Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

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 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.

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 old URL should send you to the new one, and the RSS feed (through Feedburner) is unchanged. Isaac and Ryan both have blogs now too.

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!

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, and he wrote:

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.

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 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.

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 a quick description. Feel free to add your email if you don’t mind me contacting you for further information.

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.

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 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.

OK, the following new release should fix the nasty regression with non-primary screens (HTTP, Bittorrent, Source). Enjoy, I’m off to bed.

OK, it’s been about three weeks since the last release, and we’ve been working hard. The most noticeable change in this release (HTTP, Torrent, Source) is the rebranding. The name of the app is Plex, its settings are in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex, the helper is called PlexHelper, it writes logs to ~/Library/Logs/Plex.log, etc. This means that when you start up Plex for the first time, you’ll have a blank slate. If you want to migrate over your old thumbnails and library, have no fear, Isaac has written up a handy guide to assist you with that. I personally sort of appreciated the clean slate, but that’s likely just me! Also, note that when first run, it will uninstall and kill any running XBMCHelper, so you don’t have to do anything to get that to work.

• REG: Skip to next video didn’t work, and trying to play a new video while a current one was playing caused the application to hang.
• FIX: Crashes while switching from full-screen to windowed mode (or vice-versa) when running scripts, like Apple Movie Trailers.
• FIX: Don’t hide the menu bar if we’re not displaying on the primary screen.
• FIX: Visualizations were getting the (de)amplified PCM data, which meant that volume affected the visualizations.
• FIX: The default audio latency has been re-calibrated, and should result in more accurate lip-sync.
• FIX: Crash on start on Russian systems (and possibly others).
• FIX: Crash when network goes away or is not enabled.
• FIX: Browsing photos with the Apple Remote didn’t allow for backing up a single level (thanks, Isaac!)
• FIX: Exiting DVD menu with Apple Remote now works (thanks, Isaac!)
• NEW: Remote helper now has Secure Input disabled by default, because it messed with VMware and Adobe Illustrator (among other things). You should still enable this option if (a) you have problems with Front Row starting along with Plex and (b) you don’t run any conflicting software.
• FIX: If you minimized Plex while playing a movie, things got weird when restoring, and lots of frames were dropped.
• FIX: Lots of bugs fixed with text subtitles, including missing or truncated subtitles at the end, errors in parsing that led to lots of jumbled subtitles all being displayed together, and subtitles getting lost after jumping backwards. Also, parsing subtitles use to be an O(n^2) operation, and it’s now an O(n) operation (i.e. much faster!) Thanks to everyone on the forums who helped with reproducing them and uploading subtitle files.
• FIX: DVD playback from optical media has now been disabled by default. Why? It’s too way buggy for us to leave it enabled with a good conscience (especially since it has caused crashes for people not even using the feature). If you really want to use it, you’ll have to add “<enableopticalmedia>true</enableopticalmedia>” into your advanced settings file. It’s on the roadmap, it will be fixed, but for now it’s disabled by default.
• FIX: Ryan fixed a problem with high sample rate AAC files (e.g. 96KHz) causing a crash. Sweet!
• FIX: The infamous “mouse doesn’t reach to the edges of the screen” has been fixed. Yes, in full screen mode the mouse doesn’t *quite* get to the bottom, but it’s close enough.
• FIX: Enrique fixed the OS X font loading to look in more places (/System/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts).
• NEW: Plex now replaces the default NIB shipped with SDL with its own, which means, among other things, all the standard ⌘ accelerators work, like ⌘-Q, ⌘-M, ⌘-H and, yes, even ⌘-F to toggle full-screen mode! It also means we get a new About box. The number in parenthesis is the GIT revision of the release. Yes, those are scantily clad ladies in the background, but I blame it all on the talented djh.

• FIX: The frame rate limiter was buggy, which caused the app to use more CPU than it should when idle *and* hidden. The video frame rate display has also been slightly smoothed.
• FIX: The application is now code-signed, which means those having trouble with the Leopard firewall should see better results now.
• FIX: BMP files (such as those found in the multi-GB backpack torrent for Aeon) didn’t load correctly.
• FIX: Smart Crash Reporter has been updated, and should now install correctly on more (all?) systems.
• FIX: The ‘a’ key now goes to the next audio language track when viewing videos. Thanks, Isaac!
• FIX: A crash setting fan art in Aeon.
• FIX: RAW files (CR2) have been re-enabled, as the bug that made loading them really slow has been fixed. Superpea and other photographers will definitely appreciate this.
• NEW: Two new visualizers have been included, waveform and spectrum.

As usual, we’ve also cherry-picked stuff from the XBMC team, including:

• Lots of fixes by the ever-talented jmarshall, including fixes to background loading in skins, fanart and more.
• Some fixes by d4rk to OpenGL handling around visualizers and an off-by-one error with textures.
• Some scanning/thumbnail fixes by tslayer.
• A fix to prevent the “buffering” dialog from displaying for too long, and a bogus thin line showing up in textures by elupus.
• Other miscellaneous fixes.

It’s been super hot lately, and Barkley’s been spending lots of time sleeping on the relatively cool wood floor.

Thanks to the efforts of Isaac, we have the new Plex wiki up and running. The login is shared between the forums and the wiki, so you don’t have to create a new account. Come on in, check it out, feel free to add to it.

(The next release will be here shortly, by the way!)

We’ve decided to migrate our bug-tracking over to Lighthouse. It has some killer features, including great integration with email (file or reply to a bug over email), Github integration, tagging, an API, and great usability. Bottom line: It helps us keep track of and fix the bugs you report better than ever!

We’ve migrated all existing bugs over, and gone over them to make sure they were still active and valid. The one thing we couldn’t migrate over were the users, so we’d like to ask that if you filed bugs on Trac, come over to Lighthouse, make yourself an account (assuming you don’t already have one), add a cool-looking avatar, and “watch” your bugs. The number of people watching/commenting on bugs will definitely affect our prioritization.

When adding new bugs, please add lots of good tags to help us categorize them. We’re using version tags like @0.5.0b10 to mark when a bug was found or fixed.

For attachments, feel free to attach logs and such using Lighthouse, but for larger audio/video samples, please continue to use afp://dn-0.com/samples/Dropbox. We’ll eventually be using these samples for automated testing.

Lastly, as you’ve no doubt noticed, the forums have moved over to forums.plexapp.com. The blog will be moving over in the next week or two, and since we use Feedburner for RSS, it should be a seamless transition for those of you subscribed.