for the show starts playing, you’ll see how the music coupled with the fan art really provides a more complete experience for the senses.

If you’d like to contribute to the growing collection of theme music, send the files (MP3, preferably, limited to 30 seconds, no need to fade in or out as that’s done in the code) to themes@plexapp.com. Please include the TVDB ID for the show.

Someone in the last post commented on how Barkley looked a little too clean cut, so I’ll post this photo for comparison. That’s him opening up a can of tennis ball whoop-ass on his friend Manu. I think he gets NBC with his ears pointed like that.

(And how, you might ask, would be the best way to play tracks from iTunes in Plex? Let’s just say that’s a topic of a future post. How future, you might ask? Not very.)

Barkley, while being a staunch anti-DRM canine, will still make an appearance for this feature.

The downside to PortAudio turned out to be its lack of support for doing passthrough of encoded digital audio streams like AC3 and DTS. I always figured that a digital audio stream was just bits, and if the stream was set to the right bit-width and sample rate, encoded audio would work fine. It turns out I was only partially right; most receivers will accept this stream and lock onto the encoded audio. However, they’re only doing that because they’re being liberal about what they accept. The bitstream is actually lacking lower-level S/PDIF bits (meaning that they can’t be set at the application level) making it an official encoded audio stream. This meant that some receivers, acting by the letter of the law (like the one owned by poor fatez) refused to interpret the stream as encoded digital audio.

We first knew this was a problem around 8 months ago, which makes it the longest running Plex bug in history. The first person to tackle the problem was Brandon Golm. He worked extremely hard over several months on enhancing Portaudio with support for passthrough. However, the CoreAudio code in PortAudio isn’t the easiest to modify, and this approach (which I suggested and accept full blame for) didn’t end up coming to fruition.

Enter our resident Plex audio expert Ryan (who, incidentally, was one of the very first people to contribute code to the OSXBMC project!). Ryan took an interest in the problem and decided to approach it by porting VLC’s CoreAudio output module to Plex. After a enormous amount of hard work, the day finally arrived when he could claim victory:

Since the very first time I used XBMC on my old XBox, I longed for the ability for it to auto-update itself. Now Plex has had Sparkle update capabilities for a while, but let’s face it, it wasn’t perfect. It would pop up a Cocoa window, and you’d have to change to windowed mode in order to finish the update. Your friends would mock you and your wife would eventually start seeing the FedEx delivery man. This left you feeling empty and yearning for a truly integrated update that you could complete while eating pizza and spilling beer on yourself, greasy Apple Remote in hand.

That day is here!

While he was at it, James also added support for low battery warnings on laptops. What a major buzz-kill it would be if you were just getting to the, let’s say, “climax” of the movie you were watching only to have your laptop go black with a dead battery. Bummer, right? Well, here’s what you’ll see instead:

When you see this warning, walk, don’t run, to the nearest power outlet and plug your poor starving laptop in.

This should give you an idea of how seriously we’re taking OS X integration in this next, post-stabilization phase of Plex development. Four more of the new features deal with OS X integration in some way, and we hope you enjoy reading about them!

I’ve personally always had mixed feelings about settings. On the one hand, it’s obviously nice to allow people to configure an application to work the way they want it to. On the other hand, adding an option can often be the result of lazy design: I can’t figure out which is the better way, so I’ll just make it an option.

Apple takes an ascetic approach to configuration in its software. Front Row has exactly *three* settings, and many of its other applications have only a handful of configurable options. I posit that the reason for this is that they spend a lot of time working out the way the software should work by default, out of the box, for the majority of their users.

XBMC has historically been, to say the least, a settings-rich application. Dozens upon dozens of settings were available in the main program, and then many more are available only by editing an XML file (advanced settings).

After months of fielding issues from users on our forums, Isaac took it upon himself (with coding help from Enrique and lots of feedback from the team and testers) to revamp the settings in order to solve the following problems:

• Beginning users were often confused by the vast array of configurable options.
• Some settings were dangerous (i.e. you used to be able to turn off the event server and thus render your Apple Remote useless).
• Some nomenclature used in the settings wasn’t familiar to Mac users (e.g. “Pan and Zoom” instead of “Use Ken Burns Effect” for slideshows.
• Some default values didn’t make sense.
• Options were grouped strangely in some cases.
• Some settings didn’t do anything (except perhaps as a placebo effect).

As another example of how we’ve tried to make things easier for beginning users, Ryan’s new code makes the selection of audio devices much easier, by automatically detecting whether passthrough is supported by the device.

