WOW - Plex is going to be embedded into 2011 LG TVs!

I'm at a loss - this is just beyond impressive, and came out of nowhere:

Plex and the Future of Television

September 02nd, 2010 | Category: Status,Wow | Author: elan

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This week has been a big one for TV-related announcements. Apple annouced their revamped Apple TV, and Boxee was quick to reply with their own thoughts on the matter. It turns out that now is the perfect time for us to explain our vision for the future of Plex and television as well.

Today, Plex requires that you have a Mac connected to your TV. As sexy as they are, a Mac Mini is $699. And let’s face it, you probably have a few televisions, so it becomes an expensive proposition to Plex-ify your house, especially now that you can stream your library all over with Plex/Nine. Of course, on the flip side, a Mac Mini is a powerful computer that can be used for other meaningful tasks like 3D modeling, genome sequencing, or World of Warcraft.

Another approach is something like the Boxee Box. It’s $199, which is much better, but still prohibitive for many, and it’s completely specialized. No way you could send your kid off to college with a Boxee Box, although you have to admit, it would probably help his or her social life. Additionally, releasing a custom piece of hardware is not a trivial endeavor, if we even wanted to attempt such a thing. Embedded systems are hard, and the XBMC codebase from which Plex and Boxee are both derived is a large and complex one. And really, at the end of the day, do you want yet another specialized box sitting by your TV?

Even if you get the design right, you have to be able to price it appropriately. With not outrageously different hardware from Boxee, the new Apple TV is half the price. Apple also has a two-fold advantage over Boxee: They are going to be selling their Apple TV in much higher volume (which means lower cost to produce), and – critically – they can subsidize the cost of the device because they make money every time you put your arm around your date and click “Watch” on a movie. Also, let’s face it, it’s a typical Apple product: it works perfectly as long as you don’t stray outside their ecosystem. Your files have to be in their limited range of supported formats, and you only get access to the online content they sanction. It’s not an open platform in any sense of the word, and trust me, I was the first person hoping to be able to run our Plex iOS app on it.

The optimal solution, of course, would be a box that was free, infinitely small, and required no cables. Well, we’re extremely proud to be able to introduce to you, for the first time, the Plex Box, with exactly those characteristics.

How is this possible? Well, we actually have one more “one more thing” to announce: We’re working with LG Electronics (the second largest TV manufacturer in the world) to integrate the Plex platform into their 2011 lineup of Netcast™ connected TVs and Blu-ray devices. So early next year, when you buy an LG Netcast™ TV or Blu-ray player, you will have Plex functionality built-in. Specifically, it will connect to a cloud version of the Plex platform for online content, and, if you happen to have a Plex Media Server running anywhere in your house (after all, who doesn’t have a computer in their house?), you can access your local and online content, in a rich interface, with full metadata. I’ve seen it, and it looks awesome.

I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of getting the architecture right for our platform, and this is a perfect example. Thin clients (LG TV, iOS devices), a smart media server, and plug-ins that can run in the cloud. A single integrated interface to access online content, local content, and personal content.

I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting this is to us. LG chose our platform in no small part because it is OPEN, and that is what makes it special. We have developers all over the world creating plug-ins, helping us evolve the platform, and using it creatively. We wouldn’t be here without them, and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with them over the years. I also have enormous respect for LG, who have great products, massively talented engineering, and forward-thinking management. I’ve been to Korea twice in the last year, and their engineers are super-smart, highly knowledgable, and a delight to work with. They “get” where TV is going, and I have to make a confession – the first time I saw their Plex interface, talking to a remote Plex Media Server and flawlessly streaming content, I had to pretend I had something in my eye. This is a team completely committed to revolutionizing the way we enjoy content, and clearly willing to take chances in doing so, as evidenced by working with a small team like ours.

This is also a massive win for content providers. Yesterday, writing a Plex plug-in would make their content available on a Mac, or a television powered by a Mac. Yesterday, they could suddenly make their content available on 100 million iOS devices. And tomorrow (early next year, technically), they will be able to get their content onto millions of LG TVs and Blu-ray devices. This, friends, is an unprecedented time in history. The distance between content provider and consumer has never been this close or frictionless, and it’s incredible to be a part of.

