It’s a Tuesday night, you’re bored, the North Koreans aren’t launching missiles at your state, and you’re media hungry. Well, you’re in luck. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our brilliant team of plug-in developers, we have a few more plug-ins to offer you. (Actually, I think 14 counts as more than a few.) Again, many thanks to Andreas W. for the highly skilled graphic design work.

First up is Picasa Web, written by Ian Gratton. Browse your private online library or your friends’ libraries, or search for photos.

Have you ever wanted to listen to radio stations on Shoutcast with Plex and been frustrated with the poor user interface? Just install the new Shoutcast plug-in, set your preferences (minimum bit-rate, sort order), and browse through thousands of streams.

Next up, written by our own Scott, Miro is a plug-in that taps the Miro Directory, an open content directory which offers over 6,000+ internet TV shows and video podcasts. Organized by genre or language, there is something for everyone in here (including a fair number of sheep, apparently).

Forum user beowulfe was kind enough to write a few plug-ins guaranteed to please your better looking half. Sure, they might complain when you watch 24 or don’t take the garbage out, but sit them in front of these plug-ins and you’ll likely be able to sneak off with your mates for a beer.

First up is HGTV for all your home design, decorating, home improvement or landscaping projects.

Next up is The Food Network, which has lots of content including Ace of Cakes, Good Eats, 30 Minute Meals and Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.

MakingOf.com, written by the prolific Ryan McNally, is a behind-the-scenes Web portal that provides an intimate, fresh look into the process of making a movie by the insiders themselves. Lots of cool content here.

“RTL NOW” ist die Marke für zeitsouveräne TV-Nutzung von RTL-Formaten. Seit Januar 2007 können Sie auf dem Video-Abruf-Portal RTLNOW.de einen großen Teil des RTL-Programms für sieben Tage nach Ausstrahlung kostenlos per Stream ansehen. Highlights lassen sich schon unmittelbar nach der TV-Ausstrahlung abspielen.

Author: Robert Nio

Ask A Ninja is an award-winning series of comedy videos about the image of ninja in popular culture. Watch the latest episode or any past episodes in Plex.

Elk jaar staat Utrecht tien dagen in het teken van de Nederlandse film. Dan vindt het Nederlands Film Festival plaats dat gericht is op de Nederlandse cinema in al zijn facetten. Bekijk hier de vodcast en andere online video’s van het festival (o.a. trailers, interviews en verslagen vanaf het festivalterrein).

Author: Sander Spies

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, also by Ryan McNally, is a webcomic written and drawn by Chris Hastings and inked by Kent Archer. Published three times a week on its own website, it features the fictional adventures of a character named Dr. McNinja, a thirty-five-year-old doctor who also happens to be a ninja.

Am Samstag, dem 20. September 2003, um 13 Uhr ging die wöchentliche Computersendung c’t magazin im hessen fernsehen erstmals auf Sendung. Serviceorientiert und unterhaltsam berichtet c’t magazin jeweils dreißig Minuten lang über die ganz alltäglichen Probleme beim Umgang mit Computern, Handys und dem Internet. Woche für Woche nimmt die von Mathias Münch moderierte Magazinsendung neue Produkte ebenso unter die Lupe wie die Qualität von Dienstleistungen.

Author: Robert Nio

8-Bit Theater, written by Ryan McNally, is a comic based on the video game Final Fantasy I, following the four Light Warriors in their quest to vanquish the King of Demons, Chaos.

Freecaster.tv, written by Jonny Wray, is the premier source of free high quality extreme sports videos. Watch LIVE webcast, streaming, replays and on-demand best sports video.

GameSpy, also by Ryan McNally, is all about video games. You can find walkthroughs and reviews of games for the PC, XBox, and numerous other platforms.

One last note: The plug-in authors should check the released versions, as they may include minor changes or fixes.

Things have been quiet on the blog recently, but behind the scenes we’re busy working on some exciting new features, and Plex/Nine is beginning to take shape.

In the meantime, our plug-in developer community has been doing some absolutely amazing work. We’ve had such a deluge of new plug-ins that we’ve revamped our workflow and created a Lighthouse project to manage things better. Huge props to Ryan McNally, Gordon, Ian, Robert, Nikolas, Rick, Scott, and all the others that make the plug-in space so rich and exciting.

Isaac has been kind enough to take on the role of release manager and has been working tirelessly, coordinating the efforts of the plug-in developers, framework developers, and designers. Not to mention he’s written some new plug-ins!