Additionally, keymaps have been simplified (thanks to Isaac and James). Each device’s mappings live in a separate file, and the keymaps are stored in the application bundle (but can still be overridden by the user, of course).

As a final example of how we’ve tried to pay attention to detail, you’ll notice in the screenshot below that a choice for Skin Colors doesn’t appear. That’s because the selected skin doesn’t offer color choices, so we felt that there was no sense in displaying an option that the user can’t change.

Please note that most of these changes are not set in stone. We are trying to find a balance between keeping advanced Plex users happy and at the same time making life easier for new users. If there is a setting that was hidden that you think is of great importance please take a minute to voice your concern on our forums.

Since there are so many new features, we’re going to detail them in blog posts, one feature per day. The first one will be posted later on today.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to show your plexy side, come visit our new web store that Isaac and Alexis set up, where you can pick up a Plex t-shirt or mug!

In the last months, we have made 22 releases of the 0.5 series of Plex. We’ve tried to fix all the most serious bugs, and add some OS X flavor to the application in the process (not to mention all the bugs that the XBMC team has fixed). I haven’t had a crash in a long time in my own personal use, and even the bug and crash reports have slowed.

Of course, there are still problems, and still bugs. No software is ever perfect. But we feel like we’ve reached a point where it works “pretty darn well” and we’d like to formalize this by ending the 0.5 development series, and releasing 0.6. Assuming nothing got screwed up in this release, we’ll make a couple of last-minute tweaks and fixes and release as 0.6.0.

Our long-term plan with Plex was always to stabilize, then enhance. First get it working well enough, then make major architectural changes.

At the same time as we’ve been working on the 0.5 series, we’ve also been staying up late at night, working hard on new stuff. Really cool new stuff. In the coming week or so, I’m going to be posting here with details on the *NINE* enhancements to Plex that have been completed. These enhancements will be included in the first release of 0.7 (the next development series). To summarize:

• v0.6.x: This will be the new stable series. If you fear change, and just want to enjoy your media in the safety of a stable release, use these. We’ll make bug-fixes, include the latest MediaStream, but nothing too scary.
• v0.7.x: If you like living on the bleeding edge, skiing down double-black diamonds, and jumping out of planes with parachutes, this is probably the series for you.

Here are the changes in this release (available from the Plex home page, and from Sparkle shortly):

• NEW: You can now configure the way the H.264 decoder does deblocking. Some will you will know this is the “skiploopfilter” setting in ffmpeg. Some will wonder if I’m speaking English. The bottom line is, if you allow the decoder to skip doing deblocking, it’ll be less intensive for the CPU. I’ve found that if you configure it to skip all deblocking, the “killa” bird sample uses about 20% less CPU and plays at a higher frame rate. Bottom line: your mileage may vary, but it may help you with hard-to-play content.

• NEW: Support for the Home and End keys in lists. Also support for using the A/Z keys to skip to the next/previous letter in lists. Jonathan Marshall added support for this last one a while ago, cool dude that he is, so we added a mapping. Also, Isaac added a new mapping for people using Snatch on their iPhone. You’ll have to whack your Keymap.xml file in ~/Application Support/Plex/userdata to get these features.
• NEW: We have included the latest MediaStream skin (no doubt out of date by tomorrow), along with the associated code fixes so that you don’t have to hit escape 23 times to return to the main menu from the Movie/TV sections. You can see some documentation for the new settings in this version of the skin here (many thanks to Jayman978!)
• FIX: We dimmed the wrong screen when you were running with a multi-screen setup and Plex was on the second screen.
• FIX: Some MP3 tags caused a hang. This includes the “Burial” album, so bretonh will be pleased.
• FIX: Refreshing movie info from NFO in VIDEO_TS folders caused a crash.
• FIX: Storing a TV show in multiple places (e.g. some seasons in one place, some seasons in another), whether by multi-path sources or different sources led to duplicates.

We’ve of course included all the latest XBMC fixes as well, including the latest UPnP and MythTV code.

I’ve taken to opening up fresh coconuts in the back yard with a big machete. The coconut water is supposedly really healthy, and if I’m feeling inspired, I make fresh coconut milk from the pulp for a Thai curry. Barkley loves both the milk and the pulp, so mostly I just lop the coconuts in half after drinking the water and give them to him.

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…

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!

1. I was heading out to a long dinner party, virtually assuring that there’d be a problem I couldn’t address for many hours and beers.
2. I changed things after the testers did their work. Bad me, no biscuit.

Two changes in this release:

• FIX: Crash on entering settings menu. Elan kan’t kode.
• FIX: Restore screen backlight level on exit.

