I can’t even tell you how much pleasure it gives me to sit down and write this post. Why, you might ask? Because today we’re bringing you two of the most highly requested features we’ve had, ever. If you look at the Plex Pass feature voting forum, you’ll see the #1 requested feature is trailers. And today, dear reader, you shall have trailers. But it doesn’t end there. It’s like Christmas in July! (That’s exceptional even in the southern hemisphere, right?)
Now, we here at Plex like to exceed your expectations. We really do. We all grew up raising blue-ribbon heifers and memorizing π to an ungodly number of digits, and we just really don’t believe in anything but the best. So we scoured the earth looking for the best source for trailers and we found one which also had tons of interviews and behind-the-scenes content. Talk about leveling up your library!
If you have a Plex Pass, we’ll automatically add all these amazing extras to your library as you add movies (or just refresh existing ones). Otherwise, we’ll also happily read any extras you already have locally; just be sure to follow our naming guidelines here. We’re in the process of adding extras and trailer support to all our apps. At launch, Plex Home Theater and our web app have full trailer and extras support, while Android and iOS have basic trailer support. Support in other apps will follow in short order.
We weren’t content just bringing you extras, mind you. We wanted to create a full cinema experience right in your living room (popcorn not included), so we added a feature we call Cinema Trailers. Choose the types of trailers to use on the server; then in supported Plex apps, you can select the number of trailers to play before a movie. So sit the whole family down, dim the lights, and enjoy the coming attractions!
We truly hope you enjoy trailers in Plex. Note that this is the first time we’ve licensed premium content for our Plex Pass users; so, we reserve the right to impose viewing limits in the future in order to keep Barkley fed. (Not plump, just fed.) So, now onto playlists. We’ve been eager to bring you this feature for ages, as we consider it a key part of any self-respecting media system. But we wanted to make sure we got it right, and laid the groundwork for a perfect playlist experience across all your devices. So without further ado, we present true playlists, for the first time ever, across Plex. Oh, and One More Thing… we’re especially excited about our iTunes importer. Many of us have been on iTunes for years, and our importer provides you with a nearly seamless way to transition over playlists (including smart playlists), play/skip counts, track ratings, and even media addition dates. I’m pretty sure you’d agree these imported playlists look incredibly sexy!
Playlists are supported today in our web app and on iOS, and we’re working hard to bring them everywhere we are! In order to play with these new features, you’ll need to grab yourself the latest server release. Here are a full list of changes, which include all sorts of yummy new features and fixes:
NEW
- Playlists!
- Extras!
- Import from iTunes feature for libraries including smart playlist import.
- (API) Support for blur, saturation, and alpha blending on image transcode endpoint.
- (API) Support for rich “composite” images.
- (API) Support for “starts with” and “ends with” operators in filters.
- (API) Allow null values for ID fields.
- (API) Add support for “limit=X” in filters.
- Support for skip count and skip date.
- Hey! A brand new sexy application icon.
- Added a new preference to limit Cloud Sync upload speed.
FIXES
- Default account language to English as opposed to nothing at all.
- An issue with continuous play on items with same air date.
- Massive (like 50x) speedup for global Recently Added endpoint.
- Items inserted into the past in a play queue when adding to ‘up next’ after playing through.
- Failure transcoding some channel content.
- Sometimes we generated invalid JSON.
- Fix an issue where sometimes sync items would fail to process or upload.
- Much better audio boost (Note: new boosts are significantly larger than previously, so those with large boost settings now may want to be careful).
- On occasion, transcoder would transcode audio when it should remux.
- An ordering bug getting background art from all libraries.
- A bug where an item could end up in a refresh loop.
- Server could end up hanging during nightly DB optimization task.
- Selected art could be reset on refresh if it was generated art.
- Tweaks for menubar icon on Yosemite.
- Speed up deleting transcode temporary directories.
- Play queues were returning all available alternate media for items.
- Various crashes
Last, but not least, my lovely wife Anna had a bunch of fun today shooting Barkley wearing some of our awesome Plex Gear for canines. Here are some outtakes from the shoot.
