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Plex Home Theater Changelog

What's new in Plex Home Theater 1.4.1 Build 469

Jun 23, 2015
  • FIXES:
  • PIN check when returning from screensaver reinstated
  • OSX - Fix an issue where playing AAC tracks could make progress to the next track hang
  • Screenshot functionality could still show up because of a bad keymapping
  • Fix an issue where music could not be shuffled
  • Make sure we clear the VEVO logo after we have played a music video
  • Make it possible to mark an episode in progress as unwatched
  • Fix several issues with filters not being loaded and updated correctly when switching libraries
  • Fix a bug that could lead to the wrong navigation window being loaded from slower servers
  • Fixed playback of ATMOS audio on Windows

New in Plex Home Theater 1.4.0 Build 459 (May 4, 2015)

  • NEW:
  • Underlying support for some new, upcoming features. (Stay tuned for news soon!)
  • Server names are now shown for all sections in the home window by default, they can be disabled in Skin settings
  • FIXED:
  • Apply some ATMOS support patches. Seems to work better than before, but still not 100%
  • Fixed warning when navigating Music sections
  • Fixed watch later listing and navigation
  • Fixed cropping in Photo slide show
  • Removed the Now Playing entry from the home window since it was broken in many ways
  • Fixed a crash that could happen if you played the last Episode and unwatched filter was applied
  • Fixed a problem where Android mobile app would show up in the home list even if it was disabled
  • With the next version of the Media Server the transcoding profile will no longer request AC3/DTS audio when it's disabled in PHT
  • HLS transcode streams are now removed since MKV streaming seems to work much better for all scenarios

New in Plex Home Theater 1.3.6 Build 441 (Feb 24, 2015)

  • Fixed Playlist editing mode.
  • Fixed jump-to-letter when you have loaded a subview or a pre-play
  • Correct watched / unwatched icons shown in pre-play
  • Image cache improved, it will now reload bad cached images and will be more careful about
  • adding broken images to the cache.
  • Fix certificate errors with cloud sync sections
  • Remove keybindings for taking screenshots since this feature has been broken a long time.
  • Use better LIRC default path (thanks to Maxime Gauduin)
  • Fixed a token corruption that could lead to client slowdown (Thanks to Steven Hartland)
  • Fanouts and other timers should now work better with OpenELEC / Linux (Thanks to Dale Hamel)

New in Plex Home Theater 1.2.2 Build 331 (Aug 25, 2014)

  • Fixed a bunch of crashes reported for 1.2.1 and 1.2.0
  • Fixed trailer playback when ffmpeg AVIO was enabled
  • Fixed trailer playback from Android clients
  • Make sure that repeat flag is not set for Movie play queues

New in Plex Home Theater 1.2.1 Build 314 (Aug 4, 2014)

  • Fixes:
  • Fix avoid cinema trailers to play before a TV Show

New in Plex Home Theater 1.2.0 Build 313 (Aug 1, 2014)

  • New:
  • Trailers & extras are now available in Preplay Window
  • Cinema Trailers before playback (see Preferences > Playback > Extras).
  • Play Queue items can now be removed from Play Queue on screen display
  • Support page for trailers / extras can be found here :
  • https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/202934883
  • https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/202934863
  • Fixes:
  • Fix Play Queue contextual menus depending on already existing Play Queue
  • Fix Home Window fanouts positions are now restored properly
  • Fix Sections list item selection is now restored properly
  • Fix ASS subtitles now show up properly when overriden with PHT fonts
  • Fix Channels messages dialog won’t show error message any more.
  • Fix Preferences browsing made easier.
  • Various skin fixes.

New in Plex Home Theater 1.0.13 Build 222 (Mar 25, 2014)

  • New:
  • Internal testing showed that Matroska streaming that was announced in 1.0.12 release notes did not work well with aspects of seeking and resuming. It has therefore been disabled while we figure these issues out. You can still try it out by adding on in your advancedsettings.xml but it will not work well with seeking and resuming. You have been warned.
  • Fixes:
  • Fixed deadlock in "Please Wait" dialog when navigating TV Shows.

