· 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!)
· 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.
· 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.
· 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”. One note: we recommend using the Candelair driver even on Leopard, because it can help resolve cases in which the Apple Remote loses exclusive access with the Apple driver.
· NEW: Toggle full screen option on dock menu (thanks to Billy Joe).
· 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.
· NEW: Upgrade Plex WebKit libraries to 4.0.3.
· NEW: Allow passing back User Agent (makes Apple Movie Trailers work again).
· NEW: Allow Plex Media Server photo sources to be used for the slideshow screensaver. It’s kind of nice to have a subfolder of Web Gallery of Art as your screensaver, your date will be impressed.
· 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: Greatly improved responsiveness when browsing. Things like entering or leaving a big list of items (e.g. iTunes artists list) that could hang the entire interface for 5-15 seconds are now instant.
· NEW: Thanks to James, the keyboard backlight turns off during videos playing so you can grope your date more easily.
· 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: We’ve added a “Shuffle” context menu item for the photos area.
· 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: Improved Snow Leopard support. There are still a few glitches, but Plex now runs quite well on the new kitty.
· 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.
· NEW: We display error messages when an item fails to play (as opposed to silently returning to the menu).
Fixed bugs:
· FIX: Manually added PMS sources can be removed via context menu (James).
· FIX: The default folder for the slide show was set to “F:/” (#303)
· FIX: Fixed an issue when Auto-Subtitles are enabled, we weren’t allowing manual activation of other subtitles if they were automatically disabled.
· FIX: Crash in the Media Server in iTunes plug-in.
· FIX: James made some minor tweaks to menu/keyboard handling, so that the ‘Move focus to the menu bar’ command (mapped to ^F2) works, and also ⌘W now closes the About window.
· FIX: We now scrobble to Last.fm as “Plex”.
· FIX: Thumbnails obtained from the Plex Media Server are all stored in their own directory, and given a limited time to live, so that you shouldn’t need to go manually whack icons or fanart any more. In addition, thumbnails created by the Plex Media Server with Quick Look are also only cached for a limited amount of time.
· FIX: Removed the System Info window, which really wasn’t doing much good (thanks to James).
· FIX: Disable cross-fading by default (also thanks to James).
· FIX: Fixed an error in the keymap (thanks to Mickey for reporting, and James for fixing).
· FIX: The Plex Media Server quit confirmation dialog didn’t always appear on top (James).
· FIX: Improved A/V sync, those with senses tuned to this sort of stuff should find it better behaved.
· FIX: iTunes visualizers didn’t show elapsed time (thanks to Daniel for reporting it).
· FIX: Resume point for videos is now saved when quitting.
· FIX: Years weren’t showing up in IMDB matches.
· FIX: On updates or restarts, PlexHelper (and thus Apple Remote) could stop working.
· FIX: If you had the Plex Media Server set to “Always running” it would not start on boot.
· FIX: A crash starting a zoomed MKV (with software upscaling enabled).
· FIX: A crash on startup with audio device changes.
· Also, we’ve worked on the interaction between Plex and the Media Server, as well as the Python Framework. James just pushed the official v1.0 to the store, and he’ll be blogging about all the great changes in the final release. Note that all plug-in caches and data will be reset because of changes to the encoding, which means that you will need to re-enter login data into some plug-ins (we apologize for this).
· NEW: We now support redirection from HTTP to RTMP, MMS, and WebKit streams.
· NEW: Site configurations can live inside plug-ins.
· NEW: We check for other Python files changing besides __init__.py inside of Contents/Code.
· NEW: Seek bars are allowed to specify small/large percentages to jump.
· NEW: Video items can specify bandwidth if they wish to override the automatically computed bandwidth (also useful for some FLV files where it’s not possible to extract it).
· NEW: You can pass back cookies from the Media Server to Plex, which is useful for accessing authenticated content.
· FIX: The Preferences item refreshes parent, useful for displaying/hiding sub-menus based on logged in status (James)
· FIX: Javascript seek bars didn’t reset properly.
· FIX: String keys are now allowed for album media items.
· FIX: The Plex Media Server would crash if a site configuration moved to an unknown state.
· FIX: Showing a message dialog at the top level of a plug-in didn’t work right.
· FIX: The Media Server didn’t forward requests to the right plug-in when they shared a common prefix (James)
· FIX: Idle CPU reduced greatly. On an iMac we went from 24% to around 9.8%. On a 1.83GHz Mini we went from 38% to 16%. Al Gore is happy.
· FIX: Hang when playing WebKit content after 5.1 content.
· FIX: A few issues causing App Store/plug-ins to disappear.
· FIX: Hang on exit (when Media Server Scrobbler was enabled).
· FIX: Cannot play/browse AC/DC (and other artists with funky names) from the iTunes library. Heavy metal fans rejoice!
· FIX: Scrobbling plays of AAC files to the Plex Media Server wasn’t working.
· FIX: Crash on start when Plex Media Server was run on a computer without Plex.
· FIX: Intermittant lack of audio when starting 5.1 videos when background music/themes was enabled. (We also disabling the fading, which was not helping.)
· FIX: VC-1 apparent regression in ffmpeg 0.5 which caused much higher CPU usage and related problems. Ryan and I resolved it by reverting to an earlier version of the codec. Thanks to Peter for bringing the issue to our attention, and to Aaron for help in tracking it down.
· FIX: View Slideshow context menu items weren’t enabled for top-level photo plug-ins.
· FIX: Jay and Isaac tweaked the default settings for IMDB to make sure the best quality posters are returned.
· FIX: James made some tweak to Now Playing. The flip time is now configurable in the Advanced Settings Cocoa UI (Make it flip every 5 seconds! Make your child and/or pets motion sick!) Additionally, the background is more in line with look of MediaStream.
· FIX: We’ve defaulted the automatic audio stream selection to false, as we think that default makes more sense (Thanks, Isaac! You can turn it off manually yourself in the video player preferences.) We also fixed an issue with the auto-selection of subtitles if the auto-selection of audio streams was disabled.
· FIX: We pulled the latest libdcr code which decodes RAW images (it fixes some pink-hue issues with newer cameras).
· FIX: As forum user “someone” reported, the German strings were botched in the previous version.
· FIX: Sébastien Vaast kindly send us updates to the French translation.
· FIX: We fixed a possible crash with Javascript seek bars in site profiles.
· FIX: Relative coordinates on “thumb” seek-bars were broken, many thanks to Robert Nio for reporting the issue and testing the fix.
· FIX: We pulled the latest XBMC UPnP code, in hopes this would help with some problems reported on the forums. We also pulled a fix related to the sendkey HTTP-API command, and a few other fixes.
