Download Plex Media Server 0.9.6.5 Beta

Version 0.9.6.5 of Plex Media Server has been released, which, like the previous release, is considered beta due to the large amount of changes. Also known as Plex, Plexapp or Plex Media Center, this program is an open source media server for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It can serve content to clients on the same machine, within the local network or even over the internet. Client software is available for the aforementioned operating systems, but also for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, Google TV and some TVs from LG. The program includes its own App Store, where plug-ins can be exchanged. For example, these plug-ins allow instant viewing of content from Hulu, Netflix, and CNN Video. The changelog for this release looks like this:

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.
• 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 codetoo.
• Other metadata loading/saving performance speedups.
• Location header exposed to CORS requests.
• Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderDefaultDuration) for specifying default duration for Flash/Silverlight videos. Useful for videos that exceed two hours in duration.
• Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderTempDirectory) for specifying the temporary directory for the transcoder. Useful for all those with SSD drives.
• (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?

Fixed:

• 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.
• Minor fixes and memory leaks in the Quicksilver transcoder.
• Do scanning depth-first instead of breadth first. Details matter.
• Make sure we return not-deleted media items before deleted media, fixes iOS playback failure in some rare cases.
• Pass back the correctly deletedAt time in the metadata item.
• Be careful not to overwrite good GUIDs, could lead to episodes losing poster/status when replacing SD ones with HD, eg
• A case where certain audio files could fail to analyze, causing repetitive analysis during audio scans. Points for persistence!
• Fixed a deadlock when calling into the system bundle early in startup.
• 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.
• Pass more hints along to agents, useful for WTV work.
• Browsing by rating wasn’t exactly right.
• Failure to log in certain cases on OS X.
• (DLNA) Getting metadata can result in empty parent ID.
• (DLNA) Lack of posters on PS3 (really fixed this time, so sorry).
• (DLNA) Tweak to album art for XBoxes. (XBoxes?)

Plex screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.