Plex Media Center

The Android team has worked off the Thanksgiving turkey and has gotten a nice head start on our annual holiday “cookie belly” since we last talked. [Editors Note: picture of cookie-belly removed to protect the innocent.] Still we’ve not been sitting on our laurels. In fact we’ve been just itching to get this release out to you – but it always seemed there was one more thing we needed to fix before releasing. Without further ado – here’s what’s in Plex for Android 2.0.2.1:

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) Support

A number of folks out there got ICS working but it needed some special tweaking and had some strange UI artifacts on screen when playing video. Plex now recognizes the ICS and will configure the video system properly for playback so no more need to touch advanced settings. Additionally, we’ve gotten rid of those pesky soft navigational buttons and weird gray boxes during video playback so you can watch your movies in the darkness again… as it should be.

Video Related Fixes

There were a number of different annoying video issues that occurred on some devices.  We’ve painstakingly tracked down and squashed these – hopefully without introducing something new. These include fixes for issues and general improvements around handling network connectivity issues during playback, resuming playback, seek, video sizing, dealing with video not being displayed on some devices and probably some other stuff thrown in for good measure.

As a special holiday gift – we’ve introduced a zoom button and a new video zoom mode. Tapping the button on the video playback HUD causes the video to cycle between the two modes. The video modes are:

1. ‘fit to screen’ – is what you’ve always had – expands/shrinks the video to fit entirely within the screen without cropping.
2. ‘full screen’ – expands the video to fill the screen – may crop by height or width depending upon the screen and video dimensions – try it out!

Here’s the full list of video changes:

• FIXED: issue with stuttering video on Honeycomb MR2 and ICS devices (e.g. Xoom, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus)
• FIXED: an issue where video was improperly resized after seek/scrub on some devices.
• FIXED: for some devices where we experienced audio but no video upon start of play.
• FIXED: to enhance UX and robustness of video player resume
• NEW: video zoom – tap zoom button to cycle through: scale to fit and full screen.

UI Tweaks for small tablets

Our UI for small tablets has been a bit of an ugly-stepchild. While I have an affinity for ugly-step children (as I am one) we’ve fixed this so that we better utilize the screen real-estate for this middle sized device. Here are some before and after shots:

Note: the screen capture here is of a Kindle Fire – but you should see the improvements on the Samsung Galaxy Tab and other small tablets.

Other Fixes

There have been many fixes since the last release. Here are a number that you may notice but the fixes aren’t limited to these:

• NEW: Plex now recognizes and configures itself for the Kindle Fire, more Samsung Galaxy S2 variants and a number of other devices so that these devices will play video without the need to tweak the Advanced Settings for the device.
• FIXED: Connection issues fixes for a number of cases where Plex client had trouble connecting to Plex Media Servers.
• FIXED: Direct Play from secure remote server.
• FIXED: Progress recorded during remote playback.
• FIXED: The seek thumb is now easier to grab (finally).
• FIXED: Artist appears again in Notifications as music plays.
• FIXED: Miscellaneous field reported fixes.
• FIXED: Several fixes we found on HTC devices.
• FIXED: Styling updates around progress dialogs.
• FIXED: Android as a remote once again asks where to play.
• FIXED: If no channels are installed there is now a button to add them from home page.
• FIXED: Minor change to help some video players ID audio format using file extension – should help some audio files to play properly.

–

I wanted to extend a thank you to everyone on the Plex for Android Alpha Team for all the feedback and testing that went into this release. This group of guys and gal – helps to make sure that when we release that we’ve not made a complete mess of it – we’re now on more than 841 devices so this group is absolutely critical to our success.  In particular Ammon, Chris and Cory spent a good chunk of time working with us to make sure we really nailed the video sizing and ICS issues.  Special thank you to KevinO for lending an HTC to help us troubleshoot some lingering issues on that platform.

As always let us know if you run into any trouble with the release!

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