Version history Plex (OSXBMC) (Intel, Leopard/Snow Leopard)

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Changes from v0.8.2 -> v0.8.3

• 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.

Changes from v0.8.1 -> v0.8.2

• 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).
• Along with all these additions, we’ve fixed quite a few 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)

Changes from v0.8.0 -> v0.8.1

• 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.

Changes from v0.7.15 Beta -> v0.8.0

• 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.)

Changes from v0.7.14 Beta -> v0.7.15 Beta

• We’re coming to the end of the Plex/Seven series, so we’re primarily focused on bug-fixes, but we did find the time to add a few new things for your enjoyment. Many, many thanks to all the people who helped out with this release. In the next few days, we’re going to release a few new plug-ins (and updates to existing ones) that make use of new features/bugfixes in this release, so be sure to update as soon as you can! The release can be downloaded here.
• 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.
• We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in this release:
• 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).
• We also 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.

Changes from v0.7.12 Beta -> v0.7.14 Beta

• We’ve been working hard for the last month and I’m really happy to finally be able to announce this next release (download here, but please read the release notes first). Besides the usual bunch of new features and bug-fixes, this release brings with it support for the next major release of our Media Server plug-in API, and this means that you’ll be seeing lots of new content in the App Store this week (and hopefully provides extra incentive to upgrade quickly!)
• 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 ?? ??? 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.
• Lots of good fixes in this release as well.
• 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.

Changes from v0.7.11 Beta -> v0.7.12 Beta

• 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.

Changes from v0.7.10 Beta -> v0.7.11 Beta

• 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).

Changes from v0.7.9 Beta -> v0.7.10 Beta

• We just pushed a new release out which improves compatibility with some Flash sites, and to go along with it, Scott prepared 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.
• Besides the known issue of the Plex Media Server not working with Safari Adblocker, if a plug-in stops working, it’s likely that the structure of the site changed. This doesn’t happen very frequently with most sites, but it’s a definite possibility. When this occurs, an entity we call the “Campfire Robot” springs into action automatically and tracks us down to let us know, and shortly thereafter we can push an update.
• As such, if a site stops working, the best thing to do is to check the App Store for updates. If you have automatic updates turned on, check your install history to see if an update got installed while you were getting coffee.
• To answer your question, no, we rarely sleep.

Changes from v0.7.8 Beta -> v0.7.9 Beta

• 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.

Changes from v0.7.6 Beta -> v0.7.7 Beta

• 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.

Changes from v0.7.5 Beta -> v0.7.6 Beta

• changes for this release:
• 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.
• We have also updated the Plex Media Server (included with Plex) with the following changes:
• 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.
• We’ve also pulled the usual bunch of fixes from XBMC, including updated scrapers, updated UPnP code, and some fixes.

Changes from v0.7.4 Beta -> v0.7.5 Beta

• 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.

Changes from v0.7.3 -> v0.7.4 Beta

• 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).

Changes from v0.7.0 Beta -> v0.7.1 Beta

• 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.

Changes from v0.5.21 -> v0.5.22

• 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 Jayman978!)
• 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.

Changes from v0.5.19 -> v0.5.20

• NEW: We now turn off the backlight on displays that are blanked, many thanks to James. I hear the sound of happy Mac users rejoicing.
• NEW: The menu button brings up shutdown menu instead of just exiting, as requested, holding play zooms into photos, and holding menu returns to normal zoom. Also, the escape key has been made to act just like the menu button on the remote. Thanks to Isaac for these improvements!
• NEW: Added the ability to cycle through the available displays. This works in windowed or full-screen modes, and you can use the new ⌘-Shift-→ and ⌘-Shift-← keyboard accelerators to do it. Fun! Plus, ever time I connect things in XCode’s Interface Builder, I get little shivers of pleasure.
• FIX: Weather conditions are correctly localized (thanks, Enrique!)
• FIX: James fixed a small bug with the display brightness setting.
• FIX: The audio device is now saved and restored correctly in all cases. Seriously.
• FIX: The problem affecting video with some LOL releases (and others) has been fixed (thanks to elupus for the fix to ffmpeg).
• FIX: A rare bug causing a crash when blanking displays (thanks, Enrique!)

Changes from v0.5.18 -> v0.5.19

• NEW: Our newest Plexville code master, Jam, added the ability to modify the panel brightness for applicable LCDs (iMacs, laptops) via the settings. Lots of other really cool things coming very shortly from him.
• NEW: Greatly simplified settings. Isaac worked really hard to come up with sane default settings, and also to move lots of the more esoteric settings from the UI into advancedsettings.xml. We’ve found that new users tend to run into the same things (e.g. disabling remote events and thus breaking Apple Remote). Plex now ships with a well commented advancedsettings.xml file which will get installed into your Application Support folder if you don’t already have the file. If you want to change settings that no longer appear in the UI, you can either edit the items in the advanced settings file, or remove from them there to make them appear in the UI again. Isaac did an awesome job at choosing reasonable defaults.
• NEW: Revamped the full-screen toggling (⌘-F) to make things more Mac-like. If you go into full-screen and quit, next time it will start in full screen. Also, if you drag the window over to another screen and hit ⌘-F, it’ll go to full-screen on that display. Quit and restart and it’ll be full-screen on that display. In summary, it should act much more intuitively. Thanks to migueld for pushing me on this one, we had lots of new users (rightly!) confused.
• FIX: Certain MKV files could cause crashes.
• FIX: Multi-channel AAC files could cause crashes (with AC3 transcoding). Ryan nailed this one.
• FIX: A regression displaying non-US charsets (e.g. French). Thanks to Soner and others who helped bring the problem to my attention.
• FIX: A regression scanning/refreshing movies in VIDEO_TS folders.
• FIX: Improvements to the German translation of MediaStream (thanks, Spacemessage!)

Changes from v0.5.15 -> v0.5.18

• My sincere apologies for a bug that crept in with the DTS to AC3 transcoding feature which prevented DTS from down-mixing correctly. If you use usually connect Plex to a surround receiver supporting DTS you would not have been affected.
• The problem has been fixed, and I’ve uploaded the new release. The good news is you should be able to use Sparkle to do the update for you.
• This is Barkley catching guava fruit in his mouth. He loves guava, pineapple, papaya and avocado, and on occasion we’ve caught him eating freshly-fallen mango out in the yard.

Changes from v0.5.14 -> v0.5.15

• FIX: The issue with using Remote Buddy.
• FIX: DVDs don’t play over SMB (and other non-local protocols).
• FIX: Crashes when thumbnailing MPEG2 files.
• FIX: Annoying popup asking to locate screensaver (99% sure).
• FIX: Hebrew characters should work again (i.e. be the right way around).
• FIX: Apple Movie Trailers thumbs don’t display.
• FIX: Going to full screen without visualizer doesn’t work (thanks, jmarshall!)
• FIX: Problems playing RAR files.
• FIX: Fixed a crash after playing an unplayable file.
• FIX: Cursor sounds work correctly until you play something.
• NEW: Latest version of MediaStream! We’ve added an experimental skin fontset called “Unicode” which uses Arial unicode for all the fonts, it may help international users.
• NEW: Mouse is turned off by default.
• NEW: Default username for web server is “plex” not “xbox”.

Changes from v0.5 RC 3 -> v0.5.14

• 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.

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