· NEW: Have you ever been annoyed by a video playing with subtitles even though the audio track is in your native language? Or having to look through all the 24 subtitle tracks in the MKV just to find the one in your language? Annoying, right? Plex/Eight auto-manages subtitles and audio tracks based on your language setting (i.e. the OS X language setting). For example, if your language is set to English, videos with English audio tracks won’t display any subtitles, whereas a foreign film will display English subtitles. If the language is set to Portuguese (Olá amigos!), an English film with lots of subtitles will auto-pick the Portuguese ones.
· Likewise, for those of you encoding dual 5.1/stereo tracks in your MP4 files, Plex will pick the AC3 track if the receiver is AC3-capable and the tracks have language tags.
· These options are both on by default, and they will not override per-video settings. Also, note that some video files don’t have language information for the audio and subtitle tracks. The code tries to be clever, but it’s not magic.
· NEW: James whipped up a cool animation for the Now Playing screen. Those of you with Plasma screens can now rest easy. The animation triggers every two minutes. Drink some nice red wine and stare at the screen.
· NEW: There are more and more of you using the Plex Media Server to stream your iTunes libraries to Plex, and a common request was to update the play counts and mark podcasts as viewed. In Plex/Eight, Plex now “scrobbles” plays to the Media Server, which updates the iTunes library (note that since it uses AppleScript, you’ll need to have iTunes running on the machine where the Plex Media Server is, and it will be started by OS X if it’s not). This feature is off by default, and you can enable it in the Media Server section of the preferences.
· NEW: Anamorphic zoom mode. Falk Husemann submitted a patch to change the 16×9 zoom mode to work with projectors which have anamorphic lenses attached. You can read more about this sort of set up here. You can enable this new mode by setting true in your advanced settings.
· FIX: Sometimes album art didn’t show up in the Now Playing window.
· FIX: Remote fanart (e.g. iTunes) wasn’t showing up.
· FIX: Very slow start/skipping tracks for music. We made some improvements to the Media Server, and the ever-skilled jmarshall committed a nice related fix which we pulled. You won’t believe how much faster it is.
· FIX: Speaking of performance, a big shout out to Jens Kleemann, who has been working for a while on analyzing and improving the performance of Plex. A few weeks ago, he told me that one of the main sources of the idle CPU usage was in some code that was locking and unlocking a mutex. He even sent over a patch that did less locking, and Plex took less CPU with the fix. Now this didn’t seem right to me, as a thread that is blocked on a mutex doesn’t consume any CPU. One night I looked over the mutex code, and I noticed a line of debug code that got the thread’s Mach port. I’d put this line in when I was trying to track down a threading issue *ages* ago, and it wasn’t used anymore. Except, as it turns out, it was responsible for consuming about a quarter of Plex’s CPU usage when idle. So a big thank you to Jens, and a big apology from me. Just think how many trillion of instructions your computers have executed for no good reason because of me. I might actually be responsible for global warming.
· FIX: We’ve changed the thumbnailing code for photos to use a single thumb instead of four, by popular request.
· FIX: Nikolas Stephan kindly submitted a patch so that Last.fm scrobbling works with tracks played from the Plex Media Server.
· FIX: Nikolas Stephan also submitted a patch which allows selecting folders for the photo screensaver, apparently something which used to work.
· FIX: We restart the Plex Media Server when we quit after 5.1 play (or upon restart after a crash). This is needed to work around a CoreAudio/WebKit issue, and you would have seen this issue as WebKit videos playing back without audio.
· FIX: We automatically remove empty iLife sources, so if you don’t have Aperture, it won’t show up, for example.
· FIX: GlimmerBlocker no longer prevents WebKit plug-ins from working.
· FIX: The new wider list view works with the “hide thumbs” option.
· FIX: Some SSA subtitles (e.g. Chinese) didn’t render correctly.
· FIX: James made some fixes to background music; the volume level of the background music shouldn’t be quieter than regular music, and fixed a couple of problems with it not restarting properly. Also, it’ll fade out when starting a video.
· FIX: The fonts have been fixed in the Now Playing window for the Original font set.
· FIX: A possible crash in the Plex Media Server.
· FIX: Better keyboard mappings for the Now Playing window and Mira (thanks to marklight!)
· FIX: We pulled the latest IMDB scraper from XBMC (thanks to aaron and jayman for testing it out!) and this should fix it bringing down incorrect posters when the IMPA awards option is on.
· We also pulled a good bunch of code fixes from XBMC. (No Aeon fixes, sorry.)
· NEW: One of the complaints we’ve heard is that the visualizers available with Plex, while cool, sometimes cause seizures in kids and household pets. Others say that it leads them to look forward to 4:20 PM. In any case, James and Mike B (of MediaStream fame) teamed up to bring you a sexy new option: The Now Playing visualizer. Select it just as you would any other visualizer, and take it for a spin.
· NEW: We’ve added support for ratings in Plex Media Server content. So in the next revision of the Netflix plug-in, for example, you’ll now see star ratings, as you will in another new plug-in that will be released shortly.
· NEW: Do you ever find yourself struggling to shuffle a playlist, or play an album straight through, by displaying the playlist, toggling settings, and then switching back, having forgotten what you were doing in the first place? James added a convenient Shuffle item on the context menu to make that struggle a thing of the past. Together with the new Now Playing visualizer, we’re hoping you find music playing just a little bit easier this release.
· NEW: New iLife art (thanks to the talented tassitassi). You see some of it peeking out from the screenshot above. (Note: you’ll have to whack your existing cached art at ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/Thumbnails/Programs/Fanart/)
· NEW: Our friend Kent has been hard at work on analyzing our user data. Among other things, he’s discovered that our Swedish users rock! There are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country. He compiled this data by looking at the Sparkle update requests. To make his job a bit easier, we’ve added a token to each update request that’s unique for each computer. We’re sending a one-way hash of the computer’s MAC address, which when broken down into plain English means that (a) we’ll be able to figure how many total computers are running Plex and (b) we can’t use the data to obtain any information about your computer.
Fixed a number of bugs:
· FIX: The context menu was broken for the Favorites section.
· FIX: We weren’t saving the ’show extensions’ setting correctly in advanced settings.
· FIX: James fixed a long-standing (since Plex/Five) scraper hang with tvshow.nfo.
· FIX: We got a patch from rgrove (thanks!) that ensures that LAN cache settings are used for SMB shares.
· FIX: Caching was disabled, which caused no end of trouble playing back Internet content.
· FIX: We added Lanczos back to the OSD upscaling menu.
· FIX: We increased the size of the default fonts. I have to personally apologize for that, apparently I ate too many carrots as a baby.
· FIX: Crash/hang when exiting after playing a video.
· FIX: Also a longstanding bug, the occasional lack of GUI sounds after playing videos (thanks to Kent for helping me track this down).