New in Plex Home Theater 1.0.9 Build 180 (Jan 22, 2014)

  • PHT fixes:
  • Close all filter dialogs when closing the MediaWindow
  • Sort unwatched filter to the top of the list
  • Fix subtitle/audio stream names. Now includes subtitle format and forced flag
  • Removed Subtitle->Charset setting since the server always gives us UTF-8 subs
  • Show left side menu in Queue/Recommends window
  • Add new Universal Plex font to subtitles
  • Skin fixes:
  • Fix vertical align position of Home secondary menu
  • Don't show left side menu in Channels.
  • Keep filters list vertical position consistent in all conditions.

New in Plex Home Theater 1.0.7 Build 169 (Dec 18, 2013)

  • Upstream fixes:
  • Fix video ripple on Mavericks with Intel GPU
  • PHT Fixes:
  • Update app translations.
  • OSX: Make sure we reset audio devices to PCM mode correctly
  • OSX: Don't apply a mix matrix when the input channels are the same as output channels
  • Crash fixes

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.8.4 Build 125 (Aug 14, 2013)

  • NEW:
  • Photo albums now use a random photo from the album as a thumbnail
  • Photo metadata now includes more EXIF-derived information
  • (API) Add /status/sessions/history/all endpoint.
  • (API) Removed videoResolution attribute from photos
  • FIXES:
  • Fix a number of user-reported crashes
  • Photo createdAt, originallyAvailableAt and year attributes are now set correctly from EXIF metadata
  • (Windows) Log cycling now works as expected
  • (Windows) Scanner now ignores paths in system PythonPath
  • (API) Serialize floating point numbers independently of locale
  • (DLNA) Sony Blu-Ray devices can now view photos from Plex Media Server
  • (DLNA) MpegtsM2tsMode profile settings flag wasn't working
  • (DLNA) Transcoded photo sizes are now handled correctly
  • (DLNA) Profiles now refer to photo metadata using part.X or media.X instead of photo.X
  • (DLNA) Fix hang when non-profile files were present in profile directories
  • (Linux) Be more selective exposing top-level directories in the web client

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.7.17 Build 469 (Mar 13, 2013)

  • NEW: Auto-select forced subtitles.
  • NEW: (API) More information passed back at root level to aid PlexSync clients.
  • NEW: (API) Final transcode resolution passed back for transcode session endpoint.
  • NEW: (API) Add a “transcoderVideo” flag at root if we support transcoding video.
  • NEW: (API) Allow callers to specify a background color when transcoding to JPEG.
  • NEW: (API) Add viewStateUpdatedAt for global OnDeck to allow sorting.
  • NEW: (API) export library section UUIDs for PlexSync.
  • NEW: (Android) Add FLAC as a direct play profile (syncing at less than “highest” will convert to MP3).
  • NEW: Added device notifications for sync (in progress, item complete). Mostly helps Kepler.
  • NEW: (PlexSync) Support for syncing show banners.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Massive speedups for the new transcoder in many scenarios (sync, streaming, seeking). It should be 2x to 3x faster (around 2x faster than the old transcoder), and will resolve many issues of stuttering and buffering some have seen.
  • FIX: A bug where timed library updates might only happen every other interval.
  • FIX: A major regression with subtitles causing transcoder to exit on certain OS X systems.
  • FIX: A case where we didn’t allow the host system to sleep.
  • FIX: Improvements to audio stream picking heuristics.
  • FIX: A hang when WebKit transcodes failed.
  • FIX: Some EAC3 streams showed up as “EC-3″.
  • FIX: Use media analysis duration instead of likely meaningless metadata duration when possible.
  • FIX: Improved elastic thread pool behavior, less pressure on thread creation/destruction.
  • FIX: Fixed an issue where background color wasn’t correct in the image transcoder (fixes section icons on Roku).
  • FIX: (OS X) Fix auto-update library failing under certain conditions.
  • FIX: (OS X) Show Plex/Web preferences by default, option-click shows old Cocoa prefs.
  • FIX: Improve Kepler transcoder profile, add Plex/Web profile.
  • FIX: (ReadyNAS) Update packaging, fix temp folder path.
  • FIX: (Ubuntu) Upstart fix.
  • FIX: (Fedora) Fixes in scripts.
  • FIX: (Roku) Improve profile, disable anamorphic video.
  • FIX: (Kepler) Limit AAC to two channel, so 5.1 gets mixed down when streaming on mobile devices.
  • FIX: (Kepler) Fix for anamorphic video displaying incorrectly.
  • FIX: (Windows) Don’t let PYTHONPATH interfere with our Python. Fixes some startup issues.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Upgrade to ffmpeg 1.1.2
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Allow specifying max bitrate.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) MPEG4 inside AVI files didn’t work.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Allow for faster seeking for clients that support it.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Don’t send back blank segments when transcoder dies.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Allow other users access to transcode session information.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Use higher bitrate when converting other codecs to AAC.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Improve quality when transcoding interlaced content.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Greatly improved AAC audio quality.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Remove MP3 from iOS HLS transcode target.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Improved support for remuxing with multichannel audio.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Support transcoding between multi-channel formats.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) We failed with some content due to scaling bug (Vimeo, TED).
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Send more logs up to the media server to help diagnosing issues.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Fix an issue when remuxed videos failed or acted weirdly.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Fix issue with last character being missing in SRT subs.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Fix SRT subs showing tags.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Improve accuracy of bitrate in M3U8, helps Roku.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Improve bandwidth estimates for HLS.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Some indirect videos failed to play.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) We were generating MPEGTS streams which occasionally made the Roku crash.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Improve reliability of new transcoder when resuming.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Some VOBSUB subtitles inside MKV files weren’t burned.
  • FIX: (New transcoder) Some high bitrate stereo content failed to transcode.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.7.12 Build 407 (Feb 16, 2013)

