Just over five years ago, we got together around a white board to plan the prank, and this is what we wrote:

1. Acquire millions of users.
2. Rickroll them.
3. ???

We did some more brainstorming, and decided that the best way to acquire a large user base we could proceed to rickroll would be some sort of video streaming thing. We almost called it RickPlex, but we thought that might be too obvious, so we stuck with Plex, and started coding right away.

Fast forward 5 years, 263 blog posts, and dozens of releases across multiple product lines, we finally decided we had enough coverage for our worldwide rickroll. We enabled some code we’d written all those years ago, and then cracked open a beer and waited.

After we finally stopped laughing at all the tweets and forum posts, and – frankly – ran out of beer, we all took a collective deep sigh. All those year of planning had finally paid off. We’d just pulled off what was possibly the biggest rickroll ever. And it was time to move on.

To all our users, thanks so much for being a part of this! It was a fun ride, and we wish you luck in the future. We’ll be shutting down all our services over the next few days, and moving on to other endeavors.

We have a nice Plex Media Server update for you today, mostly focusing on transcoder fixes and improvements, including a rather significant speed up: when syncing or streaming with the new transcoder, you will see up to a 2x speedup over the last release.

You can read all the detailed changes since the last public release here. We’ve created a set of forums which list all the changes for each of our products to make it easier for you to both see what’s changed, and to allow subscribing via the forums if you’d like to receive an email when we make releases!

You can download the release in the usual place.

Here’s Barkley this morning, playing on the beach.

And here he is, on the couch, waiting for the Game of Thrones season premier (“What the woof, how much longer??”).

We hope you all had a great weekend!

• NEW: Enhanced filtering: The new rich library filters you’ve gotten to know and love in Plex/Web and the new Plex for Android is now available inside the iOS app.

• NEW: Mobile Media Server: Play your synced content and view content from your photo albums on any other Plex client! I think this is such an awesome feature. You can go over to a friend’s house, and your iPhone or iPad will show up as a Plex server, and (for example) you could browse and play synced content on your Roku. Or even play it from Plex for Android, or another iOS device. Crazy!

• NEW: Push notifications: Plex will now alert you when someone adds you as a friend or sends you a recommendation.
• NEW: Universal transcoder (experimental): We’ve unified the media server’s transcoders, and now iOS can use the latest and greatest. Among other things, this adds support for more subtitle formats, including (finally!) VOBSUB and PGS.
• NEW: New and improved photo viewer.
• NEW: Dark theme.
• NEW: All sliders support variable scrubbing speed (just like the movie player) .
• NEW: Better integration of search in sections and channels.
• NEW: Audio boost & subtitle size settings are used for sync.
• NEW: Failed sync transcodes can be retried from Sync Settings.
• NEW: Source icons for online search results.
• NEW: Swipe up from the bottom to access connectivity settings.
• FIX: Attempt to direct-play MPEG-4 video.
• FIX: Better response validation (fixes certain sync errors).
• FIX: The app can now sync from servers that aren’t published to myPlex.
• FIX: Sort ordering for sync is more reliable.
• FIX: Various issues with manually added servers.
• FIX: Plex/HT and Plex/Roku player names are detected correctly.
• FIX: myPlex accounts couldn’t be created on the device.
• FIX: Offline sections couldn’t be accessed in some rare cases.
• FIX: A few other inconsistencies & crashes.

Happy Pi day, Plexians! I hope you’re all doing something date-appropriate like watching TV or relaxing an hour and six minutes earlier than usual. If, on the other hand, you’re feeling like letting your geek flag fly, you should check out the RasPlex project.

A bit of background: The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer which sells for as little as $25. Size and price notwithstanding, the popular device packs a powerful graphics chip which allows for HD video decoding and high performance 3D graphics. Sound like a perfect device to run Plex Home Theater on? You’re not alone in thinking that. Thankfully, Sam Nazarko has been doing brilliant work on making XBMC (which Plex Home Theater is based on) really run well on the Raspberry Pi with his Raspbmc project.

And I have to say, the combination of the Raspberry Pi and Plex Media Server is especially compelling, given our awesome transcoder: Any codecs the board can’t handle natively can be transcoded in real time by the server.

Thus, a few months ago, RasPlex was born. We were approached by Dale with his ideas for the project, which even included a cool-looking custom case for the device. If you have a Raspberry Pi already, you can download an early release of the Plex Home Theater port today from his site.