· FIX: The Plex Media Server is a Universal Binary again.
· FIX: Ryan helped me fix a DTS->AC3 transcoding channel mapping bug.
· FIX: A Plex Media Server crash (when stopping a WebKit video shortly after starting) was fixed.
· FIX: We’ve made the list view give more room to text. After all, scrolling text is hard to read.
· FIX: Stopping a video with 5.1 audio could be a bit slow.
· FIX: The clock could display letters (e.g. “kk:49″). Thanks to Daniel for helping me track this one down.
· FIX: James made the thumbnail searching code respect the dvdthumbs advanced setting (so you can add support for Front Row style preview.jpg files).
· FIX: Double speed playback of 22KHz audio in videos (e.g. some FLV video).
· FIX: Enhanced the caching of directories to work well with the Plex Media Server (much quicker backing up to parent directories).
· FIX: Isaac fixed a few confusing strings.
· FIX: Improved Russian strings (thanks to friendly).
· FIX: Blurry fanart. Thanks to tassitassi for bringing it to my attention and to jmarshall for the fix).
Added a few new Media Server plug-in features and fixed some bugs:
· NEW: Support for typing a string in the site config (requested by Rick, useful for authenticating into Flash sites).
· NEW: We allow specifying a dead zone in the seek bar site config, which can help make a tooltip disappear after a seek.
· FIX: Preferences weren’t being correctly escaped, which could lead to problems logging into Netflix, for example.
· NEW: Cocoa UI for advanced settings. Why should you have to edit XML files? You shouldn’t, and now you don’t have to, because the most important advanced settings are easily accessible in this advanced settings dialog that James added. The dialog is accessible via Plex > Advanced Settings… in the menu bar.
NEW: This all started with a giant bug that Youngcho Kim posted detailing improvements that would help Korean users. Seeing as I like 돌솥 비빔밥 as much as the next guy, I read the bug, thought about it, and we decided that a lot of his suggestions were really excellent for all non-English first time Plex users. So we’ve done a few things:
· Plex respects the language setting in the International preference pane. Whatever language your OS X applications start with, Plex will start with (assuming there’s a translation).
· Plex respects the units setting (Metric/US) also specified in that preference pane, and these are used to determine the units for temperature and speed.
· Plex uses the date and time formatting specified in that pane as well; for example, MediaStream uses the short time format for its clock, which you can easily configure it in a number of different ways. More importantly, it will use whatever format you have configured already.
· Plex auto-selects the font based on your language, so if your language is configured in OS X to be Chinese, for example, it will use Arial Unicode automatically.
· If you really want Plex to be running with different language/units than OS X, you can specify this in advanced settings ( tag, e.g. “en” or “it”, and tag, e.g. “metric”).
· NEW: Evan Schoenberg was kind enough to add support for the IRKeyboardEmu virtual remote, which provides support for his awesome Rowmote app for the iPhone.
· NEW: SMS jump support for Harmony, to make it easy to jump around in lists (thanks to aaronjb!)
· NEW: Ryan updated our ffmpeg to v0.5 from the XBMC source, and added the new version of libfaad2 and some other patches which provide support for more formats. See his blog post for more details. The new ffmpeg adds support for WMAv2 and lots more.
· NEW: We’ve enhanced support for .dfont files, to allow specifying font variants; the skin now uses Helvetica Neue by default, except for languages whose character sets aren’t supported by that font, which use Arial Unicode. We’ve also moved to using mixed case, which we think is more readable than all-caps. (We’ve left the original font-set as “Original” for those who prefer it).
· NEW: Improved fanart images for iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture, thanks to Aargh-a-Knot.
· NEW: Support for Plex.MoveToNextScreen and Plex.MoveToPrevScreen actions, as requested by Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy.
· NEW: Finished up localization support in Plex and the Media Server so that plug-in localization works. There was already support for it in the framework, but it needed a bit of plumbing.
· NEW: James enhanced the photo text overlay so that (a) it hides after 10 seconds and (b) you can toggle it with the ‘info’ command (’t’ on the keyboard, menu on the Apple Remote). We’ve tweaked the keymap in slideshows to be more consistent with other sections, so pressing menu displays information, holding menu returns you to the browser. Additionally, hold left and right zoom out and in, and hold play displays photo EXIF details. Also, if you just don’t want to see the overlay at all, you can hide it in the skin settings.
· FIX: Allow specifying “always on” vs. “on for SD content” for software upscaling (we’ve also allowed you to select the algorithm used in the advanced settings dialog).
· FIX: If you have audio linking to system output, it restores the original setting when exiting.
· FIX: Improved support for SMI subtitles (pulled from XBMC).
· FIX: Backing up from App Store or Help brings you back to main menu.
· FIX: When upgrading, helper and Media Server sometimes didn’t get restarted. This one was driving me crazy.
· FIX: Apple Remote could drop key-presses when system was loaded (many thanks to Evan Schoenberg for the fix, this has been annoying many for quite some time).
· FIX: When using an HTTP proxy (like Glimmer Blocker), the Media Server wouldn’t play Flash content.
· FIX: Huge speed increase starting plug-ins in the Media Server on startup.
· FIX: Signature on Media Server should always be correct now, eliminating firewall warnings.
· FIX: iPhoto album ordering now exactly matches iPhoto.
· FIX: Many things restored to Mediastream which were taken out in the last version (allow hiding Movies, TV Shows, and the Quit items, back back background image folder settings, restored “hide thumbs in list view”, and put back the library button in music files).
· FIX: Sometime when displaying a slide show, moving to the next image would simply exit out of the slideshow (nice find, James!)
· FIX: HD Homerun should work now.
· FIX: Stillness sent an encoding patch and scraper updates for KinoPoisk.ru (thank you!)
· FIX: Seasons and episodes views will now display correctly for first-time users, thanks to Isaac.
· FIX: We were missing a key mapping for deleting individual video bookmarks.
· FIX: Ryan, our resident audio wizard, fixed an issue with static noise when skipping forward in an AAC 5.1 file.
And lots of changes in Plex Media Server land:
· Support for new V1 of Plex plug-in Python framework. Major cleanups and enhancements, if you thought the first version was easy to use, you’ll love what James has done with this version. We’ll have great documentation available shortly.
· Support for plug-in preference panes (and support in the V1 framework for adding preferences).
· Support for conditions in simple seek bars (i.e. for specifying that played color is *not* a given color).
· Support for sending key presses to WebKit plug-ins in site configuration.
· Support for setting cookies in site configuration.
· Support for WebKit plug-ins that change frame size.
· Support for specifying relative coordinates for cropping and mouse events (e.g. 10 pixels from the right).
· Support for Javascript seek bars, and Javascript conditions.
· Support for site configurations reading values from a plug-in’s preferences (useful when performing authentication).