  • NEW:
  • Greatly improved (Sync and Win8) transcoder subtitle burning: support SSA and SMI, fix crashes, fix subtitle sync when resuming video.
  • FIX:
  • Scanning TV shows near the root directory of a volume didn’t work reliably.
  • Send Accept-Ranges: bytes HTTP header when answering requests for media. Fixes Win8 seeking in media.
  • DTS audio inside MP4 container could be incorrectly identified as mp4a during media analysis.
  • Transcoding certain media files could be pathologically slow. Thanks to Rodger for helping us diagnose the issue!
  • Transcoding video audio from MP3 to AAC would fail in some rare cases.
  • A/V sync issues transcoding Smooth Streaming to Windows 8 Store app.
  • Actor thumbnails weren’t being offered correctly to sync clients.
  • Removed unnecessary logging when running transcoder.
  • Add more logging when Win8 app loopback exemption can’t be added.
  • When a media asset is uploaded, it becomes the default.
  • Sync item status could be prematurely reported as complete.
  • Added iPad mini sync profile.
  • NEW: (API) Allow converting SMI to SRT (format=srt).
  • (Sync) A few issues with sync status not being reported correctly.
  • (Transcoder) An A/V sync issue affecting Win8 app.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.5.4 (Aug 2, 2012)

  • NEW: Home screen sections can be re-ordered or hidden. Yay!
  • NEW: Background art while browsing. Pretty!
  • NEW: Easier to read list view when browsing by folder. Useful!
  • FIX: High bitrate content will correctly transcode instead of attempting Direct Play (thanks, majortom!)
  • FIX: Media deletion & progress reporting works when using myPlex without publishing servers.
  • FIX: Network addresses are resolved earlier to make playing media on remote clients more reliable.
  • FIX: Easier method for adding friends.
  • FIX: Crash when attempting to set a user rating for an item with no community rating.
  • FIX: Crash marking a show (un)watched.
  • FIX: A few layout & graphical issues.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.5.2 Beta (Nov 29, 2011)

  • NEW: [Mac] Support for automatic refresh rate switching. And there was much rejoicing.
  • NEW: Add a way to specify a manual address for a media server, useful for working around network issues.
  • NEW: When running without a server, search now returns cloud results.
  • NEW: Add a global audio delay setting.
  • FIX: CPU usage for software decoding greatly reduced for all codecs, fixing VC-1 “stutter” issue and playback on older machines.
  • FIX: Allow selecting interface language in preferences.
  • FIX: Enable down-mix volume boost preference.
  • FIX: Enable speaker configuration preference.
  • FIX: A hang in the home screen.
  • FIX: Losing a server even though it was running on the same machine.
  • FIX: Not enough buffering (and therefore playback issues) with remote transcoded media.
  • FIX: Toggling full screen works on multi-display setups.
  • FIX: Allow ESC to get out of a playlist.
  • FIX: Add missing strings for shutdown timer.
  • FIX: Change the audio settings dialog to show delay in milliseconds, it seemed more human-friendly.
  • FIX: Crash clicking the “save as default” button in video settings.
  • FIX: Make sure we stop remote transcodes when stopping playback.
  • FIX: Update ffmpeg, fixes some artifacts with VC-1 and several other issues.
  • FIX: Stop printing myPlex tokens to the logs.
  • FIX: “Old-school” sources were disappearing after a restart.
  • FIX: Posters/art weren’t changing when changed on the media server.
  • FIX: Don’t play theme music if music is already playing or if video is playing in small window.
  • FIX: Background music volume is always VERY LOUD (preference works now).
  • FIX: [Mac] A crash when playing Flash/Silverlight videos followed by non-WebKit video.
  • FIX: [Mac] Flash/Silverlight video occasionally displayed black & white garbage on the screen.
  • FIX: Info button on iOS toggles OSD, and back button works as well.
  • FIX: Multiple crashes when skipping around in videos.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.3.4 (Jul 28, 2011)