Additionally, the very skilled Andreas W. (tassitassi on the forums) has joined us and is contributing a huge amount of artwork and icon design for new plug-ins (and improving existing art). This guy is incredibly talented!

Onto the new plugins; first up is MSNBC, written by Isaac. This is one that can certainly help users in “cutting the cable”. Use it to stay current with daily news updates in health, entertainment, business, science, technology and sports video.

Hot on the heels of MSNBC is an update to our CNN plugin (also by Isaac, who’s rapidly becoming a Python god) that allows you to watch live CNN news streams. While the streams are generally only available Monday-Friday 7AM-8PM PST I think this is going to fill a huge gap currently missing in the content tree. The only thing that would make it better is if we could get James Earl Jones to say “This…is Plex”.

Next up, and written by Gordon Johnston, Pro at Cooking is a comedic cooking show hosted by Dave Lee, also known by his Chinese name Dawei. Each episode features a female assistant, who tends to be a victim of chauvinism (in the name of humor). The series is filmed in Toronto.

One note: Isaac made the Eggplant Parmesan for his wife and he can’t stop talking about it.

Also written by Gordon Johnston, Interview Project by David Lynch is a neat site which features a road trip where people are interviewed across the country. Really cool idea, and really cool content.

Written by Jdevoo, The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Realism periods (1100-1850), containing over 21,300 reproductions. Never took art history in college? Crack open a beer and stare at some art. Use it to impress a date.

Next up, written by the prolific Gordon Johnston, the BBC Podcasts plugin allows access to BBC podcasts on a variety of topics, and is accessible outside of the UK.

Last up is an update to The White House plugin which adds support for much more video content and also adds a Photos section with the latest photos from the White House’s flickr feed. Rumor has it that Obama relaxes at the end of the day in front of Plex.

One last note: The plug-in authors should check the released versions, as they may include minor changes or fixes.

We were super excited when Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing contacted us to see if we could provide access through Plex to their excellent video site. An hour and a couple of emails later, we have an easy and fun way to browse Boing Boing Video while sitting on your couch.

For those of you new to Plex, you can download the latest version from here. After you’ve installed, start Plex and head to the App Store:

Since Boing Boing Video is one of our featured plug-ins, you can find it in the Featured Section. Simple select the plug-in to install it.

Once you’ve installed the plug-in, you can find it in the Videos section off the main menu. Sit back, open up a beverage of your choice, and watch some great content.

Remember how when Windows 3.0 came out, it really sucked, and it wasn’t until 3.1 that Microsoft got things right? Well, I’d like to think of this release (download here) as being the “Windows 3.1″ release of Plex. We’ve fixed a lot of issues, and this version should be much more stable than the previous one. Additionally, the people who were staying with v0.7.13 because of issues with BluRay rips in subsequent versions can now download this version without fear.

• 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.

We’ve been taking Barkley more and more to the pool as he continues his recovery from his CCL injury. So far he’s doing great and is really happy to get in the water.

As we fix some of the bugs that slipped into the first release of Plex/Eight, we thought we’d offer up some new content for you to enjoy. The very cool thing about this batch of plug-ins is that they have been created almost entirely by the Plex community!

First up is I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER written by Bart Dorsey, a plug-in that we’ve all been loving. It allows you to browse pictures from a huge selection of funny sites like the Fail Blog, Pundit Kitchen, and of course the eponymous site itself.

Next up, great for the kiddies, is Sesame Street. Written by Beowulfe, it gives you access to hundreds of short videos from years of the show.

Written by one of our most prolific plug-in authors, Gordon Johnston, Llewtube provides access to content from Robert Llewellyn’s Car Pool video blog. Robert (of Red Dwarf fame), has taken to driving around with interesting people and filming the whole thing.

Written by Brad Dolman, Tripleman is a photo blog from a Vancouver photographer.

This next plug-in, written by pygmalion (great job!), provides HD content from fxguide, which is a leading site covering visual effects in filmmaking. They’re all streamed at 720p, professionally produced, and have great content; for example, the most recent one features an interview with J.J. Abrams.

This was requested on the forums; the Bill Moyers Journal has lots of great content, including thought-provoking interviews and discussions.

Lastly, I tossed together a quick plug-in for Adam Carolla’s podcast.

Additionally, a few plug-ins were updated. Rick Fletcher finished a brilliant update to his Major League Baseball plug-in which now provides access to MLB.TV. Rick has really pushed the envelope with this plug-in, and we had to add some new Media Server features to make this plug-in work.