So what does this mean to you, our dear users? You’ve been so supportive over the years, and this is great news for you as well. It means, first and foremost, that we’ll be able to focus more resources on the development. This will be a full-time job for me and others on the team, which is – honestly – a dream come true. The Plex Media Server is the heart and lungs of the platform, and we’ll be making it rock solid and adding some really, really cool new features. We’ll be bringing it to more platforms, to make it available everywhere. There will be more content providers investing in writing Plex plug-ins, so your online content choices will grow. And next year, if you’re upgrading your TV, or or buying an LG Blu-ray player, you’ll have the ability to get Plex, built in, at no additional cost. Fully integrated into killer consumer electronics gear, exactly as it should be.

And *that* is cool.

It’s been a long journey this past year. Now you finally know all of the cool stuff we’ve been working on, and it’s so great to be able to share it with you. We’ve re-architected our platform for the future, and thankfully, most of that work is behind us. Now we can focus on making Plex more stable, more usable, and overall more AWESOME.

Controllr iPhone App - Best remote for Plex!

There is an iPhone app called "Controllr" for $2.99 and is the best app (that I've tried) for Plex. Check it out in the app store and give it a try!

Let is Snow...Leopard - Plex 0.8.3 for Snow Leopard released

I'll let the boys speak for themselves - click here for the official post or read below. I'm off to install and test out :)...

Plex 0.8.3: Let it Snow (Leopard)!

October 26th, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We realize it’s been a little while since the last release, but hopefully the wait will have been worth it. We’re thrilled to serve you up a fresh new version of Plex (download here) with lots of bug-fixes and a few little enhancements. First up, the fixes:

[French users, be sure to read through oncleben31's blog post on the new scraper included in this release here.]

• FIX: On Snow Leopard, 5.1 audio had issues. We’ve cleaned up the code, fixed the problems, and it now runs great on 10.6. Many thanks to Ryan for all his work on this one.
• FIX: We fixed an issue with the new caching system that could cause some MKVs and other files to stutter when played over the network.
• FIX: Video playlists work again.
• FIX: Multi-part videos display thumbnails again.
• FIX: Crash reading GPS EXIF data from photos.
• FIX: Fix for crash when displaying subtitles (Thanks, Billy J!)
• FIX: A few crashes in the Media Server (custom iTunes genre artwork, and playing Netflix movies).
• FIX: First WebKit play on a fresh install didn’t work.
• FIX: App Store would sometimes not show up on a fresh install.
• FIX: GForce visualizer for iTunes causes Plex to crash.
• FIX: TVDB image issue (thanks to Poldi!)
• FIX: Posters issue in IMDB scraper (thanks, Jay!) and issue with cast lists (thanks to Todd G!)
• FIX: DTS downmixing method reverted to use libdts. People who listen on headphone *may* be happier.
• FIX: Make keyboard backlight feature optional (James). You can access this setting in the advanced Cocoa preferences area under the Videos tab.

To summarize, Plex should now work pretty well on Snow Leopard, and hopefully most of the annoyances and issues in the last release have been fixed. Moving right along, what other tasty nuggets await in this new release?

• NEW: James revamped the Plex shutdown options, adding a beautiful UI that allows quitting, sleeping, or powering off after a specified time. Check out the screencast below to see it in action. Press ’s’ anywhere in Plex to go directly to the Quit menu. On the Quit menu, press ‘c’ on the keyboard or hold the Play button on the Apple Remote to bring up the quit timer. There are also options to Sleep and Shutdown in the Quit submenu. Press ‘c’ or hold Play on the apple remote with Sleep or Shutdown selected brings up the timers for both of those as well.
• NEW: One of the longest-running complaints about Plex has been the low volume when listening to downmixed 5.1 audio. We’ve added three levels of dynamic range compression (in Preferences > System > Audio): Normal, Large, and Huge. These settings apply only to AC3 and DTS downmixed audio, and the Large and Huge settings can introduce (usually subliminal) clipping. This one is for you, Aayush!
  
• NEW: Captions for iPhoto photos, and EXIF comment tag also used for captions.
• NEW: We’re using Felix’s new Apple Remote code (thanks to Evan for integrating it!). This provides, as Apple would say “improved compatibility”. One note: we recommend using the Candelair driver even on Leopard, because it can help resolve cases in which the Apple Remote loses exclusive access with the Apple driver.
• NEW: Toggle full screen option on dock menu (thanks to Billy Joe).

Along this release comes a new improved version of the Plex Media Framework used to write plug-ins, and enhancements to the Plex Media Server itself.