  • NEW: Added a preference to disable media file deletion, and we’ve defaulted it to off, for the sake of safety.
  • NEW: There is a new API endpoint /library/optimize which, as you might expect, optimizes the library database. Useful in clients or cron jobs.
  • And the fixes:
  • FIX: When refreshing a library section because changes to folders were detected, we wait until the changes stop before kicking off the scan, so that we don’t scan partial/locked files.
  • FIX: Custom artwork with spaces in path was not displaying properly.
  • FIX: This is an amusing one because it’s been there for a long time and nobody noticed. When doing a new scan, every 16th movie wasn’t displayed in the media manager (it was scanned, it just didn’t show up until you switched sections). Thanks to louisd for noticing it!
  • FIX: Our friend diamondsw helped us debug an issue where certain MKV files were failing to play on mobile devices.
  • FIX: Boots has been reporting this one for a while, there was an occasional hang in the media manager when scrolling quickly.
  • FIX: The was an issue scanning if your username had an apostrophe in it.
  • FIX: A (rather rare) crash in refreshing/timed updates.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.3.3 (Jul 21, 2011)

  • NEW: Support for deleting files in the library. Lots of people wanted this one.
  • NEW: Initial support for Photo library sections. This means that the Plex Media Server can serve up your photos without needing to use iPhoto/Aperture, which of course doesn’t exist on Windows or Linux. We’re in the process of adding support to all the clients (e.g. next version of iOS/Android apps will add support, next firmware update for LG TV will add support), but Plex for Mac already supports it in this release. I like this one personally because it means that the Plex Media Server is now complete in the basic types of media it can scan and serve up.
  • NEW: Automatic audio boost when mixing down multichannel to stereo for mobile devices. No, you’re not hard of hearing.
  • NEW: If subtitle files are dropped in next to a piece of media, they will be picked up on-the-fly without a need to rerefresh the item or section.
  • NEW: Support for SUB/IDX subtitles in Plex for Mac. They’re chunky evil bitmaps, but we love them. Sort of.
  • NEW: Support for DTS > AC3 transcoding in transcoder (useful for LG TV, ATV2 and others).
  • FIX: Subtitle scaling is now uniform, no more giant subtitles. No, you don’t need a different prescription for your glasses.
  • FIX: Anamorphic videos were not Direct Streamed.
  • FIX: More videos in general Direct Stream (level, nitrate, segment size issues).
  • FIX: Improved selection of subtitles with “shown with foreign audio” setting.
  • FIX: The SD MKV A/V sync issue.
  • FIX: A few bugs on Lion, Plex should now be Lion-ready (which answers this question)!
  • Music:
  • NEW: Support for “Various Artists” (compilations) in music sections.
  • NEW: Initial support for multi-disc albums in music sections.
  • FIX: Much improved matching, far fewer false matches.
  • Other:
  • NEW: Faster transcoder startup.
  • NEW: Much faster TV and music metadata loading.
  • NEW: [Windows] Authenticode all binaries (hopefully preventing AV software from freaking out).
  • NEW: [Windows] Configure firewall on install.
  • NEW: Listen on new multicast group in GDM to avoid Windows 7 networking bug.
  • FIX: Issue where Vorbis streams were not transcoded.
  • FIX: Better logging for Python scanner errors while scanning.
  • FIX: [OS X] Database migration progress dialog didn’t always work properly.
  • FIX: Many fixes for GDM networking code.
  • FIX: [Windows] Scans stopping without completing.
  • FIX: [Windows] Server could become unresponsive.
  • FIX: [Windows] Conflicts with user-installed Python.
  • FIX: In certain cases, iOS app wasn’t showing channel images.
  • FIX: Unmatched items could become rematched, and items matched to a different agent could go back to the default agent.
  • FIX: [OS X] Cocoa media manager no longer jumps back to the grid when you are viewing details during a scan.
  • FIX: Hang when remotely playing one file followed by the next on Plex for Mac.
  • FIX: [OS X] Directory names are served up in precomposed UTF-8 on OS X (instead of decomposed).
  • FIX: [Linux] Crashes reading certain JPEG files.
  • FIX: [Linux] Image quality wasn’t as good for posters.
  • FIX: [Linux] Advertise on the real IP, not localhost.
  • FIX: [Linux] Playing files > 2GB failed.
  • FIX: [Linux] Fanart was scaled too small.
  • FIX: [Linux] If HOME was set to /, cache path wasn’t computed correctly.
  • FIX: Disable IPv6 on Linux/Windows by default, seems to cause problems in some cases.
  • FIX: Extreme memory usage or crashes analyzing ISO files.
  • FIX: Some crashes on shutdown, and also sped it up.
  • FIX: Don’t add the “All Episodes” directory if we don’t have any (e.g. in watched tree).
  • FIX: When refreshing older media libraries, bring remote media (poster/art) references local.
  • FIX: [OS X] Massive memory leak switching sections in the Cocoa media manager.
  • FIX: Offer even higher bitrates over 3G.
  • FIX: Issue with media streams in the database that could cause a transcode to fail on start.
  • FIX: A handful of other small bugs and crashes.
  • XML API:
  • NEW: Media XML contains width and height for video and photos.
  • NEW: New endpoint GET /library/sections/X/allLeaves (returns all tracks, episodes, etc.)
  • NEW: New endpoint DELETE /library/metadata/X
  • NEW: Ability to search by filename.
  • FIX: Clipping bug in the container paging API.
  • FIX: Files with ‘%’ characters were not encoded correctly in XML.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.2.7 (Apr 14, 2011)

