Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

We have a few new plug-in releases for you as we finalize the next Plex/Eight release.

Written by Dave Addey, the Home Star Runner allows you to watch such favorites as Strong Bad Email and Teen Girl Squad.

Written by David Bartle, the Barats and Bereta plug-is is pure comedy. Luke Barats and Joe Bereta began collaborating in 2003 at Gonzaga University where they were active in the theater department, broadcasting department, and led the school’s improv comedy troupe. Later that year they began making short videos to amuse their friends which were eventually compiled on a website.

Finally, also written by David Bartle, the Mars Hill Church plug-in allows you to watch sermons from Pastor Mark Driscoll and others from the Mars Hill Church.

We’re hard at work on both Plex/Nine and the next Plex/Eight release, which contains (among other things) a few fixes for Snow Leopard issues (no solution for the Apple Remote issue yet, unfortunately).

In the meantime, our brilliant group of plug-in developers continues to make available more and more content. Here are the latest four (and many thanks to Jay for the artwork, and to Isaac for being the release manager!).

Written by David Bartle, Funny or Die features funny videos with celebrities (including Will Ferrell), comedians, and you. Be sure to watch “The Landlord”, “Prop 8 the Musical” and “Protect Insurance Companies PSA”.

Next up, and written by Billy Joe is The Live Music Archive plug-in. This site is committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in the highest quality format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy.

For you Ruby on Rails fans, Railscasts is an very informative plugin written by David Leatherman. Every week Ryan Bates hosts a new Railscasts episode featuring tips and tricks with Ruby on Rails. These screencasts are short and focus on one technique so you can quickly move on to applying it to your own project. The topics target the intermediate Rails developer, but beginners and experts will get something out of it as well.

Lastly is Tête à Claques.TV by oncleben31. This plugin allows to watch videos from TAC.TV (also known as Tête à Claques.TV in French). You can watch videos in French or in English, grouped by vote or by date. For French videos you can browse them by character family too. This plugin is localized in French and English.

Ce plugin permet de lire les vidéos du site Tête à Claques.TV (connus aussi sous le nom de TAC.TV). Vous pourrez ainsi regarder les vidéos en français ou en anglais, classées par vote ou par date. Pour les vidéos en français il est possible de parcourir les vidéos regroupées par famille de personnage.
Le plugin est actuellement localisé en français et en anglais.

Since we released the Plex Media Server we’ve received a large number of requests for documentation for the Python Framework used to build plug-ins. That day has finally arrived!

We’d like to introduce you to our new Developer’s site, created by James with design help from the ever-talented Alexis.

We’re still fleshing out many of the areas of the developer’s site, but the development manual is online, the result of hours of work by James (Framework documentation) and David Bartle (site configuration documentation).

So if you’ve been waiting for documentation to tackle that plug-in project, or you simply could use a nice reference, check it out!

(And to all the brave developers who waded in without documentation and created some kick-ass plug-ins anyway: Namaste!)

We have yet another plug-in for your viewing pleasure! We may still be sorting out the Snow Leopard compatibility issues, but that isn’t getting in the way of our plugin developers from making amazing plugins.

Written by Jonny Wray, NME brings you the latest music news and reviews, music videos, and gossip.

Snow Leopard is out, and we just wanted to take a minute and update you all on how Plex runs on this great new OS. Thanks to reports from our users as well as our own testing, we’ve found that Plex seems to have four serious issues on Snow Leopard:

• Apple Remote issue: Plex is not able to gain exclusive access to the device, which causes the system to see the button presses as well. Our friend Evan looked into this and reported it to Apple as an apparent bug. Apple replied “…this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering.” One of our clever users (FortyRock) came up with a workaround, which we recommend only if you’re comfortable editing system files. It should be noted that this apparent bug affected lots of other software, such as VLC, EyeTV, Hulu Desktop, etc.
• GMA X3100 issue: There are apparently corruption/color issues on systems with this chipset (more details here). There is no known fix or workaround for this issue as of yet.
• Digital audio (AC3/DTS) issue: There is an apparent issue with Core Audio that prevents digital audio from playing more than once successfully. We’re investigating the problem, and there is a workaround by user dannyv45 that has helped some people out.
• SMB connection issue: Plex appears to have problems connecting to a Snow Leopard SMB server. We’re investigating the issue.

So the bottom line is that if you have a system that you’re using exclusively for Plex, you’re probably better off staying with Leopard, as the new OS doesn’t bring anything in the way of advantages for Plex, and it brings a good handful of serious issues.