• NEW: Support for one-click install of plug-ins. You can now easily install plug-ins off the web without having to copy files all over the place.
  
• NEW: Support for auto-refresh in directories.
• NEW: Context menus in plug-ins.
• NEW: The ability for the HTTP cache to auto-update itself.
• NEW: Rating support for plug-ins, with support for community/system ratings as well as user ratings. This feature was used to great effect by David B in the upcoming update of our Netflix plug-in. Here’s an unrated movie and us rating it via the context menu item.
  

  And here’s the movie with our rating.

  
• NEW: Upgrade Plex WebKit libraries to 4.0.3.
• NEW: Allow passing back User Agent (makes Apple Movie Trailers work again).

As has become custom in these parts, Barkley sends his greetings.

Problems with Plex & Snow Leopard? This could help

I was having a recent issue with my video TS folders (DVD rips) freezing or locking on my after about 5 seconds of playing. I had tried removing the source folder and reinstalling it, but that didn't work. Increasing the cache size didn't work either.

A user on the plex forum did post a solution which, for me, and many others, does work.

If you're having Plex issues, I would definitely try this. Click here to read the whole post (which is now a sticky on the site) or just read here for the simple, but effective, solution. I have no idea how he figured this out, but hey, works for me!

BY DannyV45

Posted 01 September 2009 - 04:25 PM

I was having audio output problems (No audio) with 5.1 AC-3 audio HD media as well as video freezing soon after starting the movie with snow leopard. I believe this to be a buffering problem because I have buffering set for 3 seconds and thats about the time it takes to freeze.

I found a work around that works perfectly. I've now sampled about 40 HD movies and have not had another audio or video lockup problem.

From OSX's application menu go into "utilities/audio midi setup" and in the left pane set the default output to "aggregate device" (If Aggregate device does not exist click the "+" sign to create it) open the drop down menu under aggregate device and highlight "built in output" then set the "Built in output" source located to the right to "digital output" and set "Format" to 48,000 2ch-24bit then exit audio midi setup.

Note: I know your thinking why set it to "48000 2ch-24bit" and not "encoded digital audio". This is because setting it to "encoded digital audio" crashes plex. This setting will still pass the 5.1 digital audio and will also pass films that are 2 channel stereo.

then

Go into plex and in system/audio setup set output device to "aggregate device" then set "Digital output support" To "force digital" then Shut off "normilize film volume". Thats it your done.


Now what happens is the movie will start and there will be no sound for about 3 seconds (could be longer if you are buffering at a higher rate). after the movie buffers then the audio will start to play in 5.1 digital (or 2 channel stereo if encoded that way).

Here are some of my own observations that helped me resolved the problem:

I have a yamaha 7.1 receiver that has status lights for audio mode that show either stereo (2 speaker lamps that light up) or 5.1 (5 speaker lamps that light up). When you have this problem theres no audio and no speaker lamps light up when the movie starts to play and the video plays slowly and studders (Because its buffering) then about 3-5 seconds later the movie will freeze.

When you apply the work around you will then notice when playing a 5.1 audio movie that the receiver status lights will first light up stereo (2 speaker lights lit) then after 3 -5 seconds (of buffering) it will light 5.1 (5 speaker lights lit) and you will here the audio.

I'm pretty sure this problem has something to do with a buffering issue within plex.

Hope this helps.

The Plex Survey

The Plex team has put a survey to get to know the users. It is pretty quick and painless and will definitely help make Plex an even better system. If you have a minute, click here to take the survey.

Offical Update on Plex & Snow Leopard

Here it is, straight from the Plex Developers...

Plex on Snow Leopard: Issues and Workarounds

September 10th, 2009 | Category: Status | Author: elan

Snow Leopard is out, and we just wanted to take a minute and update you all on how Plex runs on this great new OS. Thanks to reports from our users as well as our own testing, we’ve found that Plex seems to have four serious issues on Snow Leopard:

• Apple Remote issue: Plex is not able to gain exclusive access to the device, which causes the system to see the button presses as well. Our friend Evan looked into this and reported it to Apple as an apparent bug. Apple replied “…this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering.” One of our clever users (FortyRock) came up with a workaround, which we recommend only if you’re comfortable editing system files. It should be noted that this apparent bug affected lots of other software, such as VLC, EyeTV, Hulu Desktop, etc.
• GMA X3100 issue: There are apparently corruption/color issues on systems with this chipset (more details here). There is no known fix or workaround for this issue as of yet.
• Digital audio (AC3/DTS) issue: There is an apparent issue with Core Audio that prevents digital audio from playing more than once successfully. We’re investigating the problem, and there is a workaround by user dannyv45 that has helped some people out.
• SMB connection issue: Plex appears to have problems connecting to a Snow Leopard SMB server. We’re investigating the issue.