The new release is available in the usual place. Will you forgive me if I post another photo of Barkley? This is him watching as his buddy Poots does tricks at the behest of our friend Heather. French Bulldogs can fly.

First of all, I want to make a big shout out to our forum members (citizens of Plexville). We just passed 10,000 posts, and we’re just a hair’s breadth away from 2,000 members. It’s a friendly, productive, helpful community, and we like it that way. A warm welcome to the new members, and a sincere thanks to everyone who helps out, we couldn’t do it without you!

We’ve been busy working on some awesome new features for the upcoming 0.7 development version, but we wanted to step away for a moment and fix some of the lingering bugs in the 0.5 series before we declare it stable. You can find the download on the home page or via Sparkle, as soon as I update the appcast.

• NEW: We now turn off the backlight on displays that are blanked, many thanks to James. I hear the sound of happy Mac users rejoicing.
• NEW: The menu button brings up shutdown menu instead of just exiting, as requested, holding play zooms into photos, and holding menu returns to normal zoom. Also, the escape key has been made to act just like the menu button on the remote. Thanks to Isaac for these improvements!
• NEW: Added the ability to cycle through the available displays. This works in windowed or full-screen modes, and you can use the new ⌘-Shift-→ and ⌘-Shift-← keyboard accelerators to do it. Fun! Plus, ever time I connect things in XCode’s Interface Builder, I get little shivers of pleasure.
• FIX: Weather conditions are correctly localized (thanks, Enrique!)
• FIX: James fixed a small bug with the display brightness setting.
• FIX: The audio device is now saved and restored correctly in all cases. Seriously.
  
• FIX: The problem affecting video with some LOL releases (and others) has been fixed (thanks to elupus for the fix to ffmpeg).
• FIX: A rare bug causing a crash when blanking displays (thanks, Enrique!)

Since Isaac has made tweaks to the keymap and advanced settings, unless you’re an expert user who has made your own edits, you’ll want to delete advancedsettings.xml and Keymap.xml from ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/ so that the new defaults can be installed.

As usual, we’ve also pulled fixes from the XBMC code, including shoutcast fixes by the ever-productive vulkanr, the latest scrapers, the usual assortment of brilliant stuff by jmarshall, and more (RTMP fixes, etc.). I also pulled r15344 as requested by chitz.

This is a photo of Barkley with his brother (i.e. littermate)Johann. We met him by chance at the dog park we used to frequent in Pasadena after noticing the striking resemblance.

• NEW: Our newest Plexville code master, Jam, added the ability to modify the panel brightness for applicable LCDs (iMacs, laptops) via the settings. Lots of other really cool things coming very shortly from him.
• NEW: Greatly simplified settings. Isaac worked really hard to come up with sane default settings, and also to move lots of the more esoteric settings from the UI into advancedsettings.xml. We’ve found that new users tend to run into the same things (e.g. disabling remote events and thus breaking Apple Remote). Plex now ships with a well commented advancedsettings.xml file which will get installed into your Application Support folder if you don’t already have the file. If you want to change settings that no longer appear in the UI, you can either edit the items in the advanced settings file, or remove from them there to make them appear in the UI again. Isaac did an awesome job at choosing reasonable defaults.
• NEW: Revamped the full-screen toggling (⌘-F) to make things more Mac-like. If you go into full-screen and quit, next time it will start in full screen. Also, if you drag the window over to another screen and hit ⌘-F, it’ll go to full-screen on that display. Quit and restart and it’ll be full-screen on that display. In summary, it should act much more intuitively. Thanks to migueld for pushing me on this one, we had lots of new users (rightly!) confused.
• FIX: Certain MKV files could cause crashes.
• FIX: Multi-channel AAC files could cause crashes (with AC3 transcoding). Ryan nailed this one.
• FIX: A regression displaying non-US charsets (e.g. French). Thanks to Soner and others who helped bring the problem to my attention.
• FIX: A regression scanning/refreshing movies in VIDEO_TS folders.
• FIX: Improvements to the German translation of MediaStream (thanks, Spacemessage!)

The new MediaStream 0.91 is included also, with lots of good stuff. There is a newer version out there, but we haven’t gotten though testing it yet with Plex.
We’ve also pulled the usual updates from XBMC: New scrapers, bug-fixes, better mouse hiding/displaying code from jmarshall, dropped frame code from elupus (look how few frames are actually dropped now!) and of course d4rk’s new plug-ins for iPhoto/iTunes (nice job!).

It was a beach day for Barkley this last weekend.

