Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

The Plex/Eight series is supposed to be about stability, and with all the changes we introduced in the 0.8.3 there were a few regressions that slipped in as well. We’re very sorry about that, and we’ve worked extremely hard since it was released to fix the issues introduced as well as new ones that came to light. So what happened to 0.8.4? We were on the verge of releasing it and then found a few more bugs, so we “nuked” the release. Those of you who sniffed it out on the server, you may want to upgrade now to the real thing.

Without further ado, the fixes:

• FIX: A bug where Plex and the Plex Media Server could get out of sync and display the wrong contents for a directory.
• FIX: An issue when stopping music playback, where the GUI “clicks” don’t restore and the playing track is still selected.
• FIX: Photo thumbnails were broken for plug-ins (thanks to orr721 for the report!)
• FIX: Hitting the menu button during a blank slideshow causes a crash. (thank to Majkel and other for the report!)
• FIX: When a track fails to play, Plex jumps into (blank) Now Playing screen anyway.
• FIX: Sometimes the photo screensaver started going “crazy fast”.
• FIX: The new remote code logged too much.
• FIX: The duration didn’t show up in plug-ins.
• FIX: You weren’t returned to the main menu correctly from items added to your Favorites, or direct links to plug-ins in the Music section. Existing favorites will need to be removed and re-added. (James)
• FIX: The iTunes plug-in now sorts artists by the “sort artist” field in iTunes. This one is for Scott!
• FIX: Crashes with WebKit plug-ins that appear in the Music section.
• FIX: PlexHelper occasionally stopped responding (or responded incorrectly) to button presses.
• FIX: Sometimes Plex didn’t start after the first run. Believe it or not, this was an OS X bug, now worked around.
• FIX: Plex hung when using the mouse wheel to scroll through text (thanks to hqrs for the report!)
• FIX: Changed the servers in the TVDB scraper to use the load balanced ones. (many thanks to kruisje for the fix!)
• FIX: Fixed a crash loading some RAW files.
• FIX: DTS-to-AC3 was broken in the last release. Thanks to our audio doctor Ryan who fixed it and improved the AC3 trancoding in the process.
• FIX: When you select “previous track” it now does the right thing with streamed content: moving to the start of the track or the previous track depending on how far along the track is (awesome, James!)

OK, so I said there were just fixes, right? I lied! James, as usual, pulled out a great new feature or two out of his hat, and we hope you enjoy them.

• NEW: Plug-in preferences show up on the context menu for the plug-in itself.
• NEW: Auto-sourcing of remote Plex Media Server iLife plug-ins. Let’s say you have a laptop with iTunes music, or your wife’s iMac has iPhoto on it. No longer do you have to manually add the sources, or wonder if they’ll work when you click on them. With the new version, sources add and remove themselves auto-magically thanks to Bonjour. Make sure you install the new Plex Media Server on the remote machines.

I’ll leave you with a rare sighting of the Loch Ness Barkley.

There’s a new beta out of Flash, which adds nice things like hardware H.264 decoding. Unfortunately, it also seems to not play nicely with the Media Server at the moment when using WebKit plug-ins. We’re investigating, but recommend not installing it for the moment. Caveat emptor.

If you’re in Sweden, you can’t use Netflix (silly geographic restrictions), but now you can use the most excellent Headweb movie service on Plex. It’s especially exciting because the company approached us and then wrote this awesome plug-in themselves. With the excellent selection of Swedish content available, it’s no wonder that there are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country!

The Headweb plug-in, provided by the Swedish online movie service Headweb.com, allows you to watch and rent films directly from your Plex-equipped living room. All 1800 films are available for rent for 24 hours. The plug-in has support for subtitles, parental filter, trailers, and is localized in Swedish and English. Headweb is currently exclusive for Swedish consumers, although expansion to other nordic countries is coming very soon. They just recently got rated Sweden’s best movie service by “Digitala Hemmet”. If you have any questions, please check out their Plex page.

Headweb plugin från filmtjänsten Headweb.com låter dig se och hyra film från ditt Plex-utrustade vardagsrum. Alla 1800 filmer finns tillgängliga som hyrfilm under 24 timmar. Pluginen har stöd för undertexter, föräldrafilter, trailers m.m. och finns på svenska och engelska. Headweb är för tillfället exklusivt för svenska användare men en utökning till övriga nordiska länder är på gång. Headweb utsågs nyligen till bästa filmtjänsten av “Digitala Hemmet”. För mer information och frågor kolla på http://www.headweb.com/180665/plex-ps3/

You can see a demonstration of the plug-in here.

It looks great!

Do you like music videos? Then you’ll love this new plug-in written by Jonny Wray. Yahoo! Music allows you to watch thousands of music videos.

