http://elan.plexapp.com Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:42:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/27/happy-thanksgiving/ Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it! What's better than a free-range organic turkey? A new Plex/Seven release! 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/25/release-plexseven-071-onwards-and-upwards/ I feel like I cheated you all, because we promised a release today and it's taken us until now to fix some last minute issues and package everything up. Technically, it's still Nov 16th, but I do realize that it will be Nov 17th for almost everyone else on the ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/16/release-plexseven-070/ 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: See, isn't that much better? While he was in there, he decided to actually make ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/16/plexseven-one-more-thing/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/15/plexseven-introducing-the-all-new-plex-media-server/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/14/plexseven-itunes-visualizers/ These new features, cleverly conjured up by James, add some welcome pizzazz to the Plex experience. 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/14/plexseven-background-music-and-tv-themes/ I'll keep this one short and sweet: That DRM music you got from the iTunes store, those 10,000 tracks you own, those 30,000 bottles of Pepsi you purchased in order to win them, those dentist bills for repairing the damage to your teeth from drinking the Pepsi, not in vain. ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/12/plexseven-itunes-drm-audio-playback/ Back when I was first getting audio output to work with the media center on OS X, I decided to use the PortAudio library. It's portable, powerful, and I was already familiar with it, having used it on a previous job. The downside to PortAudio turned out to be its lack ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/11/plexseven-new-coreaudio-output-module/ First of all, thanks to everyone yesterday who took the time to comment on our first feature exposé for Plex/Seven! We really appreciate the feedback and kind words. Since the very first time I used XBMC on my old XBox, I longed for the ability for it to auto-update itself. Now ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/10/plexseven-integrated-sparkle-and-battery-monitoring/ First you write an application. Then at some point you decide there might be a few different ways a feature should behave. You add a setting. And that's when things go downhill. I've personally always had mixed feelings about settings. On the one hand, it's obviously nice to allow people to ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/09/plexseven-simplified-settings/ We've all been coding until our fingers bleed, and now we're almost ready to give you the fruits of our labor in the form of the new development series of Plex. The first release went out last night to our testers, and things are looking good. Since there are so many ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/11/09/plexseven-the-countdown-begins/ Way back when I was just starting the port to the Mac, and the program was just as likely to crash on you as play a video, I dreamed of a day when it would be stable. In the last months, we have made 22 releases of the 0.5 series of ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/10/28/plex-v0522-last-in-the-series/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/10/17/server-migration/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/10/08/plex-in-macworld/ Top two reasons why I shouldn't have released 0.5.20 quite yet: 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. I changed things after the testers did their work. Bad me, no biscuit. Two ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/10/05/release-0521-drunk-enough-to-know-better/ *** Hold off on this release for now, there's something borked with the settings *** 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, ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/10/04/release-0520-progress-is-the-opposite-of-congress/ Alright, a fresh new release for your enjoyment. A few tasty new items, and some bug fixes reported by our most excellent community! You can download from the home page, or via Sparkle (within a few minutes). NEW: Our newest Plexville code master, Jam, added the ability to modify ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/09/23/release-0519-fine-tuning/ I'll be out of town for the next couple days, but I wanted to leave you all with some entertaining reading material. Back in July we asked you to fill out a survey detailing how you store your media, how you use Plex, and what future work on the project ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/09/14/survey-results/ My sincere apologies for a bug that crept in with the DTS to AC3 transcoding feature which prevented DTS from down-mixing correctly. If you use usually connect Plex to a surround receiver supporting DTS you would not have been affected. The problem has been fixed, and I've uploaded the new release. ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/09/11/release-0517-dts-down-mixing-fix/ I know you're getting tired of downloading these endless Plex releases, so I'm very pleased to announce that this should be the last release you'll have to (manually) download. We've included the oft-requested Sparkle update system into Plex. I'm hoping it will make it much easier for people to stay ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/09/10/release-v0516-sparkle/ Hopefully this release will cure most of the serious issues with the last one. Downloads and source at the Plex home page. Thanks to everyone for their kind comments and thorough bug reports, and a warm welcome to all the new users! FIX: The issue with using Remote Buddy. ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/09/03/release-v0515-all-about-the-regressions/ First of all, a huge thank you to our group of testers. We recruited 10 people who know Plex inside out and are major contributors to the forums, and they were kind enough to spend time putting the new release through its paces. So ChoccyHubNub, jayman978, phunkysai, jeremymc7, Mikey, Vengeancegoon, ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/08/29/release-0514-bugfixing-bonanza/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/08/20/make-sure-youre-using-the-latest-version/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/08/15/status-update-2/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/08/02/blog-migration/ 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, ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/08/01/plex-in-the-wall-street-journal/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/07/31/smart-crash-reports-and-the-gpl/ The crash reports filtered in today, and at the end of the day I sorted them into folders. There were literally 26 identical crashes when playing VIDEO_TS, which is a great sign that a lot of people are running into the problem. Thanks so much to the people who wrote ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/07/29/release-05-rc3-statistical-bugfixing/ 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 ... http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/07/29/smart-crash-reporter/