· Allow manually locking plug-ins on a page, useful with authentication and some misbehaved sites.
· FIX: Hulu playback was broken when the site exploited a bug in our code, which has now been fixed.
· NEW: Support for variably-sized Flash/Silverlight content (and also for sizes changing on the fly). You can now specify negative values in the site configuration for cropping, mouse operations, and in seekbars. A negative X or width value indicates the number of pixels from the right, and a negative Y or height value specifies negative pixels from the bottom. (Specifying 0 for width/height means “the entire width/height”, this should help for sites such as Vimeo.)
· NEW: We’ve moved the Plex Python plug-in framework into a plug-in named Framework.bundle (great idea, James!). Among other things, this fixes the issue with the code signature breaking on the Plex Media Server and the Leopard firewall getting upset about it. This also allows us to have multiple concurrent versions of the framework for backwards compatibility. We take this sort of thing very seriously, as we want you to be able to write plug-ins without fear of them breaking with API changes.
· FIX: Silly regression which resulted in you being left in an empty directory after installing from the app store (and a few other cases).
· FIX: Improved compatibility with certain Flash sites.
· FIX: Crashes in Plex Media Server with Safari Adblocker and other similar plug-ins.
· FIX: Pulled a fix from XBMC for variable framerate FLV files (important for a new plug-in).
· FIX: Crashes in Apple Movie Trailers with 5.1 audio (integrated Ryan’s excellent audio fixes).
· FIX: Some of the menu shortcuts were broken (thanks to migueld for pointing this out).
· FIX: Some other crashes in Plex Media Server with badly behaved or misconfigured sites.
· FIX: Much improved Swedish translation, with many thanks to atrus.
· FIX: Updated to the latest Amazon scrapers (thanks to John Lockwood).
· NEW: Support for executing Javascript inside plug-in site configurations (as an action).
· Improves compatibility with some Flash sites.
· A new version of the Hulu plug-in with some nice enhancements, including more fanart, better thumbnails, flattened movie hierarchy, and more results returned for specific shows.
· FIX: Fixed permissions on the Plex binary to allow non-administrative users to run.
· FIX: Tweaks to the skin for upcoming Plug-ins.
· FIX: Some crashes and leaks in the Media Server.
· FIX: Fixed the scrapers/NFO issue, this time for real (many thanks to Isaac for all the hard work on this one!). We also include the TMDB scraper again.
· FIX: A regression where only the first iPhoto album showed up.
· FIX: Improved compatibility with Flash sites for the Media Server.
· The CoreAudio crash on startup that’s been fixed.
· Mira/Sofacontrol changes.
· The TV/Movies keymap issue was fixed.
· The region link to weather settings is now fixed.
· NFO files no longer cause scraping issues.
· FIX: iPhoto events sort by date, not by name.
· FIX: Slow access to media, marking unwatched/watched, etc.
· FIX: The HTTP receive timeout was increased to 15 seconds, to hopefully allow TVDB time to respond. Thanks to Todd L on the forums for suggesting this fix.
· FIX: IFO files weren’t showing up in DVD video directories.
· FIX: The MediaStream “Info List” view mode was tweaked to make the list the same size and positioning vertically as the regular list view.
· FIX: Ryan coaxed DTSWAV files into playing. It turns out to be impossible to play 44.1KHz DTS files on OS X, as it assumes encoded audio is 48KHz. For now, we’re mixing down the files, and shortly we’ll move to transcoding them to 48KHz AC3 files. Not optimal, but better than nothing given the limitations of the platform. (I’m looking forward to this personally, because I want to have the first 1080p Wizard of Oz + 5.1 Dark Side of the Moon party.)
· FIX: The highly annoying bug which caused TV shows to lose audio randomly with TV theme music enabled.
· FIX: Certain dialogs in the update code didn’t support UTF8 strings (James).
· FIX: There is now an option you can disable to prevent Plex linking the system audio output device with the device selected in Plex (System > Audio > Link System Output).
· FIX: The audio device settings didn’t appear to be remembered in the settings (they actually were saved, just not displayed correctly).
· FIX: We’ve disallowed deleting files from inside Plex by default. Much safer! This is a change to the settings, so you’d need to delete your guisettings.xml file to get the new value.
· FIX: We fixed a bug that prevented actions from being sent to Plex via event clients (used by Remote buddy).
· FIX: Ryan fixed a crash when attempting to transcode a corrupt DTS stream into AC3.
· FIX: Background music tracks are now played completely randomly.
· FIX: Isaac fixed some issues in the harmony and keyboard maps, and also added Hold Up/Hold Down to control volume in Full Screen Video and Visusalization for Mira users (and likely Sofa Control users as well). He also went through and “humanized” some of the error messages that Plex spits out to be more intelligible.
· FIX: Tweaked permissions on a MediaStream file.
· FIX: Mikey gave us some fixes to French strings (thanks!)
· FIX: Stillness sent some fixes for the KinoPoisk scraper (thanks!)
· FIX: A crash in Weather for some regions.
· FIX: Maddox suggested some excellent changes in the scraper defaults which result in better movie covers by default.
· NEW: James added support for nested iTunes playlist folders and iPhoto folders (a much requested feature).
· NEW: Audiobook support.
· FIX: More tweaks for “album artist” tag.
· FIX: iPhoto sorting of events and albums was broken.
· FIX: The audio dropout issue which was introduced in 0.7.2 should now be fixed.
· FIX: The corrupted German MediaStream strings.
· FIX: File size reporting bug in HTTP API has really been fixed this time.
· FIX: Some tweaks to “album artist” tags in Plex Media Server iTunes module. Thanks to zanex for helping explain what was wrong.
· FIX: Certain videos (FLV, YouTube, 22KHz MP3 tracks) played back at double-speed. Thanks to Ryan for explaining how to fix this one.
· FIX: Regression causing glitchy playback of videos.
· FIX: Fixed a bug present since the start of the Plex/Seven series where music playback was oddly broken, and skipping tracks only worked some of the time (thanks to cheekyboy for the detailed report!).
· FIX: Fixed another regression relating to photo downloading over the network.
· FIX: Minor fix to the way we format file sizes over the HTTP API (thanks to thedroid).
· NEW: Aperture support. James and I had a bet on who could finish first, I took Lightroom and he took Aperture. I’m sure you can guess who won. Same killer features as iPhoto and iTunes, including automatic reloading of databases, and access across the network.
· NEW: Ryan greatly enhanced the CoreAudio driver, cutting out lots of old crufty code in the process. Not only does this fix the problem with fuzzy audio at low volumes and incorrect playback speed, but it also add some features that audiophiles will appreciate. The legacy XBMC code was performing a bunch of useless format conversions, whereas his new code converts from source format directly to 32 floating point, which is the CoreAudio native format. This means you can now play back 24-bit 96KHz media, at full fidelity. Ryan explains more in his blog post.
