This release brings you a critical fix for the myPlex Queue and Shares on the Google TV. Rest assured, we’ve been properly beaten for that. In addition to that critical fix, we’ve pulled in fixes for remote control, some long standing connection issues, and some big hitters that you’ve submitted to us from the field.

Fixes related to Plex for Android

The first bunch are related to connections to Plex Media Servers. The first two issues in particular were causing some seriously frustrating problems where some people could only get to their media servers when AWAY from home:
FIX an issue where unauthorized remote connections were incorrectly categorized as reachable.
FIX an issue where local connections aren’t chosen over remote connections when detected and reachable.
FIX an issue where sometimes servers would be listed with name of section rather than server.

And some fixes for the newly introduced remote control feature:
FIX remote controlled Androids now properly resume video in progress.
FIX when video started from remote control ends – return back to original view.
FIX when navigating to remote control Loading dialog never dissappears.

And more…
FIX where network logging failed to work on some devices / in some cases.
FIX about a dozen assorted field reported crash conditions.

Extras for Google TV

Google TV users pick up all the fixes above and:
FIX myPlex Queue and Shares now load properly again.
FIX always refresh the last selected flyout when returning to Home – so that you can finally see updates to onDeck and channels and so forth without having to reload the page.

Fair Warning – Redux

There are now 13 customers running Plex on Donut which means 4 of you upgraded! Good job! To the remaining 13 people there is good news – you should still be able to run this release on Donut (1.6) but SERIOUSLY the next version of Plex for Android will (almost) certainly not support it. 13 is an unlucky number – please upgrade. Thanks!

–

As always we’d like to extend a special thank you to the Plex for Android Alpha Test Team. They do more than you’ll ever know to make every release better!

Follow me here at darrin.plexapp.com or on Twitter for mostly Android and Google TV updates. To keep informed on all the latest Plex news follow us on Twitter or Facebook or tune in to our blog elan.plexapp.com for a wide array of Plex information.

If you run into trouble or otherwise need help please come talk to us: http://www.plexapp.com/help/.

Enjoy!

Those of you who have been paying careful attention may have noticed that releases of Plex for Android and Google TV went live yesterday morning.  We think you’ll find that this release (version 2.2.1.2) offers a nice little kick to performance as well as being generally better behaved – yep, this is a performance and stability release.

Plex for Android just got a bit faster…

Is your seatbelt buckled?  Without further ado here’s what to expect out of this release:

NEW a number of optimizations and performance improvements around especially around page and image load times.
FIX an issue where loading dialog was not being dismissed properly.
FIX connection and reconnection logic to cope with failure to connect issues, network outages and transient network issues.
FIX to allow the audio player to seek backwards.
FIX eliminate progress indicators and option to resume audio.
FIX duration was sometimes not being calculated correctly.
FIX quit followed by a quick start no longer closes immediately on those nimble enough to have noticed this.
FIX don’t reload/rerender the home screen every time.  Feel free to push the nifty refresh button in the upper left corner of the app to your heart’s content!
FIX a number of field reported crash conditions. Thanks for keeping those reports coming!

Extras for Google TV

In addition to the above there are a number of things worth mentioning that are particular to Plex for the Google TV which was also released today:

NEW Support for Plex Remote controls. You can now use Plex for Android or Plex for iOS to control Plex on your Google TV!
NEW Media Info is now displayed at top of screen when playback controls are visible.
NEW Network logging (off by default) – which we may someday ask you to turn on if you run into an tricky issue when using Plex for Google TV.
FIX An issue where Plex was failing to fall back to transcode (from Direct Play) in some situations.
FIX Seek bar doesn’t jump around anymore.
FIX An issue where Channels list was getting lost on reload.
FIX Scrobble only once.
FIX Reporting progress too often when connected to wifi and talking to remote server.
FIX Flush Cache and Reset Defaults moved out of options menu onto preference screen.
FIX Removed unnecessary logging

Fair Warning

The next version of Plex for Android will no longer offer support for Donut (Android version 1.6). If you’re one of the 17 customers this impacts please, please, PLEEEASE consider upgrading your Android device!

–

We’d like to extend a special thank you to the unspoken heroes of every Plex release on Android and Google TV: the Plex for Android Alpha Test Team. They are capable of leaping small buildings and do more than you’ll ever know to make every release better.