There’s nothing that makes us happier than more options for running Plex! (And it’s especially cool when the option comes from our amazing community.)

One of the most notable things about this release are all the changes in the new transcoder. This transcoder can burn image-based subtitles (PGS and VOBSUB), it’s much faster than the old one, resolves many issues the old one had (including quite a few issues with Roku, like the infamous AC3 issue), and we’re in the process of updating all the clients to use it.

The new transcoder is used by default with the new Plex for Android app, the latest version of Plex/Web, and by PlexSync, of course. The next release of iOS (out shortly) can be used with it, as will the next release of Plex for Roku, and we’ll be updating the DLNA server to use it as well.

Let’s get into the details; lots of stuff, as it’s been baking in PlexPass for a while. As you might expect, the majority of the changes are fixes, as we work to get 0.9.7 rock solid. You can pick up the update directly from the usual place, or wait for autoupdate to kick in shortly.

• NEW: Auto-select forced subtitles. I don’t speak alien either.
• NEW: (API) More information passed back at root level to aid PlexSync clients.
• NEW: (API) Final transcode resolution passed back for transcode session endpoint.
• NEW: (API) Add a “transcoderVideo” flag at root if we support transcoding video.
• NEW: (API) Allow callers to specify a background color when transcoding to JPEG.
• NEW: (API) Add viewStateUpdatedAt for global OnDeck to allow sorting.
• NEW: (API) export library section UUIDs for PlexSync.
• NEW: (Android) Add FLAC as a direct play profile (syncing at less than “highest” will convert to MP3).
• NEW: Added device notifications for sync (in progress, item complete). Mostly helps Kepler.
• NEW: (PlexSync) Support for syncing show banners.

• FIX: (New transcoder) Massive speedups for the new transcoder in many scenarios (sync, streaming, seeking). It should be 2x to 3x faster (around 2x faster than the old transcoder), and will resolve many issues of stuttering and buffering some have seen.
• FIX: A bug where timed library updates might only happen every other interval.
• FIX: A major regression with subtitles causing transcoder to exit on certain OS X systems.
• FIX: A case where we didn’t allow the host system to sleep.
• FIX: Improvements to audio stream picking heuristics.
• FIX: A hang when WebKit transcodes failed.
• FIX: Some EAC3 streams showed up as “EC-3″.
• FIX: Use media analysis duration instead of likely meaningless metadata duration when possible.
• FIX: Improved elastic thread pool behavior, less pressure on thread creation/destruction.
• FIX: Fixed an issue where background color wasn’t correct in the image transcoder (fixes section icons on Roku).
• FIX: (OS X) Fix auto-update library failing under certain conditions.
• FIX: (OS X) Show Plex/Web preferences by default, option-click shows old Cocoa prefs.
• FIX: Improve Kepler transcoder profile, add Plex/Web profile.
• FIX: (ReadyNAS) Update packaging, fix temp folder path.
• FIX: (Ubuntu) Upstart fix.
• FIX: (Fedora) Fixes in scripts.
• FIX: (Roku) Improve profile, disable anamorphic video.
• FIX: (Kepler) Limit AAC to two channel, so 5.1 gets mixed down when streaming on mobile devices.
• FIX: (Kepler) Fix for anamorphic video displaying incorrectly.
• FIX: (Windows) Don’t let PYTHONPATH interfere with our Python. Fixes some startup issues.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Upgrade to ffmpeg 1.1.2
• FIX: (New transcoder) Allow specifying max bitrate.
• FIX: (New transcoder) MPEG4 inside AVI files didn’t work.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Allow for faster seeking for clients that support it.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Don’t send back blank segments when transcoder dies.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Allow other users access to transcode session information.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Use higher bitrate when converting other codecs to AAC.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Improve quality when transcoding interlaced content.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Greatly improved AAC audio quality.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Remove MP3 from iOS HLS transcode target.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Improved support for remuxing with multichannel audio.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Support transcoding between multi-channel formats.
• FIX: (New transcoder) We failed with some content due to scaling bug (Vimeo, TED).
• FIX: (New transcoder) Send more logs up to the media server to help diagnosing issues.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Fix an issue when remuxed videos failed or acted weirdly.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Fix issue with last character being missing in SRT subs.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Fix SRT subs showing <font> tags.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Improve accuracy of bitrate in M3U8, helps Roku.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Improve bandwidth estimates for HLS.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Some indirect videos failed to play.
• FIX: (New transcoder) We were generating MPEGTS streams which occasionally made the Roku crash.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Improve reliability of new transcoder when resuming.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Some VOBSUB subtitles inside MKV files weren’t burned.
• FIX: (New transcoder) Some high bitrate stereo content failed to transcode.