So the bottom line is that if you have a system that you’re using exclusively for Plex, you’re probably better off staying with Leopard, as the new OS doesn’t bring anything in the way of advantages for Plex, and it brings a good handful of serious issues.

The one question we keep getting asked is “When will a Snow Leopard compatible Plex be released?”. Unfortunately – especially given the nature of some of the issues – it’s hard to predict. In the meantime, work continues on Plex/Nine and the next maintenance release of Plex/Eight…

Snow Leopard Upgrade Post coming Sunday....

Just wanted to let everyone know, I'll be making a post on Sunday afternoon or so about the upgrade. I'd love to hear feedback from others as to how the upgrade went and how it is working out with Plex and the mini. Even if you do it later or what not, it would be great to keep all the comments regarding the upgrade in that post, so its easy to find for people who are planning it in the future.

Also I have found a post on the Plex forum which talks about a minor Plex Issue (click here for that post)

The bulk of that post boils down to this post:

About Snow Leopard:

The remote signals that are sent to the Mac are picked up by Front Row and iTunes. This will cause them to interfere with each other. Every time you press the Menu button to return to top level in Plex, Front Row starts. Every time you move up or down through the Plex menu's, the system volume changes. When you press Play, iTunes starts..

Not really workable! You're fine as long as you use the keyboard only.

From what I've red and experienced, this is the only bug still left to kill.

Anyway, we'll wait to see what happens this weekend!

Thanks!

Its complete!! NETFLIX has arrived for Plex!!!!

The one gnawing thorn in my side is finally gone! Watch it now for Netflix has arrived for Plex and it looks AWESOME! Posted today in the app store , easy install and wow, looks SOOO good on Mediastream and on Aeon Stark and to be honest, is even better than watch it now on Netflix's web site!

There are so many new options for how to find watch it now movies - Top movies in the past week, past 3 months, movies in your queue, new watch it now releases - its awesome!

It does require a installation of Silverlight by Microsoft, but that is easy and painless. Here is the post release and also screen shots of it on Mainstream and on Aeon Stark. Have fun!!

From Plex:

Netflix has never looked this good

from Plex by elan

A lot of people have been asking for this, and now your wish has been granted: Netflix on Plex. Tens of thousands of instantly playable movies, and a gorgeous interface with fanart, high resolution posters and rich metadata.

Major props to Scott for doing a brilliant job with this plug-in. He’s already hard at work at the next version.

The Netflix plug-in requires the latest version of Plex.

You also need the Silverlight plug-in installed.

These first two pics are from the stock Mediastream skin on Plex. You'll notice the one big important difference is Mediastream gives the movie description information right there. Stark does not, and as of now even pressing "I" or "info" on Harmony remote doesn't pull up the info - a pretty big drawback, I think - but, graphically, they both look great. I've been playing around with Stark for the past couple of days, since they released a new version a few days ago.

But, here are two pics from Mediastream and Netflix:

(all these are screen shots off my system)

And here are some shots from Netflix on Aeon Stark:

New Apps for Plex are released

Looks like this is just the start of it! I'm definitely going to check out Vimeo.
Click here for to see the new apps posted.

Plex and the Harmony 550 Remote

In researching remotes, and based on emails from people in response to the blog, it seems the Harmony remote is the way to go. The main ones are the 500 series, 800 series and the Harmony One. For cost, and from positive ergonomic reviews, I think I will go with the Harmony 550, which is well reviewed at rogermj.com's blog here. The nice thing it is seems last December, Logitech added Plex as an officially supported device, so it looks like the way to go.

I'll report back when I have it up and running...

The Software: Plex and Aeon

Now that the hardware is setup, its time for the software. Personally, what I did, was to download and test all this on my desktop before I went out and purchased the mac mini.

I guess before we get into the players, we should talk a bit about the actual video files. For me, the two things I am interested in are regular DVDs and TV shows. I have a Blue Ray player, and for that, I just plan on buying the Blue Ray DVDs and playing them in the player when I want. Since I only plan on buying the really good stuff, its not a big deal (things like Planet Earth, which, if you have a BR player, should be the first thing get!).