Like to watch South Park and live in Sweden? Ported by Henrik Engman, South Park SE allow you to watch every episode of South Park for free.

Written by Sander Spies is a plug-in for the Netherlands, Bekijk RTL Nieuws, RTL Z en andere RTL programma’s via RTL Gemist.

Does Sander ever sleep? Apparently not, and that’s to the benefit of our Dutch users. Bekijk programma’s van NET5, SBS6 en Veronica via Programma Gemist van SBS.

We want to thank all those who participated in the survey. We appreciate all the valuable input we received, and the time you took to give us your thoughts on Plex’s future. Without further ado, let’s meet the winners!

The winner of the brand new Mac Mini was Ian H. from Bristol in the UK. He’s been using Plex for 3 to 4 months, and he works as a software project manager (looking for the next project). His favorite Plex feature is the Academic Earth plug-in.

The winner of the Harmony One Advanced was Daniel E. from Boston, MA, who is an astrophysicist. He’s a recent convert to Plex, having switched from Boxee because he was fed up with the Hulu/Boxee war and loved “the almost infinite options to customize Plex“. When asked his favorite thing about Plex, he replied: “Several here. First, I love the forum community – it’s great to see such an organic development of the software and plugins for it. Next, the scraping is second-to-none. Finally, I’ve got to give huge props to the PlexAlaska skin, which is truly beautiful.“

The winner of the Harmony 700 was Don W. from Placentia, CA. Don has been a Plex user for about 9 months and says that Plex gave him the solution for “cutting the ‘cable cord’“. He added “Plex handles my media the way I want it, but makes it easy enough for my wife to understand.” Don is a Sales Manager for Swank Audio Visuals, and works designing Audio Visual elements for Fortune 500 meetings and events. His favorite Plex feature is the App Store and Plug-ins: “It has increased my ability to make Plex my only source of media in the house. No Cable or Satellite but I watch more content and have access to more media than ever before.”

Congratulations to our winners, and thanks again to everyone!

Written by Jonny Wray, Earth-Touch is an online window to life in the natural world. Great high definition content!

Written by Sander Spies, Culture Catch is your vid/podcasting on-line smart culture channel for provocative, insightful, entertaining and often-irreverent discussions on trends in 21st century culture with those who are in the know.

Also written by Sander Spies, PokerNews contains video updates, interviews and commentary from the world of poker including the latest from the WSOP.

Love movie trailers? Written by Jonny Wray, Trailer Unleashed provides instant access to a large amount of trailers.

Written by Sander Spies, Bekijk alle Nederland 24 kanalen vanuit Plex. De beschikbare kanalen: 101 TV, Best 24, Consumenten 24, Cultura 24, Familie 24/Z@ppelin, Geschiedenis 24, Holland Doc 24, Humor TV 24, Journaal 24, Politiek 24, Spirit 24, Sterren 24

To all those in countries which celebrate this holiday, we just wanted to wish you a happy, safe, and fun Halloween! This artfully carved pumpkin comes to you from the skilled hands of our very own Jay. I mean, seriously, he even got the X spot on.

The survey will run until November 1. Also, users outside the US are absolutely eligible for the the prizes. We have always thought of Plex as an international community. If anything, the survey has shown us that most of our users are outside of the US. We intend to always treat all of our users as first class citizens.

Already filled out the survey? We sure appreciate it, and here’s how much: We’re going to be giving away some seriously cool prizes to three respondents! Those who have already taken the survey get a special thank you, as entries taken before the time of this post will get entered into the drawing twice.

Haven’t taken the survey yet? You still have time.

The prizes are:

1. One brand new Mac Mini (2.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD)
2. One Harmony One Advanced universal remote.
3. One Harmony 700 Advanced universal remote.

Not a bad deal for a few minutes of your time, so please, if you haven’t already, head to the survey and give us a piece of your mind!

UPDATE: IOSPIRIT has resolved the issue with the Candelair driver causing issues with Leopard booting. New driver version is up on their site and will be available via built-in update shortly.

We realize it’s been a little while since the last release, but hopefully the wait will have been worth it. We’re thrilled to serve you up a fresh new version of Plex (download here) with lots of bug-fixes and a few little enhancements. First up, the fixes:

[French users, be sure to read through oncleben31's blog post on the new scraper included in this release here.]