• Almost three quarters of you have little or no media on physical discs.
• 84% of you have little or no media in VIDEO_TS folders, or in ISO/IMG files.
• 81% of you have little or no media inside RARs or ZIP files.
• More than half of you have a majority of your media in high definition. Hello, future!
• Only 4% of you use 4×3 resolution.
• Only 24% of you use library mode, with 22% finding it too buggy and 29% finding it too complicated.

The interesting thing about those numbers - to me, at least - is in terms of priorities and allocating limited resources towards work on a project. As an example, I think it’s clear from these numbers that Team RazorFish did the exact right thing by leaving 4×3 support for their lovely MediaStream skin until the end!

The top three things you wanted from Plex back in July were stability, integration with OS X, and a lovely skin. We’ve been working hard to address the first, we now ship with the MediaStream skin, and we’ve got some really exciting stuff coming up in terms of integration features.

Plex needs to have strong focus on what’s important to our users, and we really appreciate everyone who filled out the survey to help us with that.

And now I’m off to go relax and celebrate our one year wedding anniversary. Assuming I can relax without an Internet connection, that is…

Plex Planning Survey.pdf

The problem has been fixed, and I’ve uploaded the new release. The good news is you should be able to use Sparkle to do the update for you.

This is Barkley catching guava fruit in his mouth. He loves guava, pineapple, papaya and avocado, and on occasion we’ve caught him eating freshly-fallen mango out in the yard.

The changes in this release (available from the home page)

• FIX: A silly and evil regression that prevented DVDs and other MPEG2 content from playing correctly, and caused crashes in DVD menus.
• NEW: Ryan added support for transcoding DTS audio to AC3 audio, for those who have slightly older receivers. If you want to enable it, change the audio output mode to be Digital, enable AC3 passthrough, and disable DTS passthrough. We also worked together to fix a bug where audio settings weren’t saved correctly, especially for people with external devices. Ryan rocks. If I post a link to his blog, will that inspire him to make his first post?
• NEW: Included the latest MediaStream skin (lovely work, guys, as always!). Added the Plexalicious Unicode fontset to hopefully help our international users.
• FIX: A potential compatibility problem with Remote Buddy (thanks, Felix!)
• FIX: Removed all the remote event settings from being visible, since people were mostly just using them to hurt themselves by turning off the server (and thus rendering their Apple Remote inoperable).
• FIX: Scott (aka Superpea) made a stunning foray into coding and sent me a fix for a problem where a remote library (FTP/XBMSP) was behaving really badly because it kept trying to create video thumbnails remotely. Bad thumbnailer! No biscuit. Nice work, dude!
• FIX/NEW: Resolution settings work much better with multiple profiles now. When you log into a profile that profile’s resolution kicks in. Create a profile for each of your 7 TV sets, and then log in to the right profile as you carry your laptop around.
• FIX: I pulled all the fanart fixes from XBMC that were required because of the initial fanart server melting down. I’d hate to see that person’s bandwidth bill!
• FIX: Fixed an annoying bug where the last thing you entered into a text box showed up (thanks spiff!)
• FIX: Updated the German translation of some skin entries (thanks, Arthur!)

Pulled the usual fixes from XBMC and one nice feature from jmarshall, who added the much-requested enhancement to resuming in videos, and some background processing of downloads of thumbnails and fanart. Nice job, man, you always make it look easy.

I’ll leave the last word to Barkley.

• FIX: The issue with using Remote Buddy.
• FIX: DVDs don’t play over SMB (and other non-local protocols).
• FIX: Crashes when thumbnailing MPEG2 files.
• FIX: Annoying popup asking to locate screensaver (99% sure).
• FIX: Hebrew characters should work again (i.e. be the right way around).
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailers thumbs don’t display.
• FIX: Going to full screen without visualizer doesn’t work (thanks, jmarshall!)
• FIX: Problems playing RAR files.
• FIX: Fixed a crash after playing an unplayable file.
• FIX: Cursor sounds work correctly until you play something.
• NEW: Latest version of MediaStream! We’ve added an experimental skin fontset called “Unicode” which uses Arial unicode for all the fonts, it may help international users.
• NEW: Mouse is turned off by default.
• NEW: Default username for web server is “plex” not “xbox”.

We also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from the XBMC code.

Here’s Barkley giving himself a good back scratch in the back yard.

Second thing, we’ve slightly tweaked the way we do version numbering. What we’d like to do is ensure two things: that you always have a stable version of Plex to download (which gets bug-fixes), and that you have access to more bleeding edge versions (with new features). To this end, odd version numbers (0.5.x, 0.7.x, 0.9.x) will always be bleeding edge versions, and even version numbers (0.6.x, 0.8.x, 1.0.x) will be stable versions. This is identical to the system that Linux used to use. This is the 14th release of the 0.5 series, and I hope it proves stable enough so that we can release the first of the 0.6 series soon.