· NEW: James enhanced the Programs area of Plex. Workflows can be added to the root-level menu, folders can be added as sources, workflows can be selected by navigating into folders. (Plex quits when starting workflows, releasing control of the Apple remote). Additionally, you can run Applescript scripts from the Scripts menu, or by mapping them directly to keys in the keymap files. This opens up lots of possibilities!
· NEW: The Plex Media Server generates thumbs for artists, per request (picks an album thumb).
· FIX: Lots of people had been asking for volume control via Apple Remote. While there’s nothing we can do about encoded digital audio volume (AC3/DTS) there are plenty of people who listen to music and videos in stereo. Hence, we’ve remapped some of the keys in an attempt to improve matters (and fixed a related bug in the process). The new mapping is as follows: up and down control volume in full-screen. Since the buttons are quite limited on the Apple Remote, we removed FF and REW and replaced them with big skip forward and back when holding left/right keys. This makes some logical sense, as hitting right takes a small skip forward, while *holding* right takes a larger step (and similar with the left button). Try it out, let us know what you think.
· FIX: Really slow stream buffering of some Shoutcast streams.
· FIX: Lots of Plex Media Server bugs fixed, including crash on Apple Lossless files, glitchy sound on start of track, incorrect play speed, crash at end of video podcast, and crash with no iPhoto libraries.
· FIX: We now disable UPnP client by default, because it causes crashes (e.g. when waking from sleep). You can also now go into network settings and disable it.
· FIX: Disable PlexHelper when launching EyeTV client (James).
· FIX: Crash when in TV shows and theme music enabled (James).
· FIX: Playing DRM tracks from Plex library now works (James).
· FIX: Crash when skipping to the next track when playing a DRM music track with an iTunes visualizer enabled.
· FIX: James fixed setting a source to be the default. For example, you can set the iTunes Plex Media Server source to be the default, and you’ll go directly there from the main menu.
· FIX: Volume no longer affects visualizations.
· FIX: A ton of iTunes visualizers fixes, including not showing new track information, crash when scanning for visualizers, support for new Disco iTunes visualizer, and iTunes visualizers not being offset/sized correctly for calibrated screens.
· FIX: Some fixes for keyboard layout switching (thanks to Roman) and updates to KinoPoisk.Ru scraper.
· Delete or move aside your old Application Support/Plex folder. Too many settings and other things have changed. Yes, you’ll have to rescan everything, but look on the bright side, you’ll get TV Theme music and the latest Fan Art. I recommend renaming the folder so that you can easily jump back to Plex/Five if you need to.
· There are bugs. This is the first release of a new development series. Some things that used to work are quite likely broken. Remember, the Plex/Five series (soon to be bug-fixed into the Plex/Six stable series) underwent 22 releases to reach the level of stability it’s currently at.
· NEW: You can now configure the way the H.264 decoder does deblocking. Some will you will know this is the “skiploopfilter” setting in ffmpeg. Some will wonder if I’m speaking English. The bottom line is, if you allow the decoder to skip doing deblocking, it’ll be less intensive for the CPU. I’ve found that if you configure it to skip all deblocking, the “killa” bird sample uses about 20% less CPU and plays at a higher frame rate. Bottom line: your mileage may vary, but it may help you with hard-to-play content.
· NEW: Support for the Home and End keys in lists. Also support for using the A/Z keys to skip to the next/previous letter in lists. Jonathan Marshall added support for this last one a while ago, cool dude that he is, so we added a mapping. Also, Isaac added a new mapping for people using Snatch on their iPhone. You’ll have to whack your Keymap.xml file in ~/Application Support/Plex/userdata to get these features.
· NEW: We have included the latest MediaStream skin (no doubt out of date by tomorrow), along with the associated code fixes so that you don’t have to hit escape 23 times to return to the main menu from the Movie/TV sections. You can see some documentation for the new settings in this version of the skin here (many thanks to Jayman798!)
· FIX: We dimmed the wrong screen when you were running with a multi-screen setup and Plex was on the second screen.
· FIX: Some MP3 tags caused a hang. This includes the “Burial” album, so bretonh will be pleased.
· FIX: Refreshing movie info from NFO in VIDEO_TS folders caused a crash.
· FIX: Storing a TV show in multiple places (e.g. some seasons in one place, some seasons in another), whether by multi-path sources or different sources led to duplicates.
· FIX: Crash on entering settings menu. Elan kan't kode.
· FIX: Restore screen backlight level on exit.
· FIX: A silly and evil regression that prevented DVDs and other MPEG2 content from playing correctly, and caused crashes in DVD menus.
· NEW: Ryan added support for transcoding DTS audio to AC3 audio, for those who have slightly older receivers. If you want to enable it, change the audio output mode to be Digital, enable AC3 passthrough, and disable DTS passthrough. We also worked together to fix a bug where audio settings weren’t saved correctly, especially for people with external devices. Ryan rocks. If I post a link to his blog, will that inspire him to make his first post?
· NEW: Included the latest MediaStream skin (lovely work, guys, as always!). Added the Plexalicious Unicode fontset to hopefully help our international users.
· FIX: A potential compatibility problem with Remote Buddy (thanks, Felix!)
· FIX: Removed all the remote event settings from being visible, since people were mostly just using them to hurt themselves by turning off the server (and thus rendering their Apple Remote inoperable).
· FIX: Scott (aka Superpea) made a stunning foray into coding and sent me a fix for a problem where a remote library (FTP/XBMSP) was behaving really badly because it kept trying to create video thumbnails remotely. Bad thumbnailer! No biscuit. Nice work, dude!
· FIX/NEW: Resolution settings work much better with multiple profiles now. When you log into a profile that profile’s resolution kicks in. Create a profile for each of your 7 TV sets, and then log in to the right profile as you carry your laptop around.
· FIX: I pulled all the fanart fixes from XBMC that were required because of the initial fanart server melting down. I’d hate to see that person’s bandwidth bill!
· FIX: Fixed an annoying bug where the last thing you entered into a text box showed up (thanks spiff!)
· FIX: Updated the German translation of some skin entries (thanks, Arthur!)
· NEW: Ability to configure the number of recent video and audio items returned in library mode.
· NEW: Fatal errors are displayed in a popup dialog box, instead of causing the application to crash.
· NEW: Our newest contributor, Pundy, added the ability to sleep the Mac directly from the shutdown menu. Nice job!
· FIX: Annoying crash reading replaygain tags from MP3 files.
· FIX: Hang exiting the app using the dock menu, or with Applescript.
· FIX: Using “Open With…” to open media files with Plex should work again.