• FIX: On Snow Leopard, 5.1 audio had issues. We’ve cleaned up the code, fixed the problems, and it now runs great on 10.6. Many thanks to Ryan for all his work on this one.
• FIX: We fixed an issue with the new caching system that could cause some MKVs and other files to stutter when played over the network.
• FIX: Video playlists work again.
• FIX: Multi-part videos display thumbnails again.
• FIX: Crash reading GPS EXIF data from photos.
• FIX: Fix for crash when displaying subtitles (Thanks, Billy J!)
• FIX: A few crashes in the Media Server (custom iTunes genre artwork, and playing Netflix movies).
• FIX: First WebKit play on a fresh install didn’t work.
• FIX: App Store would sometimes not show up on a fresh install.
• FIX: GForce visualizer for iTunes causes Plex to crash.
• FIX: TVDB image issue (thanks to Poldi!)
• FIX: Posters issue in IMDB scraper (thanks, Jay!) and issue with cast lists (thanks to Todd G!)
• FIX: DTS downmixing method reverted to use libdts. People who listen on headphone *may* be happier.
• FIX: Make keyboard backlight feature optional (James). You can access this setting in the advanced Cocoa preferences area under the Videos tab.

To summarize, Plex should now work pretty well on Snow Leopard, and hopefully most of the annoyances and issues in the last release have been fixed. Moving right along, what other tasty nuggets await in this new release?

• NEW: James revamped the Plex shutdown options, adding a beautiful UI that allows quitting, sleeping, or powering off after a specified time. Check out the screencast below to see it in action. Press ‘s’ anywhere in Plex to go directly to the Quit menu. On the Quit menu, press ‘c’ on the keyboard or hold the Play button on the Apple Remote to bring up the quit timer. There are also options to Sleep and Shutdown in the Quit submenu. Press ‘c’ or hold Play on the apple remote with Sleep or Shutdown selected brings up the timers for both of those as well.
• NEW: One of the longest-running complaints about Plex has been the low volume when listening to downmixed 5.1 audio. We’ve added three levels of dynamic range compression (in Preferences > System > Audio): Normal, Large, and Huge. These settings apply only to AC3 and DTS downmixed audio, and the Large and Huge settings can introduce (usually subliminal) clipping. This one is for you, Aayush!
  
• NEW: Captions for iPhoto photos, and EXIF comment tag also used for captions.
• NEW: We’re using Felix’s new Apple Remote code (thanks to Evan for integrating it!). This provides, as Apple would say “improved compatibility”.
• NEW: Toggle full screen option on dock menu (thanks to Billy Joe).

Along this release comes a new improved version of the Plex Media Framework used to write plug-ins, and enhancements to the Plex Media Server itself.

• NEW: Support for one-click install of plug-ins. You can now easily install plug-ins off the web without having to copy files all over the place.
  
• NEW: Support for auto-refresh in directories.
• NEW: Context menus in plug-ins.
• NEW: The ability for the HTTP cache to auto-update itself.
• NEW: Rating support for plug-ins, with support for community/system ratings as well as user ratings. This feature was used to great effect by David B in the upcoming update of our Netflix plug-in. Here’s an unrated movie and us rating it via the context menu item.
     

  And here’s the movie with our rating.

  
• NEW: Upgrade Plex WebKit libraries to 4.0.3.
• NEW: Allow passing back User Agent (makes Apple Movie Trailers work again).

As has become custom in these parts, Barkley sends his greetings.

One of our biggest disappointments with Snow Leopard was the fact that third party support for the Apple Remote was changed (or broken), and applications like Plex, EyeTV and VLC were on the receiving end. Apart from one person who posted “Plex works perfectly on Snow Leopard for me!” (who either used the keyboard exclusively, or suffered from extreme overoptimism) our forums and twittersphere filled with complaints about the new behavior, which rendered the Apple Remote practically unusable for Plex.

Our friend Evan Schoenberg looked into the issue, and ended up filing a bug with Apple, who replied “this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering“. We had high hopes for 10.6.1, but unfortunately it didn’t help. There are rumors that 10.6.2 may contain a fix, but also rumors that the change in behavior was intentional.

Over the months, we’ve also gotten to know Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy, the popular and powerful remote control solution for the Mac. He has been extremely helpful to us, reviewing our remote code, suggesting improvements, and sending us sample code. He is, without a doubt, the foremost expert on the Apple Remote outside of Apple.

After investigating the problem, he decided a few weeks ago to provide a solution himself, in the form of a free alternative driver for the IR receiver which would provide reliable exclusive access to the Apple Remote across Leopard and Snow Leopard. In addition, he’s made available an Objective-C class which makes adding Apple Remote support to an application trivially simple.

The driver itself comes in the form of a preference pane, easy to install from the web site. Once installed, you’ll be able to use Plex perfectly in Snow Leopard with the Apple Remote, with no annoying loss of exclusive access that you may have observed under Leopard.

I can’t emphasis how great this development is, and how grateful we should all be to Felix. Please consider purchasing Remote Buddy, at around $30 it’s a great deal and an extremely powerful solution for those who like to customize the way the Apple Remote works with their Mac.

We are currently testing the integration of Felix’s code into Plex (many thanks to Evan for working on this!), and this is one of the reasons why 0.8.3 is taking a bit longer than expected.