Hope you all are having a great Wednesday (or Thursday)!

For those of you having trouble seeing the video (or visiting on your iPad, the direct link to the video on Vimeo is here: http://vimeo.com/11880867

If you have a NVidia 9400M (or the new GT320/330M chipsets), and are running Snow Leopard 10.6.3, take it for a spin! As with the last post, download the binary [try the new binary below] and install it into Plex.app/Contents/MacOS. Once we get a sense of how well it’s working, we’ll spin an official release.

And yes, Al, this build does include the sleep fixes as well.

NOTE: Just to reiterate, only NVidia 9400M/GT320M/GT330M chipsets benefit from this. No support for ATI, nor for cards like the NVidia 8800 GT. This is a limitation of the framework provided by Apple (and many thanks for providing it, guys!) and may be addressed in future updates (but don’t get your hopes up). Also, Snow Leopard is required.

UPDATE: Try this new binary, which should fix the crashes. Thanks to Ryan for the quick fixes.

“I called to ask for a favor”, he continues. “You see, I run Plex on my three monitors, and I noticed that when I set the display sleep timer, my monitors still wake up after a few seconds.”

I suddenly have a bad feeling. Barkley can sense it too, I think, because he opens one eye for a second, and then falls back asleep.

“So I ran the numbers”, Al Gore continues, “and, well, with all your users, this bug is going to result in a 3 inch rise in sea-levels over the next hundred years. Son, do you know what this means?”

“Well”, I say, somewhat uncomfortably, “I saw your film”. I leave out the part about feeling really sleepy about half-way through and waking up with drool on the couch. “I thought you were really good.”

“This is no joking matter”, he says all serious, “fix this bug, and save the planet and the people of Tuvalu in the process.”

Needless to say, I fixed the bug.

I’d love it if you could give it a try for me before I send it over. You can find the binary here (replace the one inside Plex.app/Contents/MacOS). It fixes two issues and adds a new feature.

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

If it works well, I’ll spin another full release with the fixes.

Here’s Barkley, with a ball for each fix.

As most of you know, for the last year we’ve been working hard on best-in-class support for online media. Since we released the first version of the Plex Media Server with support for plug-ins, there have been hundreds of plug-ins written, and more than 1.4 million plug-ins downloaded from our store. We strongly believe that our platform is the easiest way on the planet to get media from a website to your living room TV.

On the other hand, many people who first see Plex are impressed most by how it handles your local media. To see a file on your hard drive spring to life with posters, fan art, and rich metadata is a wondrous thing indeed. Navigating through your library in various ways, seeing what episodes of a TV Show you haven’t watched, browsing through movie summaries and ratings, these things are all magical compared with browsing a lifeless Finder window.

The success of our platform for online media, coupled with our passion for building the best possible product, led us to focus our attention and energy in the last months on local content. Now as you may know, the library in Plex/Eight is based almost entirely on XBMC code. The XBMC library is quite possibly the best in the world, especially compared with other pieces of media center software. So the first question was: enhance or rewrite? At the end, we decided, just like with our plug-in framework, to throw out the existing code and rewrite it from scratch.

The ground up rewrite not only results in an extremely powerful library for personal content, but also sets the stage for providing many benefits beyond just the library itself. The latest major revision of the Plex Media Server, which incorporates the library, provides many other new capabilities under the hood that will allow us and developers to build some seriously cool new things.

This first post will serve as an attempt to explain the high-level features. Of course, the most important thing of all is its name. We decided to name the Plex Library after the Royal Library of Alexandria, the most famous library of the ancient world. (Naysayers may point out that the library was eventually destroyed, but hey, it lasted for hundreds of years!)