The DVD file: DVDs are easy. You just need one free program: Mac The Ripper. (Interestingly enough, the official site seems down or was shut down), but google is your friend and the latest version I know of was a 3.x - 2.6 is a pretty easy find as well). Anyway, running Mac The Ripper will create a "Video TS" folder (aka "rip" the DVD) and in this folder will be all the DVD audio and video information from the DVD. It will name the folder whatever the movie is and you're done. The process takes about 15 minutes. You can play this with Front Row which comes built in to OS X Leopard. However you must do one more thing. Front Row only plays movies which are located in the "Movies" folder. What I recommend doing is having an external drive where the Video TS folders reside. The right click on that drive and "make alias". Drag the "make alias" into the Movies folder and that's all you have to do. Now press CMD+ESC or hit menu on your remote if you have a laptop and Front Row will start. Your movies are there. To make things look good, I would search google images for the movie poster and move that image into the Video TS folder. Rename this image as "Preview.jpg" and now Front Row will show the movie poster when you scroll through the movie names.

So this is great, with a few small flaws. One, you have to manually find the posters and insert them, and two, there isn't a way to input the movie description so you can read about it. The other flaw is that Front Row will not play .avi files - which brings us to the TV shows. What I was doing with the Apple TV was actually using another program called Handbrake to convert the Video TS folder into a Apple TV format file, and then drop it into iTunes. There, in iTunes, I could add the artwork and movie description and sync right up with Apple TV. It was a good system, but no DVD menus and of course, several steps. But, it did have 5.1 surround and looked great. (*Note - You don't need Handbrake for Plex or Front Row - only for Apple TV)

As mentioned before, one of the two goals is to stop paying for cable. Basically, its like cutting your phone land line and going only cell phone. Who has a land line anyway, lol :) The only reason I can think of having cable is if you're a sports person. I was planning on selling my Tivo, but it occurred to me next summer I will resubscribe to cable for the World Cup and will need Tivo to record all the games. But, sports aside, the reality I just don't need cable. I never watch local news (and if I did, you can buy an antenna for $100 and get HD local over the air for free), I never watch shows I don't record, and I don't channel surf.

The HT Guys just had an episode of their podcast talking about this as well, and one of them did calculations on purchasing shows from iTunes instead of paying cable, and he ran some numbers and if you're not watching like 100 different shows, its basically cheaper to cut cable and buy the shows from iTunes (although they did address the sports thing, which can be a deal breaker, I know). Definitely check out their site and podcast. They're always running a top 10 TVs to get, and the podcast is a great combination of news, listener questions and witty banter lol - I've listened to many podcasts, and delete most because they're just bad, but these guys are now part of my must listen to and I'm looking forward to more great episodes from them

So, where does that leave me with TV? Here's what I record on Tivo:

Lost, 24, House, Top Chef, Celebrity Apprentice, Survivor, Hell's Kitchen, Heroes, BSG, and I wish Top Gear (which I now watch all episodes of thanks to TVRSS which I'll talk about below)

All of these shows you can watch for free, most in HD, for free on Hulu or the networks web sites. Total commercial time is 2 minutes for most and never more than 3 minutes. And a note about HD - I know , there is always talk about the quality of cable HD versus "online HD" and iTunes HD, etc.. I'm not obsessed with it. Yes, cable HD looks awesome on my TV, but not $1,000 per year awesome. The video content from these sources into the 46" Samsung DLP looks very very good. Definitely better than standard TV cable signal.

I consider those a secondary source. The primary source are from Torrents. Torrents refer to a way of downloading files over a peer to peer client. To download them, I use a Torrent client, and in my case, I'm using the new Vuze. Although some people say it is a bit resource heavy as it is java based, I haven't found it to be a problem. I also like the new interface and the channels it has for outside content all free - from things like new footage of the Apollo landing to the animation of the US Airways Hudson crash, comedy, movie trailers, Leaning Channel type content - it satisfies any channel surfing needs you had with cable, and really, better, because its on demand surfing! And yes, its free :)