Follow me here at darrin.plexapp.com or on Twitter for mostly Android and Google TV updates. To keep informed on all the latest Plex news follow us on Twitter or Facebook or tune in to our blog elan.plexapp.com for a wide array of Plex information.

As always we hope you enjoy! Come talk to us if you find any issues!

Yes – it’s been a while since we’ve talked. We wanted to give you a quick update to let you know we still love you!  :)

While we’ve been quiet lately, we HAVE been busily working on updating Plex for Android. There have been a number of the changes deep in the bowels of the system, so we’ve had a longer test cycle than usual. We apologize for the delay… some of these fixes have been a LONG time in coming.  Still, we think you’re going to be pleased with this release.

The thing you’ll notice first when spinning up this release is that it’s quite a bit snappier. Navigation, page loads, image loading and scrolling should all be noticeably faster. Beyond that, this release fixes many issues large and small that our community reported and has been patiently waiting for.

One thing you may not notice that I’ll tip you off about is that you can now long press just about any media item, just about anywhere, to bring up details if it has them – which is particularly useful if you’re launching stuff from the home page.  Some may not care but as for me – well – I think it’s cool if only for the little thrill I get with every buzz of haptic feedback that comes with the long-press.

Here’s the high level list, though there are many more fixes in here:

• IMPROVED performance of navigation and image loading.
• IMPROVED media selection logic – more channels play and quality better matches settings.
• NEW long press on a media item takes you to details if they’re available so you no longer have to aim at the little ‘i’.  It’s a small thing we know.
• NEW configurable logging levels – the default is that Plex will now only display errors in the logs.
• NEW ability to control your remote media players in addition to those on your local network (helps when your phone isn’t on your local wifi for example).
• FIX lights out / low profile during media playback in ICS.
• FIX some cases where subtitles weren’t being picked up and displayed.
• FIX in Plex search capabilities.
• FIX numerous connection related problems.
• FIX memory leaks especially related to images.
• FIX an issue where quality settings above 8Mbps were ignored.
• FIX a problem where some channels (Flash and Silverlight video) were always playing at the lowest quality.
• FIX for many, many other field and forums reported issues.

The proof is in the pudding. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

We’d like to extend a special thank you to the Plex for Android Alpha Test Team – nice job gang!

-

Follow me here at darrin.plexapp.com or on Twitter for mostly Android and Google TV updates. To keep informed on all the latest Plex news follow us on Twitter or Facebook or tune in to our blog elan.plexapp.com for a wide array of Plex information.

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!

That’s right! You heard it here first – Plex for Android is now on Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

It was an early morning maybe 2 weeks ago when our CEO first got his Kindle Fire, and it also happened to be the morning of my birthday. I woke up to find not one, but four email messages from him. Could it be four happy birthday emails? Or maybe I was in deep trouble – he’d found out that I’d pilfered the mac and cheese from the company fridge. I was incredibly relieved when I found out that all the excitement was about the Kindle Fire.

Needless to say – any plans I had for the day were completely shot. I was at Best Buy at opening time and walked out 5 minutes later with a shiny new Kindle Fire. It’s an awesome device, and the great news is that it works with Plex out of the box. There are a couple small things you’ll want to do to optimize performance:

First you’ll need to alter the Secondary Player in Advanced Settings to use the OpenGL player. When you’re done the settings should look like this:

Next you’ll want to change the local and remote quality settings to something like this to start with (feel free to tweak from here):

Note that a patch release is in Amazon’s hands now and it will take care of these things automagically for you – but if you’re purchasing within the next couple days – please do make sure to check these settings!

Enjoy!

–

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.

It’s a little known fact that 11/11/11 is the day the Mayans predicted that Plex for Android and Plex for Google TV would split.  Take a look at this tablet found in some ancient Mayan ruins:

Why are we doing this? For two main reasons 1) we plan on taking the products in different directions because of their different areas of focus and 2) ensuring that we can rapidly deploy fixes for each platform without jeopardizing the stability of the other. Having different products in the google market is the best way to bring you the very best of Plex on both platforms.

To help those who purchased Plex for Android for use on the Google TV, we’ve priced the Plex for Google TV app at just $0.99 for the first week (the lowest price that Google Market permits).

Get your copy soon because 2012 is rapidly approaching and I don’t have to tell you what the Mayan’s predicted about 2012.

–

Late Edit: Oh and both Plex for Android and Plex for Google TV have quite a few bug fixes in the most current releases! Enjoy.

–

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.