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31 August 2010, 16:54

Plex media centre adds support for hardware-accelerated video decoding

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Following 17 development builds, the Plex developers have released version v0.9.0.21 of their Plex media centre application for Mac OS X, code named " Alexandria". Plex is a skinable fork of the XBMC Media Center for Mac OS X that includes several customised additions to support a wide range of audio, video and image formats.

The latest version of Plex, simply refereed to as Plex/Nine, is an almost complete, "from-scratch rewrite" of the library and Mac client. The developers say that their vision for the future of Plex is "a distributed architecture, as opposed to one giant monolithic program". They note that, in order to realise this, they needed to do two things effectively; make the client smaller by removing "massive amounts of code" and design and build the Alexandria library system into the Plex Media Server. In addition to the usual bug fixes, Plex/Nine also features the inclusion of a support for hardware-accelerated video decoding.


Zoom The Plex app for iOS devices allows users to stream their media over 3G connections.
The Plex developers have also released an iOS app for iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone devices running version 3.1 of Apple's iOS or later. The app costs $4.99 (£2.99 in the UK store) and acts as a remote control for the Media Center application. It also allows users to stream media from their Plex library to their iOS device over the internet – 3G streaming is fully supported.

More details about the release can be found in a post on the Plex blog. A short sneak peak video is also available on Vimeo. However, the official release notes have yet to be published. Plex v0.9.0.21 is available to download (direct download) for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later and a Getting Started guide is provided. Plex source code is hosted on GitHub and is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), apart from the Plex Media Server which is currently closed source and connects to the GPL licensed client over the network.

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(crve)

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