The one question we keep getting asked is “When will a Snow Leopard compatible Plex be released?”. Unfortunately – especially given the nature of some of the issues – it’s hard to predict. In the meantime, work continues on Plex/Nine and the next maintenance release of Plex/Eight…

We hope everyone has in the US has enjoyed the long weekend with the appropriate mix of alcohol and family. This week brings us three new plugins:

First up, written by Sander Spies, is an AVForums.com plug-in. AVForums is a totally free, UK based, independently run resource for people interested in home consumer electronics. AVForums covers all areas of electronic home entertainment including home cinema, DVD, digital photography, camcorders, video gaming, computer hardware and mobile phones. This plugin gives you easy access to AVForums TV (shows, features, etc.) and podcasts.

Also written by Sander Spies is South Park NL, Bekijk volledige afleveringen van South Park.

Written by Jappen, Viasat Play erbjuder gratis streamning från fyra av Sveriges största TV-kanaler, TV3, TV6, TV8 och Viasat Sport. Se alla dina favoritavsnitt precis när du vill eller följ sportevenemang live. Enkelt och bekvämt levererat genom Plex.

We hope you enjoy the new plug-ins!

We have another plug-in for your viewing pleasure, while we sort out the Snow Leopard compatibility issues.

Written by Gordon Johnston, That Guy with the Glasses is your one stop site for 5 Second Movies, Bum Reviews, Nostalgia Critic, and Ask That Guy.

A couple more plug-ins for your viewing pleasure:

First up, written by Jonny Wray, Subpop records allows you to listen to music and watch music videos by one of Seattle’s most prolific record labels.

Also written by Jonny Wray, iMovies plugin allow you to stream hundreds of free public domain movies, films and cartoons.

Written by Sander Spies, Zie.nl is een Nederlandse videosharing-site waar je eenvoudig video’s kunt bekijken, uploaden en uitzenden op je eigen persoonlijke kanaal. Met deze plugin kun je de leukste en populairste video’s zien. Je kunt browsen op categorie, kanalen van gebruikers bekijken of zoeken op steekwoorden (tags).

Thanks to new features in Plex v0.8.2, we’re happy to announce a little bit of plug-in news.

We’ve had thousands of downloads of the SVT Play plug-in, and we just pushed an update. The plug-in, among other things, now has support for full and instant seeking within the videos. Daniel Eriksson, Mattias Norlander, Ivar Åsell, and Andreas (tassitassi) worked hard updating the plug-in.

PBS has been a popular request for quite some time now, and a feature added in the latest Plex finally made this possible. So now you can enjoy all 27 programs offered from the PBS website, browse by topic or by collection, see what the most popular shows are, or search for videos.

Enjoy the updates!

It wasn’t until I was over at a friend’s house playing with Plex v0.8.1 that I realized how much better this new version is. We’ve targeted two major causes of user interface delay (beach balling) in this release (starting streams and browsing through directories) and the results should make your experience much better than it used to be. As always, many thanks to the talented group of plug-in developers who keep expanding the content tree, as well as help us track down bugs!

If you’re just joining us, you can find helpful and friendly support on the forums (welcome 10,000th user!), or follow us via Twitter. Heck, you can even follow Barkley on Twitter. Or buy us a beer via the donate link at the right.

NEW: This has been a popular request for those of you without surround receivers. We’ve added a new setting that links OS X sound volume with Plex sound volume. This means that you can use your Apple Remote for *all* of your volume changes, including all the WebKit plug-ins. (For those of you with surround receivers, you’ll continue to use your receiver’s remote for all of your volume changes.)

NEW: This is one that’s bothered me for ages. Setting the cache size in Megabytes is really silly, because the amount you want to cache depends on the bandwidth of the content. For example, if you set it high, your Apple Movie Trailers might play without stuttering, but then that low bandwidth FLV would take forever to buffer. With this version, we’re introducing Bandwidth-based Caching®, which dynamically adjusts the size of the cache depending on the needs of the stream. The result: lower bandwidth streams start faster, and higher bandwidth streams play with less stuttering. Also as a consequence, the cache settings now look quite a bit more simple. You simply specify the number of seconds of media that you would like to cache.

NEW: Maverick214 on the forums submitted a great patch for displaying the end time for videos. Always nice to know how much longer you’re going to be tortured watching So You Think You Can Dance.

NEW: Do you like having your cake and eating it too? Do you like the Now Playing screen, but wish you could induce epileptic fits in your pets with the visualizer at the same time? Luckily for you, Scott was stuck on a plane, armed with a laptop and he hacked together this perfect marriage. Not for you? Simply select the “Hide Now Playing in Visualizer” in the Skin settings.

NEW: James cleaned up the shutdown options for Plex. In the skin settings, you can select which of Quit, Sleep, or Shut Down appears on the main menu. If you want to access the other choices, you simply hit “right” to pick another option. If you have your Harmony remote mapped to something custom, you can use the actions Plex.Quit, Plex.SleepSystem, and Plex.ShutDownSystem.