Plex for Android now supports Honeycomb, Xoom, and other tablets.
We rolled out our first release of Plex for Android on February 11th, 2011. Since then, we’ve made a lot of progress. Many fixes have been made and remote control functionality was added. Despite the fact that Plex for Android hasn’t been officially supported on tablets or Honeycomb – over 10% of purchases were for tablets and half of these were for the Xoom. Support for the Motorola Xoom has been the most requested new feature, and an enterprising lobbying group of Xoom users opened a topic on our forums to badger us to get our butts in gear and get them a version of Plex that works on their shiny new Xooms. We are thus thrilled to announce that as of today, you may now “Plex” on your Xoom!
As part of the support for Xoom, we’ve done a complete revamp of the application to make better use of all the space available. Our design team went to work, and I think you’ll be pleased with these sexy new views for your media. Check out some of these mouthwatering screenshots!
Movie, tv shows and episodes now use a summary view.
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National Geographics Photo of the Day – square photo summary cards.
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Music Album layout is now a grid with cover art.
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Photos are displayed with a grid layout from “The Big Picture”. Thank goodness dog sledding season is over!
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Nice screenshots but what about video playback?
Okay, okay – we know it’s all about the video. Honeycomb adds some features that make video work even better than before, and video looks amazing on the Xoom.
The quality of the video is conservatively low by default, so make sure that you experiment to find the best settings, which can vary with the specific device and your network.
For local and remote Wi-Fi, we recommend that you start at around 1.5Mbps and work your way up from there. On 3G networks, you’re not going to get HD video, so start at 320kbps and move up from there. For you lucky people on 4G, you shouldn’t have a problem getting same level of quality as you’re getting on remote Wi-Fi, and potentially better. On small devices (e.g. mobile phones) you should never need to go above 2Mbps.
We think you will be really happy with the quality of video on Honeycomb devices. If you’re a Xoom user on a fast Wi-Fi network, you should be able to use the highest quality setting. We’re getting nice crisp 720p video streamed in real time from our Plex Media Server, and we also support Direct Streaming, which provides ultra-fast startup and seeks and no loss of video quality through transcoding.
Try different quality settings and see what works best for you, and feel free to share and ask questions on our forums!
What about small screen devices?
This release is by no means exclusively for devices with large screens. There are many layout enhancements for smaller form factors, and of course all the fixes to the core system apply to smaller devices as well. There are newly introduced icon views, summary views and photo views that we think you’ll really love.
Additionally, you will notice a bit more responsiveness related to loading, displaying and scrolling. It turns out those darn tablets can show quite a few images simultaneously so testing there quickly showed us where Plex image handling was sluggish. Improvements in that area definitely help even on smaller form factor devices. If the tablets are responsive then the smaller devices are downright zippy. Here are some screen shots of the smaller devices:
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- The Office – Seasons View on small screen.
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- The Office Season 1 – episodes on the small screen.
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- National Geographic Interstellar Channel
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- Plugins now use thumbnail grid views.
Is that it!?
There are many other improvements in this release which might not be immediately obvious. The sharp-eyed out there will have already noticed that the soft ‘back’ and ‘menu’ buttons in the screenshots above have been removed. Here’s a run down of things you might notice:
New: layouts to support large screen and some new ones for small screen per images above… ’nuff said.
New: fast-scrolling has been turned on for all grid and list views for those of you who have monstrous local libraries.
New: support for Direct Streaming which allows video streaming without transcoding.
New: support for Direct Play which plays compatible video directly from the source (off by default).
Improved: soft buttons (back, menu) are now off by default and popular demand. For those who want to keep them on (you know who you are) – navigate to Settings / Advanced Settings, scroll down to last setting and enable the soft buttons option. If you’re having trouble getting to Settings – temporarily turn on airplane mode then either try to navigate somewhere else or restart the application and Plex will take you there.
If you’re interested in more details and/or what’s changing in our releases now and forevermore – you can sign up for a Plex forums account and ‘watch’ our Plex for Android changelog page. We update this page for all our public releases.
Caveats and disclaimers
This is our first release on Honeycomb and we’ve found it’s a bit fussy sometimes with respect to the media subsystem. On more than one occasion we’ve managed to kill our Honeycomb device and only a hard power cycle would correct the issue. At this time the Xoom is the only Honeycomb device we have in our test labs and while we’re working very hard to ensure platform independence we’re pretty sure that there will be at least some surprises as we roll out to other Honeycomb devices. It seems supporting every Android device has some challenges for multimedia applications. (Those of you who already know this – please stop laughing).