I also pushed a minor update to the NPR plug-in which provides much better metadata so that it looks better in the Now Playing window.

There are a lot more plug-ins in the works (some nearly done), so expect a new batch pushed to the App Store in the next few weeks.

One last note: The plug-in authors should check the released versions, as they may include minor changes or fixes.

First of all, happy Mother’s day to all the Plex moms out there! (Remember, Plex Dads, a new Plex release is not a substitute for flowers or a nice call.)

We’re very pleased to announce the first release of our stable Plex/Eight series. It’s been a long road, but we’re quite happy with the stability, especially given the massive amount of new functionality. You can download it here.

We’ve already started work on the Plex/Nine series, and you’ll be seeing lots of change between here and the official “1.0″ release. We know what areas need the most work (the library, usability) and we have a few surprises up our sleeve which we hope you’ll enjoy.

We’d like to give a really, really big shout out to our growing community of plug-in developers. The response to the new Framework has been tremendous, the plug-ins are flowing in, and we’ve gotten great feedback from everyone. Thank you all very much! As promised, James and I are heads down on documentation and will have something for you to look at very shortly. We’re also working on some updates to the App Store to improve the “regionalization” which will make it easier for our users around the world to get to the plug-ins that work for them. A pox on content providers who limit the content to only certain areas of our little blue planet.

This release consists primary of bug-fixes, but we’ve added the usual treats. As Chuck Norris said, “Anything else would be less than civilized”.

• 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 <anamorphiczoom>true</anamorphiczoom> in your advanced settings.

And the fixes:

• 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 Jay 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.)

Next up will be a big release of new and enhanced plug-ins, and then back to work on Plex/Nine.

Today also happens to be Barkley’s forth birthday. We brought him to the beach for the first time since his injury around five months ago. He swam, caught a few waves, and then rolled around in the sand in pure delight.

We can’t help it, writing plug-ins is addictive. Here are a bunch of new ones to keep you happy and entertained in front of your TV. A step closer to killing cable?

Charlie Rose has thousands of hours of interviews with highly interesting people. Everyone from J.J. Abrams to Sean Penn to Yo-Yo Ma has been on his show.

The Comedy Central plug-in, written by Scott, provides lots of stand up comedy, roasts, and episodes from shows on that channel.

This next one was requested on the forums, and was quite simple to code. There is a ton of great news content on here for fans of the New York Times.

Written by Gordon Johnston, who’s been kicking some serious ass, the NBC plug-in offers hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of programming, from old-school shows like the A-Team to the latest season of ER.

This last one is my favorite, being that I’m a big fan of indie music. Recommended if you like the Pitchfork Media plug-in, the site has lots of great up and coming artists.

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.

Here’s Barkley on Makena beach, gutting a beached whale.

A lot of people have been asking for this, and now your wish has been granted: Netflix on Plex. Tens of thousands of instantly playable movies, and a gorgeous interface with fanart, high resolution posters and rich metadata.

Major props to Scott for doing a brilliant job with this plug-in. He’s already hard at work at the next version.

The Netflix plug-in requires the latest version of Plex.

You also need the Silverlight plug-in installed.

As I mentioned in the last post, one of the reasons we are so excited about this latest release of Plex and the Plex Media Server is that we’ve added lots of new features in support of new plug-ins, as well as an elegant new version of the Python plug-in framework. We’re going to be releasing a bunch of new plug-ins this week, and here are the first four. N.B. Please make sure you install the latest version of Plex before installing these!

SVT Play, written by Daniel Eriksson, Mattias Norlander, and Ivar Åsell, is a lovely plug-in for Swedish speakers. The content is available for viewing outside of Sweden, which is excellent news as well. These guys did a great job with the plug-in.

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 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 (<language> tag, e.g. “en” or “it”, and <units> 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.

I’ll let Barkley have the last word, as usual. Seriously, who sleeps like this?

If you’re a basketball fan, you probably want to check out the hot-off-the-presses March Madness plug-in we just released. You can watch all the games live, in HD!

Note: You need Silverlight installed for this plug-in to work.

We’re got another batch of plug-ins to liven up your weekend. As usual, we’ve gotten a lot of help on these, and we really appreciate all the comments on and suggestions for the framework. There are now over 40 plug-ins available, and the App Store has only been open for three weeks! We look forward to getting more coverage for our international users, and are happy to provide help to developers in these countries, since many times we don’t have access to the foreign content (silly media providers). Specifically, we’ve been assisting some Swedish users on a plug-in which we’re excited about.