I’ll let the tireless Plex mascot have the last word, as usual. Barkley’s been dragging me down to the beach twice a day for a lagoon swim, and if I’m not mistaken, his paws are growing more and more webbed.

Anyway, you know why you’re here, so without further ado, here’s how to get the new Plex for Android release. These links will only work for PlexPass members:

1. Install the latest Plex Media Server from here.
2. Visit this forum post for details on how to get the app from Google Play or download the APK.
3. Profit!

This is the first release of a brand new codebase, so we expect there will be a veritable cornucopia of bugs. Bring ‘em on (with well-written reports in the forum) and we’ll get ‘em fixed!

Here’s a bonus Friday night photo of Barkley. Check out that sagittal crest.

One of my biggest gripes against Android was how unresponsive the user interface was, even after four major iterations of the platform. Little did I know, the geniuses at Google were hard at work on Project Butter, and I have to say, butter tastes good.

What Android has going for it, more than any other mobile platform, is a supreme lack of complacency. Besides silky smoothness, Jelly Bean also introduces large improvements in the notification system. And Google Cloud Messaging (which completely replaced Cloud to Device Messaging), is far superior than iOS push notifications.

When the iPhone came out, it was 5 years ahead of anything else in the space. Indubitably. But one would be hard-pressed to argue that the platform has progressed with anything close to the speed at which Android has. Let’s be frank: when it first came out, Android was crap. But when you have two cars racing on a long straight highway, over time, velocity is everything. So 5 years later, Apple is no longer 5 years ahead. And more dangerously, their speed is unimpressive as of late. Their hardware is outstanding, best in the world. But iOS itself, honestly, feels like it’s languishing.

The other big complaint I had against Android was its development ecosystem. This is something Microsoft understood, and got right with its Metro [sic] toolset. It is very easy to make a nice “modern” Windows app (or whatever they’re calling it this week).

When we first started with Plex for Android, the edit/build/deploy cycle was glacial. So bad that when the app finally ran, you literally forgot what change you were deploying to test. That bad. Google should have focused earlier and with more passion on tooling. Empower the developers, and you’ll reap the rewards when they empower your platform. Annoy your developers, and you’ll have a software ecosystem problem.

Today, that problem is mostly solved. I can edit and deploy to my Nexus 7 in a few seconds. The x86 emulator is much faster than the emulator of yesteryear, running inside a Linux VM, on top of an emulated ARM processor (apparently nobody watched Inception). There are still annoyances, and IntelliJ’s UI designer for layouts is sadly primitive compared to Visual Studio, but it’s much, much better.

So where does that leave Android, and perhaps more importantly, Android users? In a good place, and getting better. For the first time ever, you can actually find Android software which is comparable (and sometimes ever better) than the iOS versions. As an example, I love the Lantern Campfire app. It runs in the background, notifies me of new messages, and looks infinitely better than 37 Signals’ pathetic excuse for an official app. I could go on, but our friend Aayush Arya wrote a brilliant article which I highly recommend you read.

I realize, you’re here for Plex news, not a 500 word meandering diatribe on mobile operating systems, so I apologize. I felt the need to update my previous thoughts on the matter, and, as a fellow Plexian said, eat some crow. Nom nom nom.

I’ll make the actual news short and sweet: we’ve rewritten Plex for Android from scratch. Frankly, we learned a lot of lessons from the old app, and it served us well. But we’ve been reading and re-reading the Android Design Guidelines, and we thought we could do better, especially if we dropped support for older versions of Android.

We targeted Android 3.2 or newer, used some great platform features (Google Cloud Messaging, lock-screen music controls, global search integration), and you’re going to love it. It also supports PlexSync. To everyone who has been patiently waiting, I apologize for the delay, but it will have been worth it. The app is fast, smooth, and beautiful. It uses paging and infinite scrolling and network data compression, which means access to giant libraries is super fast. It supports the same rich filters you’ve gotten to know and love from Plex/Web. And most importantly, it’s a great platform to build on.