· FIX: Cmd-F works to toggle full-screen mode even if you’ve remapped the backslash key.
· FIX: Starting Plex with the screensaver active will turn it off.
· FIX: Manually browsing for subtitles exits the player.
· FIX: Crashes in ffmpeg playing various files (e.g. MS-DVR samples, King of Queens sample, Odd Couple sample).
· FIX: Locking bug in SMB resulting in crashes (fixed nearly simultaneously by my buddy vulkanr!)
· FIX: Crash on startup if you had multiple RSS feeds (this took about ten frustrating hours to track down).
· FIX: Apple Remote causes Front Row to start/system volume indicator. I believe this one is finally nailed. Thanks to the people who tested it.
· FIX: RAW file threading issues, leading to some loading of RAW files to fail.
· FIX: VIDEO_TS directories stack correctly and allow direct playing, thanks to dtmetz!
· FIX: DTS music files (thanks to spiff) and AC3 music files now play correctly, although only the former in 5.1.
· FIX: We call the Crash Reporter installer as an external entity so as to properly comply with the GPL. Thanks to Enrique for throwing a patch together so quickly. He also fixed a bug relating to installing the Plex helper.
· FIX: The XBox360 controller can now scan through files properly with the left thumbstick and exit with the big “X” button.
· FIX: Apple Movie Trailer plug-ins now install properly.
· FIX: The Apple Remote menu key (and backspace key) were unable to get you out of an empty movie/TV library.
· [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 Ive simply disabled the transaction, which fixes all the hangs, but it "may" introduce other issues (but hopefully not). Ill choose the devil I dont know on this one.
· FIX: Fixed an annoying regression which caused some videos to play too quickly. Hopefully it helped you cruise through wife-selected gems such as So You Think You Can Dance.
NEW: There is now support for watered down full-screen mode, and its enabled by default. This should provide compatibility with Expos, Dashboard, Spaces, Cmd-Tab, Cmd-Control-Esc, etc. Plus all three of you who use Remote Desktop to control it will be happy that the annoying tearing is gone. Also in this new mode, screen blanking has been improved, you can modify your settings on the fly without restarting. If youd like to use the old mode, youll need to edit ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/AdvancedSettings.xml like this:
· NEW: Dont allow disabling caches, as this could lead to problems.
· NEW: Enrique added support for Smart Crash Reports. This means that whenever you get a crash, you have the option of sending us the crash report. Simply click on the Report button, and then in the bottom right, youll see a button for Send to OSXBMC & Apple (which is enabled after the system configuration is gathered). Please, please, please, use this, well get the crash reports, your bugs will get fixed, and then well all drink beer and watch fireworks. Note also that the first time you run it, youll get a dialog asking if it can install Smart Crash Reports. (Note: Ive heard this doesnt appear on all machines, not sure why that is yet.)
· NEW: The XBMCHelper is now installed into ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC, so that people dont have that problem upgrading the application because the file is in use. The helper is automatically upgraded if needed as well.
· FIX: The helper settings section has been renamed Remote Helper since it handles more than the Apple Remote.
· FIX: We no longer prevent you from using the helper if youve installed Remote Buddy. There should be no problem using the two together, although to be honest, I dont use it myself. Many thanks to the developer for working with us on this one.
· FIX: That annoying problem where the Apple Remote brings up both Front Row and OSXBMC *should* be fixed. More like worked around actually, because its a bug in OS X. The side effect is that when the helper is running, its possible that applications like Quicksilver (who capture keys) wont completely work. I say possible because (a) I havent tried it and (b) I dont use Quicksilver while watching movies.
· FIX: Crash on startup for case-sensitive partitions. Thanks to Brent for helping me track this one down.
· FIX: A regression that prevented images from loading over SMB (does nobody use the app to view photos anymore?)
· FIX: Removed all the broken resolutions from the screen settings. Well get back into changing screen modes at some point, probably at the same time as we switch refresh rates for different media.
· NEW: Apple Movie Trailers script was updated to the latest version (thanks, Nuka!)
· FIX: The default port for the web server has been changed to 3000.
· NEW: Latest version of ofdb scraper was included.
· FIX: The keymap has a new entry for switching between audio languages in full-screen (the a key). Also, the c key works to obtain a context menu in the file manager view (which is needed to eject optical media). To obtain these new settings, youll need to whack your old Keymap.xml file.
· NEW: When starting from scratch, a default sources.xml is installed which provides people with some basic sources for photos, music and video. Many thanks to Isaac for these last four items!
· FIX: The smart folder code has been reworked a bit. Its *possible* that some of the scanning issues that Jeremy was running into will be fixed. If not, its probably not the fault of smart folders.
· FIX: Ive increased the latency by a few milliseconds in the Portaudio code to hopefully reduce or get rid of underflows entirely (resulting in audio dropouts). Please see if you notice any improvement, and check the log if youd like to see what latency its using. N.B. The change will be subliminal (e.g. on my system the latency went from 1.5ms to around 9ms.)
· FIX: Who says we dont save the best for last? That annoying bug where the app hangs when canceling a video thats buffering (e.g. YouTube or AMT or FTP)? Fixed!
· Vulkanr got DVD playing working. So you should be able to insert a DVD into the drive and watch it play. To eject, go to the file manager and use the context menu. If it doesnt eject right away, try again. Brilliant stuff, vulkanr! He also fixed another Python crash.
· Jmarshall fixed the setting, and lots of other little things.
· Charleydoes fixed a crash on exit and a slow query.
· Spiff added .ogv/.oga file extensions.
· NEW: AC3 encoding. This is a killer new feature that allows your receiver to play full surround sound from unsupported formats, like AAC and FLAC. My hat is off to Ryan Walklin who got it working in record time. I know, were supposed to be stabilizing things for 0.5 final, but this was just too damn cool not to work in. Go play some Apple Trailers and then throw your Apple TV out the window.
· FIX: The infamous and incredibly annoying CAPETag bug, manifested by a crash in the middle of music playlists (randomly, of course).
· FIX: GIF image loading was kind of broken. Im surprised nobody noticed. I guess everyones pr0n collection has moved to JPEG? Boobs do look better in 24 bit color.
· FIX: A crash with keyboard layouts (thanks to Enrique and Roman).
· FIX: Text subtitles with more than two lines would have missing lines.
· FIX and FIX: Lots of fixes to smart folders. We now run asynchronously and timeout after a while if nothing has been returned. Memory handling has been fixed (thanks, Enrique!) so it doesnt crash when scanning a smart-folder-source to the library. And we respect the folders scope when executing the query.
· FIX: Switching between full-screen and windowed mode has been fixed to return to the same windowed resolution.