I’ll start with a shout out to our users in Britain, who will be overjoyed to see an iPlayer plugin. We’ve got at least one more British plug-in in the works as well. James has been working on this plug-in for a while, and it’s a real labor of love. With BBC iPlayer you can catch up with shows from the past seven days that you’ve missed or want to watch again, or watch episodes from an entire series with Series Catch-Up. Shows are available from all BBC TV channels and radio stations, and BBC Wales content shown on S4C. Inside Plex, you can view the most popular iPlayer content, highlights selected by the BBC, and browse by channel, day, genre or format, or use the search feature to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Next up, we have a couple of new ones that I know will be heavily in my rotation. Daniel Metz, Isaac and Scott created plug-ins for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Tons of content, and lovely organization.

James also whipped up a plug-in for Geekscape, which was requested by phunkysai, long-time Plex tester and all around good guy.

Next up, anyone with a TiVo is going to love this one. Written by Yoav, and described in more detail here, this plug-in lets you stream shows directly off your TiVo. Brilliant work! As one happy beta user commented “Thank you very much, this app runs beautifully”.

Last, but not least, we have another beautiful photo blog available on your TV, called Aperture Priority. There is some great tilt-shift photography on there.

We’ve got lots of things “cooking” but we wanted to make a quick release (download here) to fix Hulu as well as provide some important enhancements to the media server.

• 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.

Also, we’ve had lots of developer interest, and we’re now working with a few people on some upcoming plug-ins. In order to prevent duplication of effort, we’ve added a page to the wiki which lists the plug-ins that are in progress. We’ll be adding more to that page (Isaac threw it up quickly from memory), but please add to it if you’re working on a plug-in; you can provide your forum name in the contact section so that others can contact you to help out.

There have been some plug-ins developed which will likely not find a place in the Plex App Store, such as the 18+ plug-ins. We’d still like to encourage good organization and structure for these “unofficial” plug-ins, so Isaac has created a wiki template for you to use. If you have one of these plug-ins, please add a page to the wiki for it, and either upload the zipped bundle to the wiki or add an external link to it. You can then add a link to the new page on the unsupported plug-ins index page. Thanks very much!

This is one of my favorite photos of Barkley. I’m not sure why he was sitting like that on the stairs, but he looks quite regal.

We have lots of interesting plug-ins in the works, but this one is kind of special. After all, who doesn’t love Pandora? Scott, who never ceases to amaze me with his plug-in writing prowess, whipped this lovely gem up. It still has a few rough edges, such as the need to log into Pandora with Safari, but we couldn’t resist releasing it early for you to play with.

You’ll note that the last menu item at the top level is a help screencast that walks you though the plug-in, which Isaac made. Please watch it if you have any questions. The only other tricky bit besides logging in through Safari is that we’ve added special controls for this plug-in: Hitting “right” moves to the next track, hitting “up” gives the track a thumbs up, and hitting “down” gives the track a thumbs down. (Sometimes you have to hit the key/button twice).

Hopefully it’s a fun new addition to the content available in Plex!

After a few days of working perfectly, they’ve deployed new countermeasures against us. We’re looking into it and are working on a fix.

This cat and mouse isn’t benefitting anyone.

The final thing I’ll say is that there is a ton of other content available on Plex via Joost and other plug-ins, and there will continue to be more and more as time goes on.

There’s some new stuff for you to enjoy in the Plex App Store today. First of all, we have a plug-in for the popular Daily Kos site. If progressive politics if your thing, you’ll likely enjoy this one.

If you prefer to get your politics directly from the White House, Chris Tarczon (author of the popular IGN plug-in) wrote a plug-in which gives you access to Obama’s weekly addresses (in HD!) and other White House content.

And for those of you who don’t care a whit about (American) politics, but like your rock indie flavored, install the Pitchfork TV plug-in, which provides access to a *ton* of content, including band interviews, live performances, music videos, and more.

We’ve also released an update to the CNET plug-in so that the “Today on CNET” section actually reflects the current date.

A couple of fixes in this one, which you can download here.

• 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.

Here’s Barkley pondering the perennial question: To Eat or Not to Eat?

Just in time to distract you at the start of your work week, we have a bunch of new content available from the App Store.

James added Academic Earth, a brilliant site with thousands of lectures from the best professors in the world. This one was requested in the forums.

