Plex Media Center

Hello all -

Yes, yes – FINALLY a new Plex for Android release!

Some of you may have heard that the Android Team went on vacation, was lost at sea or have heard the rumors that I was found in an alley with a loose line of drool hanging from my lower lip. Rest assured that these rumors are patently untrue… though the last does hit uncomfortably close to home.

Samsung Joy

In reality we’ve been working VERY hard despite our radio silence. Let’s start with some good news for the Samsung users out there. This release fixes Plex on the Samsung Galaxy S2! For those of you who’ve visited our forums after getting the S2 – you know that while we were trying to fix the video problem we were playing an exhausting game of Whac-A-Mole with Samsung – as we were trying to turn off sales to these devices as fast as Samsung introduced 9 different models. Clearly Samsung was winning the game since on more than one occasion the device popped up on our top 10 chart when we thought we weren’t selling it at all – so we know the Plex community loves this device. We’re happy to say that sales to the SGS2 have been turned on as of this release and that Plex is working beautifully on on it. Have at it!

But wait – that’s not all… there’s MORE good news for the Samsung lovers out there. Sadly the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ with Touchwiz update broke the startup of video playback on Plex for Android. We managed to get our hands on one, find the problem and get that fix into this release as well. I have to say that after spending some good quality time with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ – I for one am impressed with this device. It is a beautiful device and Plex runs like a champ on it.

Additional Video Related Enhancements and Fixes

We’re not sure why Samsung had it out for us but we think we’ve now made nice with them. Just in case we don’t have it quite right we’ve exposed 3 ‘players’ that Plex will automatically try when it runs into trouble. If Plex fails to be able to play with the default settings on a device it will fall back to try one of the other 2 players. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen – if you pay close attention to the dialogs when video is starting you may notice Plex cycle through these players.

If you think you know better than Plex what player is most likely to work you can setup Plex to always start a specific player or allow you to choose as you’re starting up your video playback by changing the Advanced Settings. Regardless of which you choose as your primary – Plex will still try the others if the first does not work.

Your choices are:

Plex Chooses – Plex will choose at runtime which player it thinks will work best.

System Player – the player that comes with your android device.

Plex Player – a fast and stable player that we’ve been using since we did our first release of Plex that is generally used when the native player doesn’t support what we need to do.

Alternate Player – our newest way of playing video that’s a bit more experimental. It uses the OpenGL subsystem of Android (Froyo and higher) so it should have broader compatibility (for devices with Froyo or beyond).

Offer Choice of Player – Plex will offer a choice of players every time you start video playback.

Based upon our testing we believe this will be a win for the mods community as well. In particular the ‘Alternate Player’ setting in the Advanced Settings area is a very new player that works in many of the cases that the existing players did not. If you’ve been having trouble getting video to work properly with your mod and your mod is running on Froyo or higher – give this player a try.

FIXED: Resume works on Honeycomb. We know this has been an annoyance for our Honeycomb users. Yes you can now resume videos without manually fast forwarding.
IMPROVED: We’ve introduced some fixes and changes to the way we handle connections and servers. We know this has been a frustrating thing for some users. There are more fixes to come in a future release but this release should be a step in the right direction.
IMPROVED: Video starts and resumes faster than it has in the past.
FIXED: progress dialogs no longer dissappear before video starts so you have some idea of what’s going on before your video starts up.
FIXED: some cases where dialog boxes were stuck open.

And of course there are lots of other little fixes as well…

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A couple words of thanks to a couple folks in particular from the Plex for Android Alpha Test Team that have gone above and beyond the call of duty for this particular release. In particular if you’re on our forums and see cranch or tallnerd1985 – please be kind to them. Without cranch’s loaner of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″ and his testing of the SGS2 we’d not have gotten as good a fix for SGS2 nor as fast a fix for the Samsung Galaxy 10.1″ Tab. And tallnerd1985 has been trying all combinations of the mods to try to figure out what exactly is causing Plex difficulties and helping us to work around them and has done a variety of tests on different flavors of mods – the mods community in particular owes him much beer. Last but not least – thanks to daKurgan and fury for early testing, work-arounds and logcats of the SGS2 issue.

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To keep informed on the latest Plex news follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Or tune in to one of our blogs elan.plexapp.com for a wide array of Plex information or darrin.plexapp.com for mostly Android updates.

Enjoy!

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