Here are some of the features of the new library:

• Decentralized: This was very important to us. The XBMC library is coupled to the media center itself. In Alexandria, the Plex Media Server stores all the data, and serves it out via an HTTP/XML interface. In this way, multiple Plex applications can share a library, or multiple libraries. You can do cool things like stop watching a movie on one client and resume on another.
• Flexible: As opposed to the XBMC library with its limiting Movies and TV areas, Alexandria allows a library to have unlimited sections. For example, you might have a “Documentaries” section, a “Home Movies” section, an “Anime” section, and a “Foreign Films” section, all configured to suit the media.
• Open: As mentioned before, the data from the library is available via an HTTP interface to the Plex Media Server. In addition, a new class of plug-ins called Metadata Agents have been developed, which are responsible for finding and retrieving information about your media from the Internet. Agents already exist for IMDB, TheMovieDB, TheTVDB, and others. Agents can retrieve any sort of data, such as TV theme music, subtitles, and song lyrics. The agents can be combined and arranged so that the resulting information is a customizable amalgam. We’ve also added a new class of entities called Scanners, which are responsible for identifying media on your drives. This means that even if you have a completely different file system structure to your media, you can write a few lines of Python code and integrate it with Alexandria.
• Unified: In Alexandria, even if a movie has no entry on IMDB (for example), it still sits alongside those movies that do. There is no more “file mode” and “library mode”. Everything in a library section, regardless of how much metadata it has, is a first class citizen of the library. This also allows content like home movies to live in the library, have their own fan art, posters, summaries, and other metadata.
• Robust: One of the problems with the old library is that a change to the IMDB site, for example, could cripple the scraper and prevent new content from being added. Since the metadata agents and scanners live in Plex plug-in bundles, they are auto-updated from our site, so we can quickly push a fix. Additionally, Alexandria is flexible enough such that even if a metadata provider like TheTVDB is down, new episodes are still added (and somewhat magically, may even get full metadata!)
• Developer friendly: The old scrapers were an enormous pain to develop, maintain, and even understand. We’ve built the new agents on top of our proven plug-in framework, which relies on modern features like XPath to make it easier than ever to bring metadata to your media.
• User friendly: There are a number of features which make Alexandria a pleasure for users. The library management is centered around the Plex Media Manager built into the Plex Media Server, which makes it easy to add library sections. Once added, these sections show up instantly on all Plex clients in the house. The Media Manager makes it easy to maintain your media, correct matches, tweak the metadata, customize the artwork, and more.

This, in summary, is Alexandria. I’m sure the first question will be “When can I have it?” We are quite far along with development, and we have released early builds to a select group of testers, who have been extremely helpful with their feedback and help. I’m using it full-time on my Mini, and used it to watch the latest episode of Lost last night. There are, of course, many things to clean up, fix, and add, but it won’t be too long now before we open up the testing to more people.

Thanks again for your patience. I’ll write more soon, and cover lots more of the details of Alexandria. Until then, I’ll leave you with some quotes from the first group of testers:

“Setting up sources is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier!!”

“NIIIIICEEEEE!!!!”

“This is going to be soooo good!!”

“ho-ly sh*t! I can read and understand this!”

“PC users are going to want a Mac. This is way ahead of XBMC now”

“This is just … WOW!!!”

“That is fantastic! Exactly what we need.”

“This looks amazing…exactly what is missing”

“You guys, this is f**king amazing”

“Whacking sources before used to be such a pain in the ass. Now it’s no big deal.”

“Wow, this is really nice”

Thanks as always to the plug-in authors, and to Isaac for managing the plug-in release process.

Kelby.tv – Written by Sander Spies

Kelby.tv provides videos from the following sites:

NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) News
Ask Dave
Photoshop User TV
Lightroom Killer Tips
Layers TV
D-Town TV
Photoshop Killer Tips

Webcomics – Written by Spaceman

Like comics? You’ll love this plug-in!

TellSticker – Written by Eithe

TellSticker lets you control your TellStick devices from within Plex. You can switch devices (like lights) on or off, dim them or bell them. You need to have Telldus Center installed for it to work (and a TellStick hardware device).

View exclusive Highlights, Recaps, Interviews, News, Results, Features and Athlete Bios from NBCOlympics.com

Flickr – Written by Ian.G and Jonny Wray

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world, and it’s great to be able to welcome it to Plex.

Studio 100 TV – Written by Sander Spies

Studio 100 TV verzamelt de leukste videoclips van Mega Mindy, Samson en Gert, Kabouter Plop, K3 en nog vele andere. Bekijk ze nu allemaal gratis online!

