Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Release notes

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  • NEW: We have included the latest MediaStream skin (no doubt out of date by tomorrow), along with the associated code fixes so that you don’t have to hit escape 23 times to return to the main menu from the Movie/TV sections.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 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.

v0.5.21

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

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!)

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!)

v0.5.17/v0.5.18

  • FIX: DTS down-mixing fix.

v0.5.16

  • 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!)

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”.

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 resulting in the application crashing.
  • 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.