Ok, so you've got this great client to download torrents - where do you get the shows from? TVRSS.net. If its on TV, its here (alomst everything mainstream, at least). Go to search, put in the TV show name, under quality put in HDTV and search. You can see all the episodes come up. When you download them, they are free of commercials, so no skipping required, and are in .avi format. But you don't want to have to go in and find each new show and download, which is why you right click on "search based RSS feed" and "copy link location" and now you have an RSS feed to that show with the parameters you set (in this case HDTV). Now open up Vuze, go to subscribe, then to RSS, and paste in this RSS link you've copied from TVRSS. It will populate, rename the Feed to the name of the show you found, click auto download new on the top right corner, and that's it. Go back, find more programs, add to Vuze, and now, every time you start Vuze, it will automatically search the RSS feeds for new episodes and start downloading them. There it is - a DVR, for free, no DVR fees, no cable fees, no commercials, nothing. A big shout out to my main man John for showing me the light! He is doing this on PC and using Micro, which he said has a way that he can set a timer for when the torrents run. So as not to interfere with regular surfing when he's awake, he has his set to only run from like midnight to 7am or something like that, so download bandwidth is while he's sleeping. I might run a mac automator script to do something like that, or just start it before I go to bed at night.

Ok, so now you've got your DVDs and your TV shows , you need a nice, easy, good looking interface. We've talked about Front Row, but that doesn't really quite cut it for me. My first step was to try Boxee. Based on the XBMC (XBox Media Center), Boxee is a front end viewer like Front Row which can play lots of media including Video TS folders and .avi's. I had heard so much about it on podcasts and on forum it was the natural place to start. Also, since at the time I had an Apple TV, it made sense, since there was a hack which allowed Boxee to be installed on the Apple TV. I only got as far as installing it on the desktop. To be honest, I just didn't like it. I spent about 20 minutes with it and just wasn't to keen on the bubbly looking interface and more importantly, I couldn't get it to read my Video TS folders, get the posters, meta info, etc.. and in that time it crashed a few times as well. The reality is that I've got things to do, and don't really want to spend a lot of time hacking and figuring things out (which I like to do, and have done a lot of, but...) I just want this to work and work easy. So I kept looking and found Plex.

Plex is also based on XBMC and in my opinion, is just a million times better than Boxee. In less than 15 minutes, my movies were showing up in the movie section with poster art and movie info meta data and my TV shows were found and pulled up as well. They all played and I was good to go to start really getting into it Plex - and the interface looked awesome to boot. This was definitely the way to go.

Plex has excellent support in the form of a great wiki and user forum, all on their site. The few questions I had were SO easy to find on the wiki, it was a breeze setting things up. After spending a little time with it, I was able to easily navigate the settings and configurations.

Basically, you go into the Video section, and Add a Source. In my case, the "Movies" folder (which recall is an Alias dropped into the public folder) and the "TV Shows" folder, also an alias in the Public folder. From there, follow the wiki instructions, and you selected IMDB for the movies and TVDB for the TV shows, and a few other one time configurations, and now, Plex goes in, reads all your files, and pulls all the artwork, fan art, director, year, movie / show description and displays it in the Movies section and TV section as you browse your content. It is SO cool. As a kicker, when you go to TV shows, and you select "House" for example, it will start playing the theme music to House.

Once I did this , I added a really nice skin called Aeon which just has great wow factor on the screen. You can set up background pictures for the movies section, TV, weather, etc. In my case, I have set up a "folder" so I drop in about 10 or so high res photos (which you can get from the Aeon site, or from google) and it will scroll through them smoothly when you menu over the different categories. Here are some pics to see:








You can see I've limited my menu items to Music, Weather, Movies, TV shows. They also have Apps, Games, and a few other things. Also this is the Aeon skin. The Plex skin is also nice and they both offer a a little different way of displaying the movie or TV info. Also, you can select about 3 or 4 ways of showing the info as well. But in the example above with Volver, Plex found all this on its own. It went out behind the scenes, pulled the DVD poster, the year of the movie, director, IMDB fan rating, movie description, etc.. If you remember with Front Row, you have to do that all yourself and copy/paste it into the folders. Also, with the Plex main skin, it will show fan art of that movie behind everything. Like here, you see Dash from The Incredibles. It would be nicer to see Penelope Cruz for ex, so its less confusing, and maybe there is a way I haven't found yet, but you get the idea. It does pull all the information for TV shows too. Episode number, episode name, description, fan art, theme music, etc.. its really nice.