We’ve prepared a little video which shows off the new Plex for Android (codenamed Kepler, in case you cared). You’ll want to watch it all the way through, because in the video you’ll see unveiled a surprise MAJOR feature (never seen before) that will literally, blow your minds.

We didn’t just set out to make a great Plex Android app.

We set out to make the most beautiful Android app, period.

When will it be released? This week. On Google Play. As a separate app, so you can run both side by side.

Will it be PlexPass only? Yes. Until it’s out of beta, at which point it will be available as a free upgrade for existing Plex for Android users. (Note that it does not, and will not, support Android versions earlier than 3.2). Also note that the PlexSync feature will always require a PlexPass.

Why 3.2? Because the Google TV runs 3.2, and we like the Google TV.

I have an Android 2.x device. Why do you hate me? At this point almost 90% of our users are running 4.0 or newer. We felt that requiring a modern version of Android was the best move for the app, and the vast majority of our user base.

That’s not to say that these updates themselves aren’t exciting. We’ve been doing  a lot of work on the next-generation transcoder in the media server lately. Currently in use for PlexSync and the Win8 app, it’ll soon be available for iOS and Android and Plex/Web as well, as it offers many advantages over the old transcoder. For starters, the new version supports burning PGS and VOBSUB subtitle formats, which has been requested for – literally – years. Secondly, it should offer much better performance, stability, compatibility with codecs, should fix issues with A/V sync, and many other things. Last, but not least, it leverages a powerful server-side profile mechanism which will soon be used universally for DLNA, PlexSync, and “live” transcoding. We’re building the most advanced media server on the planet here, and the new transcoder is at the heart of it!

Here’s a full list of changes in the latest Plex Media Server, available from here:

• NEW: Greatly improved (Sync and Win8) transcoder subtitle burning: support SSA and SMI, fix crashes, fix subtitle sync when resuming video.
• FIX: Scanning TV shows near the root directory of a volume didn’t work reliably.
• FIX: Send Accept-Ranges: bytes HTTP header when answering requests for media. Fixes Win8 seeking in media.
• FIX: DTS audio inside MP4 container could be incorrectly identified as mp4a during media analysis.
• FIX: Transcoding certain media files could be pathologically slow. Thanks to Rodger for helping us diagnose the issue!
• FIX: Transcoding video audio from MP3 to AAC would fail in some rare cases.
• FIX: A/V sync issues transcoding Smooth Streaming to Windows 8 Store app.
• FIX: Actor thumbnails weren’t being offered correctly to sync clients.
• FIX: Removed unnecessary logging when running transcoder.
• FIX: Add more logging when Win8 app loopback exemption can’t be added.
• FIX: When a media asset is uploaded, it becomes the default.
• FIX: Sync item status could be prematurely reported as complete.
• FIX: Added iPad mini sync profile.
• NEW: (API) Allow converting SMI to SRT (format=srt).
• FIX: (Windows) Large log files when number of library paths exceeded 64.
• FIX: (Sync) A few issues with sync status not being reported correctly.
• FIX: (Transcoder) An A/V sync issue affecting Win8 app.

Leveraging the new transcoder, and all these other fixes, is the latest update of Plex for Windows 8. It’s taken us a few releases, but at this point media playback support on the app is really super good, and it’s able to play lots of content with remuxing, which (given our support for throttling on the server side), means awesome quality video with minimal CPU usage. Lots of other new stuff, including more keyboard navigation and a cool media information popup, and many bug-fixes.

Plex/Web also got a massive update. A giant, thundering, epic update, featuring a redesigned home screen, greatly simplified navigation, and lots of other goodies. Look at this beautiful new dashboard!

We’ll be back very soon, but until then, I’ll leave with with two photos of Barkley, who has been your faithful Plex mascot for the last five years. The first one finds him as a puppy, with giant paws and a feisty disposition.

As you can see, he’s grown in size quite a bit. (Sweetheart, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

First up, let’s have a look at a really cool new feature in the Plex/Web release that you all should already have, thanks to the magic of auto-update. As many of you already know, PlexSync is cloud and server-based, and thanks to that, you can now queue up media to be converted for any of your devices from the convenience of a browser, no matter where in the world you are.

So you might be at work, and between designing spacecraft or performing open-heart surgery, you’re busy getting your iPad (sitting at home) ready for your upcoming vacation. Not that we at Plex condone ever doing anything other than work, at work. Really.

