Plex, the popular, Mac-based media center software just released version 0.8.1 last week that includes some important new bug fixes.
What is Plex?
Plex, is a fork of the XBMC HTPC software. It's free and very popular with Mac users.
What's New With Plex 0.8.1?
- A new Now Playing Visualizer
Release Notes include the following updates:
- 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.
Read More about the latest version of Plex on the Plex Blog
Also be sure and check out the following recent plugins for Plex:
- Boing Boing Video
- I Can Haz Cheezburger - browse pictures from a huge selection of funny sites like the “I Can Haz Cheezburger”, “Fail Blog”, and “Pundit Kitchen”.
- Sesame Street - hundreds of short kids videos
- CarPool – access content from the CarPool video blog
- Tripleman – view photos from the photo blog
- FXGuide TV - provides HD content from fxguide
- Bill Moyers Journal – interviews and discussions
- Adam Carolla’s podcast
- Update to the “Major League” plugin with support for MLB.TV.