  • NEW: We display the warning icon on shows/seasons/episodes and artist/album/tracks so that you can see more clearly which media is missing. Also note that if you dislike this feature, you can always disable it in the Library preferences by enabling “Empty trash automatically”. We enable it by default because we never want to delete any of your data without you knowing about it first.
  • FIX: We’ve updated the transcoding engine to fix a number of issues, including 3G video playback being audio only (thanks, Chris!), improvements in threading (1080p content should work more smoothly), and according to one tester, DTS-MA now mixes down correctly. Thanks also to mitch969 and others on the forums for all their help testing!
  • FIX: A few fixes for for the web-based media manager, including a fix for changes to collections not saving, sections not disappearing from clients when deleted via the web manager, and fixes for the “Match using” and un-match functionality.
  • FIX: When an episode is renamed, make sure we reload metadata if the episode or season number changed.
  • FIX: If a slideshow screensaver is active, playing content via the iOS or Android remotes turns the screensaver off (thanks to Man for bring this to our attention).
  • FIX: A fix for Turbo Scanning where if you edited a library section (to add a new directory, or when moving media, for example), you would need to perform a deep scan to pick up the changes.
  • NEW: Support for scanning OGG.
  • NEW: Improved and enhanced poster gathering from tags in all supported file formats.
  • NEW: Music lacking tags is scanned in as “unknown” artist/album.
  • FIX: Tons of fixes and improvements around reading tags.
  • NEW: Parse track numbers out of filename if they’re not in the tags.
  • FIX: Folders with more than 50 files are scanned.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.2.6 (Mar 29, 2011)

  • FIX: As issue when scanning a lot of new content (especially TV shows), where the Media Server could become unresponsive. We are now downloading media at the time of the scan (to make access faster in clients), and there was a bug that could cause an excessive amount of simultaneous downloads to, um, mess things up.
  • FIX: Subtitles weren’t being automatically enabled when there was just one embedded subtitle in a file and the preference was set to subtitles being “always enabled”.
  • FIX: As if that wasn’t bad enough, if a subtitle wasn’t enabled automatically when a file was played on Plex for Mac, it was disabled rather forcefully, so that it wouldn’t (won’t) appear again even if your preferences changed.
  • NEW: Support for scanning FLAC! So I recently upgraded my desk stereo a bit, and as a result, I got into an argument with a friend about MP3 VBR vs FLAC. He insisted that there was a huge difference in imaging and dynamics (words that audiophiles like to throw around, along with “coherence” and “coloration”, as they mark their CDs with green pens and purchase three-hundred dollar HDMI cables in hopes that the zeros and ones are, I don’t know, transmitted in Helvetica?). Anyway, having purchased quite a few CDs in the past, and having ripped them to VBR MP3, I was hoping that he was wrong, because, after all, re-ripping 400+ discs didn’t sound like much fun. To make a long story short, he uploaded three tracks for me in MP3 and FLAC format, and I A/B’d between then (blindly, of course). The result? They both sounded great, and I couldn’t tell the difference to save my life.
  • NEW: The Local Media agent has been updated to pull album art out of tags for MP3 and FLAC files. And there was much rejoicing.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.2.5 (Mar 22, 2011)