Sourcing content through partnerships with top broadcasters and cable networks, 1Cast is the online destination to get all the news you need – updated throughout the day.

CBC – Written by mysciencefriend

More than just a traditional broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada is evolving into a content company, the home of Canadian programming and a multimedia leader with a solid presence in the regions.

CBC’s new video player brings you online streaming of your favorite entertainment, news and sports programming straight to your computer. Watch full-length episodes, news, on-demand sports and more.

The Prayer Room – Written by Sander Spies

Kansas City Missions Base, founded by Mike Bickle, operating in 24/7 worship and prayer since 1999 with a Bible school, bookstore, cafe, and conference center.

Het Gesprek – Written by Sander Spies

Het Gesprek biedt inspiratie, nieuws en inhoud met programma’s over actualiteiten, maatschappij, cultuur en media.

GreenStijlTV – Written by Danny Michael

Bekijk het online tv-kanaal van de website GeenStijl.TV (onderdeel van GeenStijl).

Dumpert – Written by Danny Michael

Bekijk filmpjes, plaatjes en beluister audio van de website Dumpert.nl (onderdeel van GeenStijl).

Feed Me – Written by Jonny Wray

Create a library of your favorite video and audio podcasts using ‘Feed Me’. This plugin allows you to build and view content from a collection of sources by browsing the integrated podcast directory sites or by entering RSS URLs directly.

Universal Sports – Written by Jonny Wray

Universal Sports is the premier Olympic and lifestyle sports network featuring coverage of the Olympic Games, Paralympic Games, World Championships, World Cups, Grand Prixs and more.

DR – Written by Nikki

DR is a danish public service tv and radio government owned company.

This plugin supports streaming of videos and audio from dr.dk/Podcast and dr.dk/bonanza and live streams of DR1, DR2, DR Update, DR K, and DR Ramasjang tv channels. It also supports TV On Demand.

TV2 – Written by Nikki

Streaming of videos from video.tv2.dk – TV2 is a danish tv channel.

Lens – Written by Elan

Lens is the photography blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web.

Live Music Archive – Updated by Billy Joe

This isn’t a new Plug-in, but rather a really awesome update to an existing one. This new version of Live Music Archive supports looking at your iTunes artists and presenting you with concerts for matching artists. This is a really innovative way to find live recordings of your favorite artists.

Watch full length music videos and video playlists for free. Browse through the years and play the top videos for each decade, watch video premiers, and more!

Anna Kim Photography – Written by Elan Feingold

My lovely wife has begun pursuing her second career as a photographer, so I thought it only appropriate to make a plug-in for her web site. Yes, that is a photo of me obsessing over a batch of sourdough loaves (thanks, Isaac). Yes, I am wearing pants.

Written by Sander Spies, HT Guys is a podcast created by two guys, Braden Russell and Ara Derderian, known as the HT Guys. Listen in as they talk about the latest in home theater.

Also written by Sander Spies is the Uncle Jay plug-in. Uncle Jay explains the news to today’s innocent, ignorant and immature minds. Also to children. Watch Uncle Jay so you can figure out what’s going on, because grownups – perhaps you’ve noticed – haven’t.

After the great success of the SVT plug-in (which is in the top 25 most downloaded plug-ins), the group was approached by TV4 (the largest commercial television channel in Sweden). TV4 wanted to know if they would create a plug-in for their content, and even offered to create an API to their specification.

Now let’s just stop for a minute and consider how cool this is: Can you imagine if NBC came to us with the same great attitude? It seems, at least at the moment, sadly unfathomable.

So Daniel Eriksson, Sander Spies and Andreas Wahlström sat down to design and code the new TV4 plug-in, which looks absolutely great. If you speak Swedish, make sure you check it out. Many thanks to them, and many thanks to TV4 for understanding and embracing new ways to deliver their content.

TV4 har lanserat en ny tv-upplevelse på nätet. I TV4 Play kan du se både korta klipp och hela program – om du vill se knäckebrödsdansen från Talang om och om igen så finns den här, men du kan också se avsnitt från många av TV4:s mest populära program som Talang, Robinson och Parlamentet, helt gratis. Denna plug-in möjliggör för er att se allt detta gratismaterial direkt i Plex.