You’ll also note new branding, new icons, splash screen, DMG background, all courtesy of the talented Alexis Gallisá. He’s worked hard not only on the branding, but the new Plex website (where you can find download and source links).

Last, but not least, you’ll note that we have said goodbye to Project Mayhem III as a default skin. Team Razorfish has very graciously allowed us to use the lovely MediaStream skin as the default skin for Plex. Note that if you have any problems with the skin, or feature requests, please report them on the Plex forums!

NOTE A few things for this release: You’ll probably want to delete your local copy of MediaStream if you have it installed in Application Support/Plex/skin (so as to avoid having two copies). Similarly, you’ll want to move Project Mayhem III into Application Support/Plex/skin (if you want to keep it around). Also, in order to obtain full fanart support (automatically scraped fanart), you’ll want to follow the procedure outlined by Isaac here, or else blow away your library and start over from scratch. Isaac, you rule, thanks for all the help getting this release out the door!!

• NEW: Ability to configure the number of recent video and audio items returned in library mode.
• NEW: Fatal errors are displayed in a popup dialog box, instead of causing the application to crash.
• NEW: Our newest contributor, Pundy, added the ability to sleep the Mac directly from the shutdown menu. Nice job!
• FIX: Annoying crash reading replaygain tags from MP3 files.
• FIX: Hang exiting the app using the dock menu, or with Applescript.
• FIX: Using “Open With…” to open media files with Plex should work again.
• FIX: Cmd-F works to toggle full-screen mode even if you’ve remapped the backslash key.
• FIX: Starting Plex with the screensaver active will turn it off.
• FIX: Manually browsing for subtitles exits the player.
• FIX: Crashes in ffmpeg playing various files (e.g. MS-DVR samples, King of Queens sample, Odd Couple sample).
• FIX: Locking bug in SMB resulting in crashes (fixed nearly simultaneously by my buddy vulkanr!)
• FIX: Crash on startup if you had multiple RSS feeds (this took about ten frustrating hours to track down).
• FIX: Apple Remote causes Front Row to start/system volume indicator. I believe this one is finally nailed. Thanks to the people who tested it.
• FIX: RAW file threading issues, leading to some loading of RAW files to fail.
• FIX: VIDEO_TS directories stack correctly and allow direct playing, thanks to dtmetz!
• FIX: DTS music files (thanks to spiff) and AC3 music files now play correctly, although only the former in 5.1.
• FIX: We call the Crash Reporter installer as an external entity so as to properly comply with the GPL. Thanks to Enrique for throwing a patch together so quickly. He also fixed a bug relating to installing the Plex helper.
• FIX: The XBox360 controller can now scan through files properly with the left thumbstick and exit with the big “X” button.
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailer plug-ins now install properly.
• FIX: The Apple Remote menu key (and backspace key) were unable to get you out of an empty movie/TV library.

Of course we’ve also pulled lots of good stuff over from the XBMC tree including some Bluray-related enhancements (find and use DTS-HD streams, by elupus), fanart and skinning enhancements (spiff and others), and fixes including the annoying ff/rew hang bug, fast text scrolling (jmarshall, who also fixed a ton of bugs), and lots of Python stability fixes by vulkanr: you rock, Python (and lots of other things) would not be stable without you!

And here’s your Barkley!

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…)

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.

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!

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.

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.

Anyway, the release today (HTTP, Torrent, Source) fixes the most common crashes and hangs that I observed after a day of watching reports come in.

• FIX: Possible crash when adding or editing source.
• FIX: Crash playing VIDEO_TS files (the biggest one!)
• FIX: Code signing is done correctly, so it will behave with Leopard Firewall.
• FIX: Lots of crashes as a result of some optical drive code still being enabled by default.
• FIX: A *ton* of hangs doing various things (e.g. adding sources, stopping video). The problem was that the scanner thread (which sometimes starts when the program starts), creates a big-ass database transaction inside which it does tons of time-consuming things like network scraping. This means that (a) no other database operations can run, like saving where you were in a file for resuming when you stop, or setting content on a source and (b) if the scan gets aborted for some reason, you end up with nothing in the database! The transactional design is simply incorrect. For now I’ve simply disabled the transaction, which fixes all the hangs, but it *may* introduce other issues (but hopefully not). I’ll choose the devil I don’t know on this one.

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.