Plex Blog

July 2, 2012

Plex Media Server v0.9.6.5

I know what you’re thinking: “How can they keep releasing updates so frequently?” Is it overclocked CPUs? Human cloning? Performance enhancing Kombucha drinks? Well yes, but that’s not the real secret. The real secret is that our team has this incredible passion for creating the best media solution ever, and we are tireless. We’re also spread out around the world, so our company chatroom is always buzzing with excitement and code commit messages around the clock (we love you, Campfire and Github!). This is the most amazing team I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and it feels too fun to call it “work”. Thanks to all of you for your continued support and love, we’re going to keep bringing you updates (the next iOS release is sweet, and about to head to Apple!) and lots of new stuff.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the new release (which we’ve deemed a beta, due to the massive changes, available here or use our BETA AppCasts):

  • NEW: Massive performance improvements in scanning engine. We took things apart and put them back together again, and scanning should be much faster. Like much faster. You’ll notice it especially when scanning item-heavy sections like music. Speaking of music, we just pushed an much-improved Last.FM agent as well. Oh, and we also pushed a new Scanner which fixed an issue reading ID3 tags. So lots of love for music this release.
  • NEW: Support for Virtual Scanners. Up until now, Plex Scanners have been limited to scanning the files directly, but with Virtual Scanners you can be much more creative. We’ve included an example (the Plex iTunes Scanner) which is a quick and easy way to scan in your iTunes collection much more quickly than using the regular music scanner. In under 50 lines of code, too.
  • NEW: Other metadata loading/saving performance speedups.
  • NEW: Location header exposed to CORS requests.
  • NEW: Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderDefaultDuration) for specifying default duration for Flash/Silverlight videos. Useful for videos that exceed two hours in duration.
  • NEW: Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderTempDirectory) for specifying the temporary directory for the transcoder. Useful for all those with SSD drives.
  • NEW: (DLNA) Add support for device matching on serial number and manufacturer fields. Really, guys, did you implement the spec in a slightly different way on purpose? Just to mess with us?
  • FIX: Music scans refreshed artists/albums for no good reason, again and again. Think of it like a nervous golden retriever which kept poking the dead squirrel. Bad dog. Sit. Stayyyy.
  • FIX: Minor fixes and memory leaks in the Quicksilver transcoder.
  • FIX: Do scanning depth-first instead of breadth-first. Details matter.
  • FIX: Make sure we return not-deleted media items before deleted media, fixes iOS playback failure in some rare cases.
  • FIX: Pass back the correct deletedAt time in the metadata item.
  • FIX: Be careful not to overwrite good GUIDs, could lead to episodes losing poster/status when replacing SD ones with HD, e.g.
  • FIX: A case where certain audio files could fail to analyze, causing repetitive analysis during audio scans. Points for persistence!
  • FIX: Fixed a deadlock when calling into the system bundle early in startup.
  • FIX: Fixed a hang scanning DVR-MS content. We’ve been doing lots of work lately to get those files to scan in properly, we’ll be pushing new scanner/agents shortly! Thanks, Ian, you know who you are.
  • FIX: Pass more hints along to agents, useful for WTV work.
  • FIX: Browsing by rating wasn’t exactly right.
  • FIX: Failure to log in certain cases on OS X.
  • FIX: (DLNA) Getting metadata can result in empty parent ID.
  • FIX: (DLNA) Lack of posters on PS3 (really fixed this time, so sorry).
  • FIX: (DLNA) Tweak to album art for XBoxes. (XBoxen?)
And of course, Barkley has been busy as well, doing lots of swimming and taking long walks. Life lesson from the dog: life is short, spend it doing things you love, with the people you love.
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The Best of Plex

Plex Media Server v0.9.6.5 is a premium feature and requires a Plex Pass subscription.

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