Do you like music? If so, riddle me this: What’s the premier subscription music service on the planet that everyone’s talking about? That’s right, Spotify. Of course, if you live in the US, you haven’t been able to enjoy it yet, but if you (or your IP address) resides in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France or Spain, you’ve probably checked out this amazing service.

So here’s the good news: If you have a premium subscription to Spotify, you can now enjoy this incredible service from the convenience of your couch for the first time ever, inside Plex. Head to the Plex App Store, install it, open up a nice bottle of wine, and enjoy the millions of tracks that are just a click of an Apple Remote away.

(Many thanks to Don McAllister and Oscar R for their initial testing of the plug-in and great suggestions!)

NOTE: Don’t forget, you need the latest Plex to use this plug-in, as well as a premium Spotify subscription.

Without further ado, the fixes:

• FIX: A bug where Plex and the Plex Media Server could get out of sync and display the wrong contents for a directory.
• FIX: An issue when stopping music playback, where the GUI “clicks” don’t restore and the playing track is still selected.
• FIX: Photo thumbnails were broken for plug-ins (thanks to orr721 for the report!)
• FIX: Hitting the menu button during a blank slideshow causes a crash. (thank to Majkel and other for the report!)
• FIX: When a track fails to play, Plex jumps into (blank) Now Playing screen anyway.
• FIX: Sometimes the photo screensaver started going “crazy fast”.
• FIX: The new remote code logged too much.
• FIX: The duration didn’t show up in plug-ins.
• FIX: You weren’t returned to the main menu correctly from items added to your Favorites, or direct links to plug-ins in the Music section. Existing favorites will need to be removed and re-added. (James)
• FIX: The iTunes plug-in now sorts artists by the “sort artist” field in iTunes. This one is for Scott!
• FIX: Crashes with WebKit plug-ins that appear in the Music section.
• FIX: PlexHelper occasionally stopped responding (or responded incorrectly) to button presses.
• FIX: Sometimes Plex didn’t start after the first run. Believe it or not, this was an OS X bug, now worked around.
• FIX: Plex hung when using the mouse wheel to scroll through text (thanks to hqrs for the report!)
• FIX: Changed the servers in the TVDB scraper to use the load balanced ones. (many thanks to kruisje for the fix!)
• FIX: Fixed a crash loading some RAW files.
• FIX: DTS-to-AC3 was broken in the last release. Thanks to our audio doctor Ryan who fixed it and improved the AC3 trancoding in the process.
• FIX: When you select “previous track” it now does the right thing with streamed content: moving to the start of the track or the previous track depending on how far along the track is (awesome, James!)

OK, so I said there were just fixes, right? I lied! James, as usual, pulled out a great new feature or two out of his hat, and we hope you enjoy them.

• NEW: Plug-in preferences show up on the context menu for the plug-in itself.
• NEW: Auto-sourcing of remote Plex Media Server iLife plug-ins. Let’s say you have a laptop with iTunes music, or your wife’s iMac has iPhoto on it. No longer do you have to manually add the sources, or wonder if they’ll work when you click on them. With the new version, sources add and remove themselves auto-magically thanks to Bonjour. Make sure you install the new Plex Media Server on the remote machines.

I’ll leave you with a rare sighting of the Loch Ness Barkley.

The Headweb plug-in, provided by the Swedish online movie service Headweb.com, allows you to watch and rent films directly from your Plex-equipped living room. All 1800 films are available for rent for 24 hours. The plug-in has support for subtitles, parental filter, trailers, and is localized in Swedish and English. Headweb is currently exclusive for Swedish consumers, although expansion to other nordic countries is coming very soon. They just recently got rated Sweden’s best movie service by “Digitala Hemmet”. If you have any questions, please check out their Plex page.

Headweb plugin från filmtjänsten Headweb.com låter dig se och hyra film från ditt Plex-utrustade vardagsrum. Alla 1800 filmer finns tillgängliga som hyrfilm under 24 timmar. Pluginen har stöd för undertexter, föräldrafilter, trailers m.m. och finns på svenska och engelska. Headweb är för tillfället exklusivt för svenska användare men en utökning till övriga nordiska länder är på gång. Headweb utsågs nyligen till bästa filmtjänsten av “Digitala Hemmet”. För mer information och frågor kolla på http://www.headweb.com/180665/plex-ps3/

You can see a demonstration of the plug-in here.