· FIX: Hugely reduced latency with controllers (XBox360/Apple Remote). The difference is unbelievable with the XBox360 controller, it should be indistinguishable from a wired controller at this point.
· FIX: Crash when displaying SSA subtitles in some cases. Thanks to Bad Mr Frosty and Parag for helping me track this down!
· FIX: Minor changes to the way we do vsync, not sure if it will improve things for people having trouble, but it wont make things worse.
· FIX: Revert the logarithmic volume change. Not sure if its a Mac thing or not, but it just made things really quiet for the majority of the volume range.
· FIX: Crash on exit when exiting when a script is running.
· FIX: Some erroneous references to /opt/local in the libraries we ship in Resources.
· FIX: 187.avi was getting stacked with 300.mkv, and I can assure you that the latter really doesnt play well after the former. Although, come to think of it, Samuel L Jackson yelling This is motherfucking Sparta! would be pretty awesome.
· FIX: The XBMCHelper is now killed again when you disable it in the settings.
· NEW: Enrique added support for CoreFoundations exception handling, so that we better log those sorts of errors.
· FIX: Enrique fixed a few more memory leaks and built the latest libcdio to fix a crash.
· NEW: (Bonus subtitle-lovers feature) Rather than just being able to select the lowly Arial font (or whatever you tossed in the media/Fonts directory in your application package (and come on, who does that?) you can now pick from a large number of Apple-supplied fonts. Seen below is Georgia Bold. Please let me know if you have an answer to the question posed.
· REG: Switching between windowed and full-screen mode when watching a video now works again.
· NEW: The genius known as bmfrosty realized that all Leopard installations come with Arial Unicode, so Ive put some code in to intercept requests to Arial and redirect to the system-installed Unicode version. This means no more need to download and install the font for all you international folk, it should work out of the box! Simply select Arial as the skin font, and it should work. Well be putting more work in here shortly, including allowing you to pick more system-provided fonts.
· FIX: You can now add Smart Folders as sources.
· FIX: Some memory leaks playing sounds and loading images (thanks to riquedafreak!)
· NEW: Weve upped the minimum cache size in a few cases to be more realistic for HD media. Still lots of improvements to be made in this area, but if youre having trouble with frames dropping or jerky playback, make *sure* your cache settings are high enough.
· FIX: Ive included a patch by crocodile that apparently fixes streaming from a Dreambox.
· FIX: The default on-screen time for the song information has been raised from 2 seconds to 10.
· FIX: New ffmpeg libraries to include a fix by elupus relating to seeking in MKV files.
· FIX: A patch by Roman Sokolov has been included which apparently helps out with Cyrillic input, switching keyboard layouts, and allowing hot-keys to work. Im not completely clear on the fixes because, frankly, I dont type in Cyrillic, but the patch was clean.
· NEW: Another part of the same patch, we now allow the desired URL encoding to be specified in a scraper. We default to UTF-8, and the new KinoPoisk scraper thats been included in this release specifies CP1251.
· FIX: For ages now weve had trouble with large subtitles and the lovely Aeon skin (cases with fonts having point sizes great than 50). Well, no longer. Thanks to jmarshall for pointing me in the right direction on this one.
· REG: Amazingly nobody noticed, but playing movie trailers with the AMT plugin caused a crash. Luckily, before anyone complained, its now working again.
· FIX: Better behavior with switching between full-screen and windowed mode in terms of fonts and skins resizing correctly.
· REG: Caching A/V ratios tweaked, fixes frame dropping problem introduced last version. I tried a bunch of HD trailers and got frame dropping only when my pathetic connection couldnt keep up.
· NEW: Bumped up maximum allowable cache size in certain cases.
· FIX: TIFF loading crash reported by superpea, fixed by upgrading to the latest version of libtiff.
· FIX: ProjectM was updated to 1.1 by malloc64 (nice work, mate!), and I recompiled for OS X. I ran into some problems on GMA950 (go figure), but worked around them. It *should* now work and not display garbage on the lower third of the screen. More tweaks may be needed, but I think its much better than the old one.
· NOTE: You MUST delete your Keymap.xml file, and probably should delete your entire Application Support/XBMC folder before upgrading. If you dont and then file a bug I will feed you to the dinos myself. This is also a beta and so does still have some glitches.
· NEW: Support for EAC3 audio. In theory, at least. I have to admit to not having any EAC3 content laying around, but I assume the guy who wrote the code for ffmpeg *did*. Thanks to Martin for pointing me to the patch. Also added .m2t/.m2ts to the list of recognized extensions.
· NEW: Support for Smart Folders. Pretty cool, actually.
· FIX: DVD playing over SMB (and other VFS protocols). I know Ive lied repeatedly in the past about this working, but this time Ive made sure of it. I hope. To be completely honest, I only tested VIDEO_TS folders and not .iso files.
· FIX: XBMSP support. Ive also misled you about this one in the past, but this time I actually verified that it works. This combined with iTunesFS is now officially my favorite way of getting my iTunes libraries playing remotely.
· FIX: Users skin folder wasnt being created.
· FIX: Profiles are saved and loaded correctly now, to the Application Support area.
· FIX: Scraper/IMDB/filesystem bugs that prevented files named Broken (2006/I).mkv from looking up correctly.
· NEW: I have news for you. Those cache settings that youve been tweaking to get just perfect, dont actually do anything. Pure placebo effect. Well, until today, at least. Theyre now hooked up and actually work. Superpea will dig this.
· Note: You MUST delete your Keymap.xml file, and probably should delete your entire Application Support/XBMC folder before upgrading. If you dont and then file a bug I will feed you to the dinos myself. This is also a beta and so does still have some glitches.
· NEW: Mixdown for AAC 5.1 (many thanks to tokyovigilante for the patch!) Those HD trailers from Apple work perfectly now.
· FIX: Crash playing certain MKV files (great bug report by bmfrosty).
· FIX: DVD playing over SMB (and other network protocols) should work now. mtehonica, if you could test, that would be much appreciated.
· NEW : Support for Aliases.
· FIX: Listing directories with broken symlinks is wonky (things went missing).
· FIX : Timezone off-by-one issue (really fixed this time!)
· FIX : Mouse cursor sometimes shows up. I double-doggy dare it to show up now!
· NEW: libdvdcss is included, which should help with DVD playing
· FIX: Scott updated the XBox360 controller keymap, mapping the white and black buttons to the two buttons above the triggers and made some other improvements and fixes. NOTE: You will have to remove your existing keymap.xml in ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/UserData. As before, failure to do so may result in your having fairly unpleasant interactions with carnivorous dinosaurs.
· FIX: The screensaver kicked in after 10 seconds no matter what the time was set to.
· FIX: Our European friends will be happy to know that accented characters now show up correctly when browsing files and directories. Thanks to Roman for pointing me in the right direction. Total amount of time spent tracking this down including the time I invested last time (in which I gave up) was probably about 10 hours, so it feels really good to nail this one.