So, once Plex is running, CMD F for full screen and you're set. I've only really glossed over Plex, and there is more I want to talk about, like controlling it via remote or keyboard, and the 1080 vs. 720, both of which I am researching now. But I wanted to get this post up. I do have the Mac mini hooked up to the TV, it is pulling DVDs and TV shows from the Desktop Mac Pro shared folder (from external USB drives plugged in). The Mac mini is currently wireless off the airport extreme N router, and plays both DVDs and TV shows without skipping or hesitation. DVD quality is excellent, and HD TV shows downloaded are very good - not quite as good as cable HD, but better than standard defintion. And the mac mini to TV hook up was basically done in about 45 minutes from out of box to playing content on the TV (including mac mini primary setup, software downloads, and plex configurations).

Oh and I need to talk about the Apps. Plex has an "App Store" which is all free, but you can download apps which include: Hulu, CNN, TED, CNet, CBS for March Madness (which in part addresses the sports at least for this), MTV Videos, You Tube, and a lot more stuff. All this resides in your video channel in the menu, and you just select it and start watching. Its great! A few notes about this - Boxee techincally doesn't do Hulu anymore - Hulu asked Boxee to pull it, but apparently there is a work around using an RSS feed of Hulu, but here, its the full deal with an awesome menu. CNN App has all the current videos news clips on the TV.

So I'll be researching remotes / keyboards and be back with info on the that as well as more info on the setup and other topics about this.

Late post addon - Just read this on engadget about Vuze "Today, Vuze has announced a new iteration of its online video portal application that integrates playback with iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 devices. So far as we can tell, no other competitor offers that much integration (read: direct Mac / PC-to-device transfers) across so many products" - good stuff !

Bringing the Mac Mini home :)

The Apple store had requested 48 hours to turn the RAM install, which was disheartening, but I was happily surprised when they called Saturday morning to say it was ready for pickup. It was a busy weekend, so I didn't get a chance to work on the project until Sunday. But let me tell you, opening up that little mac mini - it really is so cool! You don't realize until you have it at home and hold it - you want to show it off and will love having it part of your setup!

Like any mac, setup takes less than 5 minutes.I had set it up on my desk using my main monitor and keyboard to get things going. If you're new to mac, you turn it on, select English (or whatever language you wish), set up an account name and password, accept or decline Mobile Me, detect your wireless network and enter the password in for it, and you're at the Desktop ready to go.

After that, I downloaded Firefox, Plex and Aeon (which I haven't talked about yet but will get to soon).

Once you've done this, you only need two more things to connect to your TV - a DVI->HDMI connector and a mini Toslink cable.

The Mac Mini comes with a display port to DVI adapter, but you're going to need a DVI to HDMI cable, or a DVI to HDMI adapter if you already have a cable. This will allow the video portion of the signal to get from the mac mini to the TV. There is a decent amount of chatter about why the mac mini doesn't have an HDMI output, and best guess is that Apple is still wanting the Apple TV (which does have an HDMI) to be its living room portal and not the mac mini. *** NOTE : Not all DVI -> HDMI connectors are the same , see note below***

Now that you've got the video, you're going to need the audio. The mac mini does come with digital output, but a regular Toslink isn't going to fit, so, you'll need one with a mini input like this or if you just need an adapter you can pick up one like this here.

That's pretty much it. Your mac mini is hooked up to the TV and you're good to go on the hardware side. But before I get to the software side, there is an issue I'm becoming aware of. I am hooking up to a Samsung DLP 1080p TV. 108op is not an obvious screen resolution on OS X. Actually, before I go there, what I originally did was plug the HDMI into the Onkyo received (which has 4 inputs and an output to the Samsung TV). The display detect sets at 720. Looking at the display (the picture here is from the Dell monitor, but you get the idea), there is only an option for 1920x1080 interlaced. I unplugged it from the Onkyo and plugged it directly to the Samsung TV and got the same results. There is a blog posting about this issue here with a possible resoultion, but I haven't been successful with it yet. So I'll report back on this later. For tonight, I'm running at 720.

UPDATE: So, it turns out, and I don't know why, but I've always assumed that my TV (which I inherited :), was a 1080p TV. Turns out its not - it is 720. Which explains why I was having issues. So at least now I'm not obsessing about it. BUT, I did read very useful information that not all DVI to HDMI connectors are the same. Turns out there are DVI-A, DVI-D and DVI-I. To get full 1080, you must use a -D or -I cable or adapter. Read more here.

Time to get into the software of it, so I'll start a new topic for that...