This also means that you can now use the advanced filters available in Plex/Web and send the results to one of your devices. So you could select “unwatched movies rated PG and released in the last three years”, for example, and this smart filter would continually watch for movies matching that criteria and convert them for your device. Pretty cool, right?

There’s also a cool new “activity” view which shows what your server is working on (yes, we will be enhancing it in the future to show more activity, which many of you have been asking for).

As you probably already know, PlexSync is a premium feature which we bundle with PlexPass.

Switching topics, there’s also a brand new release of Plex for Windows 8 in the store, with a bunch of new things including theme music! Direct play of AVI and MP4 files! PlayTo support! Support for Window Media Center remote controls! And lots more, you can read the full release notes here.

Last, but not least, there’s a new Plex Media Server release, which addresses some issues, including a reboot problem with LG TVs. We’ve spoken with LG, and they say a firmware update is coming which will fix the bug, but we have a workaround for you in the meantime. You can download the new release in the usual place.

• FIX: Workaround for LG TVs rebooting.
• FIX: (Windows) Lots of CPU, giants logs in some cases.
• FIX: An issue scanning sections where the paths had trailing slashes (e.g. W:\).
• FIX: MP4 files with DTS streams had them incorrectly identified as MP4a.
• FIX: (Sync) A few issues with sync status not being reported correctly.
• FIX: (Transcoder) An A/V sync issue affecting Windows 8 Plex app.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, our triad of releases to greet the new year, as a harbinger of much awesomeness to come.

First up, we have a major update to the Windows 8 Plex app with a bunch of bug fixes, much improved support for keyboard navigation, audio/subtitle stream selection, universal search, a lovely interface to the channel store, and a new high quality (but experimental) option for video playback which allows re-muxing most H.264 video. It’s available in the Windows 8 store right now.

Next up, Plex/Web is kicking it Gangnam style with an awesome new release, including the much requested ability to upload custom posters, with drag and drop, no less (or from a URL), some sexy tag completion in the editor, support for retina-quality posters on retina devices, and lots of bug fixes. You’ll get the update automatically within the next few hours, or you can force an update, as usual.

You know it’s going to be a big year when we have two photos of Barkley gracing a release post! The second one of course celebrates the new new release of the media server, which has the usual bag of goodies and fixes. You can download it right now from the usual place.

• NEW: Music sections support searching by album.
• NEW: Massive performance improvements for some DLNA streaming scenarios.
• NEW: Allow players to specify a protocol and respect their port.
• NEW: (API) Support for filtering movies by studio.
• NEW: (API) Support for sorting by last view date.
• NEW: (API) Added endpoints for uploading custom media assets (e.g. posters). Used by Plex/Web.
• FIX: Some cache control header updates.
• FIX: A few crashes.
• FIX: (Windows) Workaround for Win 8 security model preventing Plex for Windows 8 from connecting on same machine.
• FIX: (Windows) Crash on start.
• FIX: (Windows) 100% CPU when Plex for Windows 8 is running.
• FIX: (Transcoder) External SRT files with BOM marker weren’t getting rendered.
• FIX: (Transcoder) Faster startup.
• FIX: (PlexSync) Transcoder now handles anamorphic video properly.
• FIX: (PlexSync) Sometimes converted files could be bigger than source files.
• FIX: (PlexSync) Ratings directory was missing.
• FIX: (API) New /channels/arts endpoint which returns channel background art.
• FIX: (API) Resolutions filter can be itself filtered.
• FIX: (API) Don’t return empty studios.
• FIX: (API) Global on deck has mixed parents.
• FIX: (API) Make sure recently viewed channels have identifiers.
• FIX: (API) Fix incorrectly escaping JSON.
• FIX: (API) Fixes for media asset uploads, and select/lock upload.
• FIX: (API) Fix alphanumeric paging with non-alphanumeric characters.
• FIX: (DLNA) Hopeful fix for some heap corruption.
• FIX: Fixed a few (very) rare deadlocks.
• FIX: Fixed iTunes channel for iTunes 11.
• FIX: (Sync) iPad 4s weren’t using the right profile.
• FIX: (Transcoder) Faster starting for transcoded audio.
• FIX: (Transcoder) Fixes for RTMP with new transcoder.
• FIX: (Transcoder) Speed up WebKit transcoder starts.
• FIX: (Transcoder) Fix for some remuxing cases with Win8.