  • The last release contained a database bug which caused the following issues in certain cases (mostly from-scratch scans):
  • Scans wouldn’t bring in new content.
  • Deleting the trash would crash the media server.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.2.4 (Mar 21, 2011)

  • FIX: The Media Server would crash on start if you had certain plug-ins installed with bogus XML.
  • FIX: In certain cases, a scan would result in multiple movies showing the same name/poster.
  • FIX: A few fixes for soft deletion, including merged movies not showing the /!\ icon.
  • FIX: Changing the view type in Unwatched Shows would change the view type for episodes.
  • FIX: Possible fix for an OS X Lion crash (Plex is still unsupported on Lion).
  • FIX: Plex should now pick DTS/AC3 tracks over stereo when connected to a receiver.
  • FIX: When you play a video via iOS application, screen saver is turned off on Plex.
  • FIX: [Win] Issue with the transcoder, many videos wouldn’t play.
  • FIX: [Win] Posters for seasons/episodes not displaying.
  • FIX: [Win] Customization of application support directory wasn’t working.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.2.3 (Mar 17, 2011)

  • NEW: Universal Search.
  • NEW: Direct Play and Direct Streaming for clients.
  • NEW: Subtitle support in agents, and streaming subtitles from server to clients (SRT/SMI/SSA).
  • NEW: Support for secure access via Web Media Manager.
  • NEW: Turbo Scanning (option-click to do regular “deep” scan).
  • NEW: Soft Deletion.
  • NEW: Added the By Folder second level menu.
  • NEW: Support for our Bonjour replacement, known as G’Day Mate (GDM). Easy discovery!
  • NEW: [Win] Support for storing application support files anywhere.
  • FIX: The “Add Application” button was broken.
  • FIX: Don’t refresh metadata every two weeks.
  • FIX: In rare cases a Python process would take 100% CPU.
  • FIX: “Unwatched” section second title was incorrect.
  • FIX: Browsing for subtitles on Plex for Mac client.
  • FIX: Flash 10.1/10.2 works now.
  • FIX: With newer Flash installed, PMS is not restarted after 5.1 audio (as Flash but was fixed).
  • FIX: Refresh works with local media agent even if media isn’t matched (for subs, posters).
  • FIX: [Win] Various crashes (shutdown, during scans)
  • FIX: [Win] Issue with dialogs popping up asking you to insert drive.
  • FIX: [Win] Updated to latest transcoder, fixing lots of issues.
  • FIX: [Win] Make sure we don’t conflict with installed Pythons.
  • FIX: [Win] Lack of season/episode posters.
  • FIX: Movies with ratings of 10 don’t show up under “5 stars”
  • FIX: Any “phantom” media in the database is whacked after a scan.
  • FIX: Don’t let the machine sleep while transcoding.
  • FIX: Empty machine name crash.
  • FIX: Support for audio playback from Android with security enabled.
  • FIX: Add countries and producers tags to metadata models.
  • FIX: Media is downloaded on metadata refresh, and always kept around.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.1.1 (Oct 24, 2010)