It looks great!

Like to watch South Park and live in Sweden? Ported by Henrik Engman, South Park SE allow you to watch every episode of South Park for free.

Written by Sander Spies is a plug-in for the Netherlands, Bekijk RTL Nieuws, RTL Z en andere RTL programma’s via RTL Gemist.

Does Sander ever sleep? Apparently not, and that’s to the benefit of our Dutch users. Bekijk programma’s van NET5, SBS6 en Veronica via Programma Gemist van SBS.

The winner of the brand new Mac Mini was Ian H. from Bristol in the UK. He’s been using Plex for 3 to 4 months, and he works as a software project manager (looking for the next project). His favorite Plex feature is the Academic Earth plug-in.

The winner of the Harmony One Advanced was Daniel E. from Boston, MA, who is an astrophysicist. He’s a recent convert to Plex, having switched from Boxee because he was fed up with the Hulu/Boxee war and loved “the almost infinite options to customize Plex“. When asked his favorite thing about Plex, he replied: “Several here. First, I love the forum community – it’s great to see such an organic development of the software and plugins for it. Next, the scraping is second-to-none. Finally, I’ve got to give huge props to the PlexAlaska skin, which is truly beautiful.“

The winner of the Harmony 700 was Don W. from Placentia, CA. Don has been a Plex user for about 9 months and says that Plex gave him the solution for “cutting the ‘cable cord’“. He added “Plex handles my media the way I want it, but makes it easy enough for my wife to understand.” Don is a Sales Manager for Swank Audio Visuals, and works designing Audio Visual elements for Fortune 500 meetings and events. His favorite Plex feature is the App Store and Plug-ins: “It has increased my ability to make Plex my only source of media in the house. No Cable or Satellite but I watch more content and have access to more media than ever before.”

Congratulations to our winners, and thanks again to everyone!

Written by Sander Spies, Culture Catch is your vid/podcasting on-line smart culture channel for provocative, insightful, entertaining and often-irreverent discussions on trends in 21st century culture with those who are in the know.

Also written by Sander Spies, PokerNews contains video updates, interviews and commentary from the world of poker including the latest from the WSOP.

Love movie trailers? Written by Jonny Wray, Trailer Unleashed provides instant access to a large amount of trailers.

Written by Sander Spies, Bekijk alle Nederland 24 kanalen vanuit Plex. De beschikbare kanalen: 101 TV, Best 24, Consumenten 24, Cultura 24, Familie 24/Z@ppelin, Geschiedenis 24, Holland Doc 24, Humor TV 24, Journaal 24, Politiek 24, Spirit 24, Sterren 24

Already filled out the survey? We sure appreciate it, and here’s how much: We’re going to be giving away some seriously cool prizes to three respondents! Those who have already taken the survey get a special thank you, as entries taken before the time of this post will get entered into the drawing twice.

Haven’t taken the survey yet? You still have time.

The prizes are:

1. One brand new Mac Mini (2.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, 120GB HD)
2. One Harmony One Advanced universal remote.
3. One Harmony 700 Advanced universal remote.

Not a bad deal for a few minutes of your time, so please, if you haven’t already, head to the survey and give us a piece of your mind!

We realize it’s been a little while since the last release, but hopefully the wait will have been worth it. We’re thrilled to serve you up a fresh new version of Plex (download here) with lots of bug-fixes and a few little enhancements. First up, the fixes:

[French users, be sure to read through oncleben31's blog post on the new scraper included in this release here.]

• 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.

To summarize, Plex should now work pretty well on Snow Leopard, and hopefully most of the annoyances and issues in the last release have been fixed. Moving right along, what other tasty nuggets await in this new release?

