Ahh, late December. Snow falls softly past frosted windows, a fire crackles in the hearth, and in the kitchen, someone is making a spiced alcoholic drink with lots of whipped cream. Unless you live in Hawaii, like I do, laid up with some form of Hawaiian Ebola, shivering in our unseasonably cold 65F (18C!) evenings. Or if you live in Australia like some of our team, you might be heading to the beach—marsupial presumably in tow—to escape the insane heat wave.
No matter where in the world you are, we wanted to spread a bit of Holiday cheer in your direction. First of all, we’d love to introduce you to a brilliant new feature: Lyrics from LyricFind. Plex Pass members get synchronized lyrics for their music, so you can sing along until the dog howls, or finally figure out what Kurt Cobain is mumbling about. Simply download the newest Plex Pass Preview release of the media server (autoupdate is not enabled yet), and check out our simple guide to lyrics. We also support BYOL (Bring Your Own Lyrics) as seen here. A few quick notes: LyricFind is not available in all countries or on all planets, and synchronized lyrics aren’t available for all tracks. And there was probably a second shooter on the grassy knoll.
Hey, by the way, do you need a last minute Christmas present? Well, you could do much, much worse than the gift of a Plex Pass, now available via our lovely new gifting page.
Speaking of gifts, we’re thrilled to announce that our PlayStation® and Xbox One apps are now completely free! We expect many of you will wake up with one of these under the tree, and now you can use them for something other than fragging with noobs. Or do you frag the noobs? Totally unclear.
Need another gift? How about our awesome Media Optimizer feature, now available for everyone! Use it to automatically create optimized versions of your media for the best streaming performance. Read all about it here, update to the newest media server release, and start optimizing.
Since we’re on a roll, and gifts this time of year usually come in packs of three, we also wanted to let you know about a great feature which has been rolling out slowly, but with today’s release is now available for everyone across our iOS and Apple TV apps (it’s already available on Windows and Web). Those apps now are able to display text-based subtitles, which means you don’t need a powerful server burning them in. This means faster video playback, faster seeking, and much happiness for lower-powered servers.
We want to take a moment and thank you all for an amazing year! We have the best team and the best community of users anyone could ever ask for. We’re super excited for 2016, and we have some amazing stuff coming…
Barkley wants to wish you all the best for the holidays and for 2016 as well!