  • NEW: Cast information restored to movie information dialog in Plex for Mac.
  • NEW: Ability to choose a specific piece of media to watch (e.g. HD, SD) if you have multiple media items. (You can disable this in Preferences > Video.
  • NEW: Added back “By Albums” in iTunes plug-in. Sometimes all you need is a little more cowbell.
  • NEW: Allow splitting apart TV Shows and Movies in the media manager.
  • NEW: Added an “Unwatched” section for Movies and TV Shows.
  • NEW: Added “By Album” in music library sections.
  • NEW: Allow browsing for on-disk graphics (posters/art) in the Media Manager.
  • NEW: Support for volume control in new remote control protocol.
  • NEW: Display number of items for each piece of media (e.g. if you have SD and HD versions of a movie). If you sort by items descending it’s a good way to see if you have any duplicated media (Reveal in Finder will show all of them) or if the agents have mistakenly matched two different pieces of media to the same thing. Yes, I’m really this disorganized, or at least I was until now!
  • NEW: Searching for matches in the media manager is now asynchronous and can be cancelled. Death to beach balls!
  • NEW: In Preferences > Transcoding, we’ve added an option to offer higher bitrates over 3G.
  • NEW: In Preferences > Library, you can optimize your database.
  • FIX: That dratted issue with posters and art continually re-downloading off the Internet. The Plex Media Server is now the single entity that downloads the graphics, and all the clients request from it. Expirations have been fixed, and other improvements around caching have been made. The bottom line is that, while not perfect, it should be much, much better. N.B. As part of this change, it’s of course going to have to download everything one last time in order to transition over to this new scheme.
  • FIX: Leopard crash on start (thanks, Ryan!). Also a crash on start when your computer didn’t have a name. And a few other crashes on start.
  • FIX: Stuttering playback (mostly with HD media). In some cases the cache size was being set incorrectly based on bad analysis, and this could lead to stutters during playback.
  • FIX: Anamorphic videos fix for iOS. Additionally, anamorphic MP4 files play correctly on Plex for Mac (thanks, Ryan!).
  • FIX: High CPU usage during scan, which could cause stuttering during playback as well.
  • FIX: Plug-ins could go missing in Plex when starting at same time as PMS.
  • FIX: We now quit the Scanner if the Media Server quits.
  • FIX: When detecting a rename, we upload location the in the database, otherwise media gets whacked when removing old location.
  • FIX: When a duplicate episode was found, it lost the “addedAt” time (making it disappear from “recently added”).
  • FIX: Allow backspace to exit the weather section, preferences, and a few other places where you could get stuck with the iOS app.
  • FIX: The “-1″ year issue in list view.
  • FIX: Better handling of locked database file.
  • FIX: In certain cases, stacked movies were not played in the right order.
  • FIX: Sometimes partial fanart files were displayed, leading to corrupted images being displayed.
  • FIX: Better handling for audio/video distinguishing in iTunes for foreign languages.
  • FIX: Allow changing metadata agent settings when there are no sections.
  • FIX: Video podcasts passed back as Video elements instead of Track.
  • FIX: Hebrew subtitles were displaying punctuation incorrectly.
  • FIX: The word “dvdmedia” was displayed at the end of the movie title.
  • FIX: Occasionally startup issues could result in agents not showing up, improve the recovery from this.
  • FIX: Issue on startup, due to space in home folder.
  • FIX: Videos stopping randomly in the middle of play.
  • FIX: A few tweaks to the Media Server’s menu bar, to make canceling a library refresh possible, and to make it harder to accidentally start one.
  • FIX: iTunes/iLife plug-ins mysteriously disappearing.
  • FIX: Lots of crashes while scanning and analyzing media, including some MP3s.
  • FIX: The Media Server starts (and installs) on a machine without Internet.
  • FIX: We fixed a .BUP/.IFO ordering issue which could cause a crash when playing a VIDEO_TS movie. You’ll need to remove and add the section to fix the ordering (but you won’t lose view state/progress doing so).
  • FIX: A buffer overflow issue reported by d1dn0t, which also caused crashes when navigating into some plug-ins.
  • FIX: Adding library sections from the command line wasn’t working (thanks, Atrus!).
  • FIX: The library would occasionally refresh continually.
  • FIX: Crash of the iOS app near the end of a video.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.9.0.21 (Aug 31, 2010)

  • Display sleep bug fixed.
  • Double sleep bug fixed.
  • Ryan W kindly added support for MP4 subtitles (apparently Gore hates MKV and has all his media in MP4 format).

New in Plex Home Theater 0.8.5 (Nov 20, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.8.3 (Oct 27, 2009)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.8.2 (Aug 10, 2009)

  • 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)

New in Plex Home Theater 0.8.1 (May 23, 2009)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.8.0 (May 11, 2009)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.7.15 (Apr 23, 2009)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.7.14 (Apr 8, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.13 (Mar 10, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.12 (Mar 4, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.11 (Mar 2, 2009)

  • 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).