We received a submission for an IGN plug-in from Chris Tarczon. Chris obviously “gets” our framework and did a great job with it. There is a ton of gaming-related content here.

James also did a plug-in for The Escapist, which houses a collection of gaming-related shows, reviews and entertainment content.

Scott and Isaac whipped up a plug-in for The Onion, a hilarious site with fake news.

And finally, we received another user submission from Chris Barnes for his wife’s photoblog site. She’s a talented photographer, check it out!

We also released updates to Hulu (display more season/episode data), Google LIFE (update for site change), and Revision3 (added thumbnails).

We hope you’re enjoying consuming all this content as much as we’re enjoying bringing it to you!

Lots of good stuff fixed in this release, and we’re happy to bring it to you. You can download this release here.

• 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).

And some really nice new stuff. James and Isaac worked hard on usability for this release. First of all, we’ve made it easier for you to get to the App Store:

They also renamed some of the top level menu items, and added favorites, since with the ever-growing amount of content, favorites can be very helpful (use the context menu to add items to your favorites):

And finally, you know how most applications have this thing called “Help” where you can go to seek assistance inside the actual program? Novel concept, right? Well, James whipped up a plug-in, Isaac populated it, and now you can browse helpful screencasts without leaving Plex:

One minor note: we really want to express our gratitude to all the websites we support. They have really been helpful, as the changes they make to their sites have ended up assisting us greatly in finding and fixing bugs in our code, as well as enhancing the flexibility of the plug-in code and site configuration files. Hulu works again in this new release, I’m happy to say.

Here’s Barkley, artfully dangling some sandy drool.

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.

Here’s another of Barkley and Anna from the San Francisco series:

As if you really needed a reason to upgrade to the latest version of Plex out today, but just in case, I’ll give you one: You’ll be able to run the new NPR plug-in. I picture our users as being a cultured, sophisticated bunch, so hopefully you’ll enjoy this one.

So run, don’t walk, to install the latest update and then head over to the App Store to pick up the NPR plug-in.

We’re really happy to see that people seem to be enjoying the store. We’ve had tens of thousands of plug-ins downloaded already, and we have a bunch of new ones in the works! In the meantime, we’ve cooked up another quick release to try to fix the most egregious issues with the last one.

• FIX: Fixed permissions on the Plex binary to allow non-administrative users to run.
• FIX: Tweaks to the skin for upcoming Plug-ins.
• FIX: Some crashes and leaks in the Media Server.
• FIX: Fixed the scrapers/NFO issue, this time for real (many thanks to Isaac for all the hard work on this one!). We also include the TMDB scraper again.
• FIX: A regression where only the first iPhoto album showed up.
• FIX: Improved compatibility with Flash sites for the Media Server.

The release can be downloaded here or via Sparkle as usual.

Here’s another photo of Barkley playing on a beach in San Francisco.

We figured that you might not have quite enough content yet to keep you busy watching and out of the forums filing pesky bugs. Luckily, Scott has been on a skiing vacation, and a few evenings ago he drank a bit too much at an Après-ski, then went home and wrote the Joost plug-in. We hope you enjoy it, there is a ton of content on there. Seeking doesn’t work yet but it should be an easy fix.

James also deployed some updates for the App Store plug-in itself. There’s now an update history section where you can browse through the plug-ins you’ve installed and the latest release notes for each one.

If you have automatic updates enabled, you’ll get the new App Store without any further ado, otherwise select Check For Updates to install manually.

Less than 24 hours after we launched, we received the first third-party plug-in submission, from the very talented photographer Jasper van der Meij. It’s really impressive, because he figured it all out just from looking at existing plug-ins, and even added his own nicely designed artwork.

If you’re looking to write your own plug-in, have a look at the installed ones in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins. If you’re writing a plug-in that works with a Flash or Silverlight site, you’ll also need to add a site configuration into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Site Configurations (see existing ones in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins/SiteConfigurations.bundle/Contents/Resources). The Plex Media Server automagically picks up changes so you don’t need to restart it while you’re developing, although you may want to run it inside Terminal to see the debug output.

I promise that we’ll have tutorials and documentation in short order, but these plug-ins are very easy to write, especially if you know Python and understand XPATH. We also have a new forum for the discussion of plug-in development.

Let’s see what you can come up with!

I could present the usual release notes, talk about the CoreAudio crash on startup that’s been fixed, the Mira/Sofacontrol changes (thanks marklight!), mention the TV/Movies keymap issue that was fixed, explain that the region link to weather settings is now fixed, and that NFO files no longer cause scraping issues. But honestly, I’d rather talk about something else.