• NEW: James revamped the Plex shutdown options, adding a beautiful UI that allows quitting, sleeping, or powering off after a specified time. Check out the screencast below to see it in action. Press ’s’ anywhere in Plex to go directly to the Quit menu. On the Quit menu, press ‘c’ on the keyboard or hold the Play button on the Apple Remote to bring up the quit timer. There are also options to Sleep and Shutdown in the Quit submenu. Press ‘c’ or hold Play on the apple remote with Sleep or Shutdown selected brings up the timers for both of those as well.
• NEW: One of the longest-running complaints about Plex has been the low volume when listening to downmixed 5.1 audio. We’ve added three levels of dynamic range compression (in Preferences > System > Audio): Normal, Large, and Huge. These settings apply only to AC3 and DTS downmixed audio, and the Large and Huge settings can introduce (usually subliminal) clipping. This one is for you, Aayush!
  
• NEW: Captions for iPhoto photos, and EXIF comment tag also used for captions.
• NEW: We’re using Felix’s new Apple Remote code (thanks to Evan for integrating it!). This provides, as Apple would say “improved compatibility”.
• NEW: Toggle full screen option on dock menu (thanks to Billy Joe).

Along this release comes a new improved version of the Plex Media Framework used to write plug-ins, and enhancements to the Plex Media Server itself.

• NEW: Support for one-click install of plug-ins. You can now easily install plug-ins off the web without having to copy files all over the place.
  
• NEW: Support for auto-refresh in directories.
• NEW: Context menus in plug-ins.
• NEW: The ability for the HTTP cache to auto-update itself.
• NEW: Rating support for plug-ins, with support for community/system ratings as well as user ratings. This feature was used to great effect by David B in the upcoming update of our Netflix plug-in. Here’s an unrated movie and us rating it via the context menu item.
     

  And here’s the movie with our rating.

  
• NEW: Upgrade Plex WebKit libraries to 4.0.3.
• NEW: Allow passing back User Agent (makes Apple Movie Trailers work again).

As has become custom in these parts, Barkley sends his greetings.

Our friend Evan Schoenberg looked into the issue, and ended up filing a bug with Apple, who replied “this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering“. We had high hopes for 10.6.1, but unfortunately it didn’t help. There are rumors that 10.6.2 may contain a fix, but also rumors that the change in behavior was intentional.

Over the months, we’ve also gotten to know Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy, the popular and powerful remote control solution for the Mac. He has been extremely helpful to us, reviewing our remote code, suggesting improvements, and sending us sample code. He is, without a doubt, the foremost expert on the Apple Remote outside of Apple.

After investigating the problem, he decided a few weeks ago to provide a solution himself, in the form of a free alternative driver for the IR receiver which would provide reliable exclusive access to the Apple Remote across Leopard and Snow Leopard. In addition, he’s made available an Objective-C class which makes adding Apple Remote support to an application trivially simple.

The driver itself comes in the form of a preference pane, easy to install from the web site. Once installed, you’ll be able to use Plex perfectly in Snow Leopard with the Apple Remote, with no annoying loss of exclusive access that you may have observed under Leopard.

I can’t emphasis how great this development is, and how grateful we should all be to Felix. Please consider purchasing Remote Buddy, at around $30 it’s a great deal and an extremely powerful solution for those who like to customize the way the Apple Remote works with their Mac.

We are currently testing the integration of Felix’s code into Plex (many thanks to Evan for working on this!), and this is one of the reasons why 0.8.3 is taking a bit longer than expected.

If you wouldn’t mind giving a few minutes of your time, we would really, really appreciate it if you could take our latest survey, which can be found here, and let your voice be heard.

Peace out, and many thanks in advance.

Written by Dave Addey, the Home Star Runner allows you to watch such favorites as Strong Bad Email and Teen Girl Squad.

Written by David Bartle, the Barats and Bereta plug-is is pure comedy. Luke Barats and Joe Bereta began collaborating in 2003 at Gonzaga University where they were active in the theater department, broadcasting department, and led the school’s improv comedy troupe. Later that year they began making short videos to amuse their friends which were eventually compiled on a website.

Finally, also written by David Bartle, the Mars Hill Church plug-in allows you to watch sermons from Pastor Mark Driscoll and others from the Mars Hill Church.