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.10 (Feb 27, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.9 (Feb 25, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.8 (Feb 22, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.7 (Feb 9, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.6 (Feb 5, 2009)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.5 (Dec 27, 2008)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.4 (Dec 25, 2008)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.7.1 (Nov 26, 2008)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.7.0 (Nov 17, 2008)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.5.22 (Oct 29, 2008)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.21 (Oct 6, 2008)

  • FIX: Crash on entering settings menu. Elan kan't kode.
  • FIX: Restore screen backlight level on exit.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.16 (Sep 11, 2008)

  • 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.5.14 (Aug 30, 2008)

  • 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5 Release Candidate 3 (Jul 30, 2008)

  • [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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 10 (Jul 5, 2008)

  • 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 it�s 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 you�d like to use the old mode, you�ll need to edit ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/AdvancedSettings.xml like this:
  • NEW: Don�t 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, you�ll see a button for �Send to OSXBMC & Apple�� (which is enabled after the system configuration is gathered). Please, please, please, use this, we�ll get the crash reports, your bugs will get fixed, and then we�ll all drink beer and watch fireworks. Note also that the first time you run it, you�ll get a dialog asking if it can install Smart Crash Reports. (Note: I�ve heard this doesn�t appear on all machines, not sure why that is yet.)
  • NEW: The XBMCHelper is now installed into ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC, so that people don�t 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 you�ve installed Remote Buddy. There should be no problem using the two together, although to be honest, I don�t 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 it�s a bug in OS X. The side effect is that when the helper is running, it�s possible that applications like Quicksilver (who capture keys) won�t completely work. I say �possible� because (a) I haven�t tried it and (b) I don�t 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. We�ll 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, you�ll 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. It�s *possible* that some of the scanning issues that Jeremy was running into will be fixed. If not, it�s probably not the fault of smart folders.
  • FIX: I�ve 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 you�d like to see what latency it�s 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 don�t save the best for last? That annoying bug where the app hangs when canceling a video that�s 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 doesn�t 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 9 (Jun 23, 2008)

  • 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, we�re 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. I�m surprised nobody noticed. I guess everyone�s 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 doesn�t 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 won�t make things worse.
  • FIX: Revert the logarithmic volume change. Not sure if it�s 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 doesn�t 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 CoreFoundation�s 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-lover�s 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.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 8 (Jun 14, 2008)

  • 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 I�ve 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. We�ll 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: We�ve 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 you�re having trouble with frames dropping or jerky playback, make *sure* your cache settings are high enough.
  • FIX: I�ve 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. I�m not completely clear on the fixes because, frankly, I don�t 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 that�s been included in this release specifies CP1251.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 7 (Jun 10, 2008)

  • FIX: For ages now we�ve 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, it�s 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 couldn�t 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 it�s much better than the old one.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 6 (Jun 9, 2008)

  • NOTE: You MUST delete your Keymap.xml file, and probably should delete your entire Application Support/XBMC folder before upgrading. If you don�t 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 I�ve lied repeatedly in the past about this working, but this time I�ve made sure of it. I hope. To be completely honest, I only tested VIDEO_TS folders and not .iso files.
  • FIX: XBMSP support. I�ve 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: User�s skin folder wasn�t 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 you�ve been tweaking to get just perfect, don�t actually do anything. Pure placebo effect. Well, until today, at least. They�re now hooked up and actually work. Superpea will dig this.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 5 (Jun 2, 2008)

  • Note: You MUST delete your Keymap.xml file, and probably should delete your entire Application Support/XBMC folder before upgrading. If you don�t 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 3 (May 30, 2008)

  • 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

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 2 (May 13, 2008)

  • 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 you�re 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 you�re running in full-screen mode, windowed, or both, along with any other details that may help track the problem down.

New in Plex Home Theater 0.5.0 Beta 1 (May 8, 2008)

  • 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 I�ll 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. There�s 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 that�s 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. Cayce�s remote could definitely best Scott�s in a fight, but Scott�s 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 d4rk�s 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 isn�t started. You�ll 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 you�re 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 doesn�t work. I�m pretty sure d4rk fixed this one.
  • FIX: Subtitles look squashed in 720p/1080p. The infamous Jmarshall fixed this one. I�ll 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 didn�t work anymore so I put it back in. It doesn�t save the information to the database, but it�s 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 in Plex Home Theater 0.4.5 (Apr 8, 2008)

  • 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 doesn�t.
  • 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.