· FIX: Timezone selection has been removed, and we now use the OS X timezone. This fixes the DST problem people reported, and allows the timezone selection to be handled in a single place.
· FIX: Weather is fixed.
· FIX: Scripts are fixed (silly release building error).
· FIX: Red and blue were swapped in SSA subtitles.
· FIX: Allow selecting any available audio device as a passthrough device. This should enable people with external USB interfaces with digital output to use them. NOTE: You may have to reselect your audio output device if youre doing passthrough.
· FIX: Much improved bold-ing and italic-ing thanks to jmarshall.
· FIX: Mediasources.xml and profiles and plugins were incorrectly read from and written to application bundle.
· FIX: Potential fix for the XBMC helper losing exclusive access to the Apple Remote (and thus holding down play putting the machine to sleep). Please test, and if you still run into the problem, let me know if youre running in full-screen mode, windowed, or both, along with any other details that may help track the problem down.
· NEWStandard mode is what is enabled by default, and is intended for those using, well, an standard Apple Remote. The other mode is Universal Remote, which Ill explain in the next bullet item. The Always Running option instructs the helper to start on login and always run, so that you can use it to start XBMC. If you hit the menu button when in the home screen, XBMC will exit, and another press of the menu button starts it back up again, so it works just like Front Row but without sucking.: Apple Remote support. This is a big one. Theres now a helper that runs and communicates with XBMC. Among other things, this allows you to use the Apple Remote to start XBMC, a highly requested feature. The code has also been rewritten to handle the buttons much faster, so you should notice none of the pesky delay thats been present up until now. There are preferences for the Apple Remote in Settings -> System -> Apple Remote which let you specify three modes. Disable the Apple Remote support if you want to use a third party application (e.g. Remote Buddy, Sofa Control). Isaac has been working relentlessly with both companies to ensure that you have great behavior with those apps, and he is the one who did all the Apple Remote keymap programming. Very nice work!
· NEW: Universal Remote support. This is totally awesome, and the brainchild of Cayce and Scott who are both Universal Remote-aholics. When I met them in person for the first time, they had each independently brought their universal remotes along to try to convince me that their model was the best. I cannot make this stuff up. Scott sports a Harmony 550, and Cayce has an URC-MX900. Cayces remote could definitely best Scotts in a fight, but Scotts remote is sexier. Anyway, they came up with this cool scheme that I coded in the XBMC helper to allow sequences of Apple Remote buttons to allow for many more commands than the standard Apple Remote could support, even with holding down buttons. Check out this page for details on the mappings and you should be able to program your Universal Remote. You can change the sequence delay time to work best with your specific remote. Thanks to Scott for testing the crap out of this with his Harmony, and really making sure it works well.
· NEW: XBox360 controller support. Rounding out our controller portfolio is the XBox 360 controller. Good for those MAME games, when we get them working. This controller worked with SDL, but the code was buggy and once the controller shut down, you were screwed. I moved the code into the XBMC helper and tweaked d4rks awesome event client stuff a bit to support what we needed with analog sticks. The controller will fall asleep and wake up fine, and you can use the big X button to start XBMC if it isnt started. Youll need these drivers, and you may want to replace one of the kexts with the one here since it fixes a bug when plugging and unplugging the USB receiver. Again, thanks to Scott who tirelessly worked away to create a keymap for this controller.
· NEW: SSA Subtitles. This was a oft-requested feature, especially by the infamous Bad Mr Frosty. Luckily for him, a new XBMC team member named Rudd integrated support for libass (used by mplayer). We took his code, started with the default libass, integrated some fixes and enhancements from mplayer, and enabled enca support (which can detect languages in subtitle streams using some cool techniques). Fontconfig support has also been enabled and so SSA subtitles should work perfectly now, except in the case of fonts embedded in MKV files, which Rudd is working on.
· NEW: Sleep displays and computer. Cayce added two killer features for this release. There are new options in Settings -> System -> Hardware that allow you to have XBMC turn off your monitor after a specified time, and also sleep your Mac after a specified time. Great stuff! Since the Apple Remote can wake the Mac from sleep, this ends up being really nice.
· NEW/FIX: Unified upscaling, fixed problems with interlacing. The initial software upscaling code was pretty hastily thrown together. I cleaned it up for this release and the software and hardware upscaling options are all available from the on screen video settings menu when viewing a video. This is nice because you can flip through the available settings to compare them. NOTE: There is a known issue with a single frame of solid green when moving from software to hardware modes, and vice versa. My OpenGL fu is weak. We also enabled a new algorithm available in ffmpeg called sinc which is supposedly quite good, but also very computationally expensive. A mini is not usually enough to use sinc upscaling, but feel free to give it a try.
· NEW: Skip to next/previous chapter in DVDs. If youre watching a DVD, hitting up/down on the Apple Remote (or keyboard) skips by chapters.
· FIX: Shoutcast crashes. The guy working on the Windows port (charlydoes) fixed the memory corruption issue with Shoutcast streams, and they should now work perfectly. Awesome work!
· FIX: Skip to next/previous video doesnt work. Im pretty sure d4rk fixed this one.
· FIX: Subtitles look squashed in 720p/1080p. The infamous Jmarshall fixed this one. Ill buy him a beer or five when we visit New Zealand.
· FIX: Add Get Album Information back to context menu when not in library mode. I was very sad when this option didnt work anymore so I put it back in. It doesnt save the information to the database, but its useful for reading an album review or getting a thumbnail.
· FIX: Navigation through menus with Apple Remote might leave you stuck. Navigation should work perfectly now in all skins.
· NEW: High quality software upscaling is now supported. You can specify preferences in Video -> Player as to when the scaling is enabled and what scaling algorithm is used. This makes a huge difference when viewing SD content. It takes quite a bit of processing power, but the good news is that decoding SD content doesnt.
· NEW: Monitor blanking is now supported. When selecting a full-screen mode, you have the option of telling XBMC to blank the other monitors. The preference is in Appearance -> Screen. I suspect Martin will be happy that he can stop throwing a sweater over his iMac, which sounded like a total fire hazard to me.
· NEW: The built-in web server now works. Among other things, it serves as an alternate remote control for those of you using a laptop as an expensive remote. Make sure to set a port above 1024.
· NEW: You can now store your own skins in the Library/Application Support/XBMC/skin directory, to avoid having to move aside and reinstall skins every time you upgrade. Thanks to d4rk for coding this up!
· FIX: A crash when reading WMA files.
· FIX: The OS X mouse cursor sometimes made an unwelcome appearance in full-screen mode.
· FIX: Settings that made no sense for OS X have been removed to reduce confusion.