This release, one innocent little point difference from the last, has the biggest new Plex feature ever. I’m not just gushing hyperbole here when I say you will never use Plex the same way again.

I’d like to introduce you to the new Plex Media Server:

Dear Media Companies,

I’m really beginning to think that things between us won’t work.

I have to admit that I’ve been cheating on you for a while now. I’ve been spending time with USENET. She’s old, she’s unattractive, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but she does offer me one simple thing that you don’t: unencumbered access to ad-free media.

It didn’t have to be this way. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve never been a good listener. You seem more interested in your friends the Advertisers than me. And you’re terrified that I’ll steal your content, without realizing that (a) I already am and (b) you could offer me so much more.

In thinking of me as an untrustworthy thief, you’re missing some great opportunities. There is a holy trinity of things I want desperately from you, because I can’t get them anywhere else: availability, quality, and metadata. By availability I mean give me access to full catalogs of content. More is more. If I can’t get it from you, I’m going to have to go elsewhere, and you don’t want that. Secondly, give me quality: why would I go to you for SD content when I can get HD content elsewhere? Why would I go to you for ad-laden content when I can get ad-free content elsewhere? Lastly, give me rich metadata: reviews, related content, recommendations, transcripts, and credits. And give me an API interface to that data. In return I will give you my money every month, and I’ll rub your feet at least once a week.

I see you getting nervous, looking down at your shoes. Don’t you get it? I pay $30/month for my illicit relationship with the old hag, and she doesn’t offer me any meaningful part of the holy trinity - let’s face it, though, she only has to be better than you, and that’s not hard. She offers spotty availability, unreliable quality, and a paucity of metadata. The money I’m giving her could be in your pocket.

I would say that we needed counseling, but before that, I think you need to educate yourself a bit about basic economics; learn about concepts like tiered pricing and price discrimination. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that you’ve put your content online, but you’ve done it in a way that’s nearly useless to me. You want to offer it free, with ads? Great, but for the love of God, offer a subscription model where I can access it without the ads. Charge me a bit more and give me higher resolution content. A bit more and I get access to metadata for remixing your content.

(Remember two important things: (1) If you don’t give me what I want, I will go elsewhere and (2) You have the ability to give me things that I can’t get elsewhere.)

To reiterate: You have to stop being scared that I’m going to steal your content, because I’m already stealing your content. Your goal should be to get me to give you the money I’m already giving to others.

I’ll leave you with a win-win proposal. Sit down and run the numbers, and figure out how much I’m worth to you per month as a pair of eyeballs to your Advertiser friends. Double that amount, and that’s how much I’ll pay you for access to your content without any ads. Triple it, and that’s how much I’ll pay for high resolution, unencumbered content with metadata.

So please, take some time and think about things. I really think we could be great together.

As much as we try to ensure the quality of every release, there can always be some gremlins that sneak in, which is why it’s important to make it extremely easy to make new releases. After all, there’s a lot of stuff happening between writing a line of code and getting that code into your living rooms.

Luckily, we have a few scripts written, and there are really only a few simple steps: The first script builds a release, tags it, and packages it up into a DMG. The second one uploads it to our server, distributes it to a set of initial mirrors, and uploads metadata about the new release. The third “throws the switch” on the new release.

Here are the changes in this new release, which can be downloaded here (source here):

• 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.

Enjoy! This is Barkley relaxing in his favorite spot of grass on the island, in the remote town of Hana.

A one-click method to gather up information about your Plex configuration and submit it to us online? A great tool to help us diagnose and solve your problems with the application? Written in Cocoa? Auto-updating? It might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. Head over to James’ blog post as he introduces the new Plex System Reporter tool, and download it for yourself.

I can’t believe it’s already February! It’s been a rainy month out here, so for the most part there was nothing better to do than hunker down and write code and hope the electricity didn’t go out.

We have a brand new release for you with lots of good stuff. The exciting part, though, is that we spent as much time on the release as we did on some great new features coming up shortly. These new features are going to change the way you use Plex, and are going to open up some very interesting possibilities. We’ll be making a preview release shortly.

The release can be downloaded from here, and the source is available here.

Without further ado, here are the 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.

Here’s Barkley resting in the yard. He’s still wearing his brace, but his limp is nearly gone, and we’re planning to start the water rehab in our friends’ pool shortly.