In the meantime, our brilliant group of plug-in developers continues to make available more and more content. Here are the latest four (and many thanks to Jay for the artwork, and to Isaac for being the release manager!).

Written by David Bartle, Funny or Die features funny videos with celebrities (including Will Ferrell), comedians, and you. Be sure to watch “The Landlord”, “Prop 8 the Musical” and “Protect Insurance Companies PSA”.

Next up, and written by Billy Joe is The Live Music Archive plug-in. This site is committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in the highest quality format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy.

For you Ruby on Rails fans, Railscasts is an very informative plugin written by David Leatherman. Every week Ryan Bates hosts a new Railscasts episode featuring tips and tricks with Ruby on Rails. These screencasts are short and focus on one technique so you can quickly move on to applying it to your own project. The topics target the intermediate Rails developer, but beginners and experts will get something out of it as well.

Lastly is Tête à Claques.TV by oncleben31. This plugin allows to watch videos from TAC.TV (also known as Tête à Claques.TV in French). You can watch videos in French or in English, grouped by vote or by date. For French videos you can browse them by character family too. This plugin is localized in French and English.

Ce plugin permet de lire les vidéos du site Tête à Claques.TV (connus aussi sous le nom de TAC.TV). Vous pourrez ainsi regarder les vidéos en français ou en anglais, classées par vote ou par date. Pour les vidéos en français il est possible de parcourir les vidéos regroupées par famille de personnage.
Le plugin est actuellement localisé en français et en anglais.

We’d like to introduce you to our new Developer’s site, created by James with design help from the ever-talented Alexis.

We’re still fleshing out many of the areas of the developer’s site, but the development manual is online, the result of hours of work by James (Framework documentation) and David Bartle (site configuration documentation).

So if you’ve been waiting for documentation to tackle that plug-in project, or you simply could use a nice reference, check it out!

(And to all the brave developers who waded in without documentation and created some kick-ass plug-ins anyway: Namaste!)

Written by Jonny Wray, NME brings you the latest music news and reviews, music videos, and gossip.

• Apple Remote issue: Plex is not able to gain exclusive access to the device, which causes the system to see the button presses as well. Our friend Evan looked into this and reported it to Apple as an apparent bug. Apple replied “…this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering.” One of our clever users (FortyRock) came up with a workaround, which we recommend only if you’re comfortable editing system files. It should be noted that this apparent bug affected lots of other software, such as VLC, EyeTV, Hulu Desktop, etc.
• GMA X3100 issue: There are apparently corruption/color issues on systems with this chipset (more details here). There is no known fix or workaround for this issue as of yet.
• Digital audio (AC3/DTS) issue: There is an apparent issue with Core Audio that prevents digital audio from playing more than once successfully. We’re investigating the problem, and there is a workaround by user dannyv45 that has helped some people out.
• SMB connection issue: Plex appears to have problems connecting to a Snow Leopard SMB server. We’re investigating the issue.

So the bottom line is that if you have a system that you’re using exclusively for Plex, you’re probably better off staying with Leopard, as the new OS doesn’t bring anything in the way of advantages for Plex, and it brings a good handful of serious issues.

The one question we keep getting asked is “When will a Snow Leopard compatible Plex be released?”. Unfortunately – especially given the nature of some of the issues – it’s hard to predict. In the meantime, work continues on Plex/Nine and the next maintenance release of Plex/Eight…

First up, written by Sander Spies, is an AVForums.com plug-in. AVForums is a totally free, UK based, independently run resource for people interested in home consumer electronics. AVForums covers all areas of electronic home entertainment including home cinema, DVD, digital photography, camcorders, video gaming, computer hardware and mobile phones. This plugin gives you easy access to AVForums TV (shows, features, etc.) and podcasts.

Also written by Sander Spies is South Park NL, Bekijk volledige afleveringen van South Park.

Written by Jappen, Viasat Play erbjuder gratis streamning från fyra av Sveriges största TV-kanaler, TV3, TV6, TV8 och Viasat Sport. Se alla dina favoritavsnitt precis när du vill eller följ sportevenemang live. Enkelt och bekvämt levererat genom Plex.

We hope you enjoy the new plug-ins!