As our first release for tablets we expect that some large screen devices may be less than perfect from a layout perspective… and for non-Honeycomb devices you won’t get the same level of hardware support for video playback. Just come visit us on the forums if you happen to find any issues on one of those devices and we’ll be happy to help with any issues you’re seeing.
Is THAT it!?
Of course not! Well, yeah, that’s it for now… but rest assured there’s plenty more to come so stay tuned. Watch my blog for more updates specifically around Android, and of course follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest on all that is Plex.
Enjoy!
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Well done Darrin! This is awesome news!
Sweet! I’m gonna see if my Nook can handle this!
So extremely sweet. I bought the xoom in Feb for this app and it lives up to all the hope i had.
Thanks!
@Danny Nook should be able to handle it though Plex won’t be able to bring streamed HD video to your Nook just yet – it should work. If you need to enable the soft back and menu on the Nook go to Settings / Advance Settings – the last option will do that. Enjoy.
Great been waiting for this for ages
Gonna give it a go on my Asus Transformer tablet and see what its like as you obviously haven’t tested it on this device. Hoping it will solve my problems of playing mkv files via HDMI on my TV!!!
@AFK_Matrix It’s true we don’t have an Asus Transformer in the test lab. In theory it should work just fine. If it doesn’t please stop by the Plex for Android forums and we’ll be happy to help you with any problems you’re having. BTW – you might want to take a look at the ATV2 port of Plex if you’re trying to hook up to a TV – those guys have done an amazing job.
Thanks for the quick reply darrin. I have downloaded Plex and it works perfectly on my Asus and solves the TV issues I was having. No more stuttering/crashing with the other apps I was using while waiting for Plex. I will use it a bit more and report any other problems etc on your forum.
Thanks.
@AFK_Matrix – Awesome news- thanks for letting us know!
Other tablets including Crackberry Playbook ?
@ConHeo – Ha – I’m afraid not… other android tablets I suppose I should have said. Given that this was an android release I figured I could get away without being specific. Whew… tough crowd.
Any chance Plex will add “lights out mode” support? The status bar is distracting.
View v = findViewById(R.id.view_id);
v.setSystemUiVisibility(View.STATUS_BAR_HIDDEN);
Will try it out on Archos 101. Not honeycomb but does already do 720p smoothly.
@jm Absolutely – consider it done. Thanks for the reference code!
@Brian – Just remember that playing 720p locally is very different from streaming 720p. As we say above – Honeycomb has better support in our case for high quality video. That said – definitely let us know how it goes!
Nice! So far so good!
C/P from this post. “and remote control functionality was added”! Does this mean that an Android tablet could be used to web browse on the internet dashboard of a 2011 LG Smart TV?
Just installed this on my LG G-Slate tablet (Honeycomb). As I type this, I’m streaming Insidious mkv (720p)perfectly over my wirelss N network at the max rate. Well done…just what I was looking for. Well worth the price!
@Wannago – you’re a bit late to the party but welcome nonetheless!
Hi Darren,
I am using Plex on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (thanks for the update). I am wondering whether you could implement fading out the Android controls (soft buttons, clock etc.) at the bottom of the screen while playing a video (just like the Honeycomb stock player does). These are quite distracting and it’s kind of pointless to have them in view while watching a movie.
In fact, is it possible to remove that status line entirely, and play the movie in true full-screen? Or does Android not allow this?
Hi Gadzonk – yes Android does provide some ability to do this and it is on the list to do.
I was getting really crappy video quality until I realized that plex always used ‘Remote Wi-Fi’ settings whether I was local or remote. Also auto-select always selects the lowest possible quality.
I’d just assumed that plex was limited to 480p until I saw it running on a laptop and realized it could do much higher resolutions :p
I have plex working perfectly on my Toshiba thrive over wifi. Is there going to be a way to use Plex a media player so you can it can play the videos on the tablet itself.
@SEan never say never but no it’s not something we’re working on at the moment.
@Tony – Plex should be using local wifi settings when you’re on a local network, remote wifi if you’re on a remote wifi network and 3G if you’re going over a cellular network. This said – the auto-select logic isn’t very bright at this point so I’d encourage you to play around with these settings and figure out what works best for you and your situation… as you’ve already figured out!