Plexapp

Infobox Software
name = Plex



caption = Plex logo
developer = [http://elan.plexapp.com/ Plex Developer Blog]
latest release version = 0.5.19
latest release date = September 23, 2008
programming language =
operating system = Mac OS X
platform = x86 architecture
language = International (multiple languages)
genre = Media player, media center
license = GNU GPL
website = [http://plexapp.com/ Plexapp.com]

Plex (a.k.a. Plexapp), is open source media center software for -based Apple Macintosh computers. It was forked from XBMC media center software on May 21st, 2008 [http://elan.plexapp.com/2008/05/21/exodus/] . The framework allows users to manage video, photos, podcasts, and music from a computer, optical disk, and the Internet using an Apple remote. It is a sophisticated alternative to Apple's Front Row, similar to Windows Media Center and iTheater, with skinnable and user-configurable interfaces.

Details

Plex supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Plex can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drive, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.

Through its Python plugin system, Plex includes features such as YouTube and Apple movie trailer support, SHOUTcast, and more.

Through the processing power of modern Mac computer hardware, Plex is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p, however as Plex does not currently support hardware video decoding it is placing the entire load of the video decoding process on the system's CPU which means that users need an Intel Core 2 processor 1.6 Ghz or better to decode native 1080p videos encoded with the H.264 codec. [cite web|url=http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Minimum_Requirements|title=Minimum Requirements|last= |first= |date=11 August 2008|publisher=Plex Wiki|language=English|accessdate=2008-09-16]

Plex source code is based upon XBMC which it uses as its framework. Plex is distributed under the GNU General Public License (with a few libraries used by Plex licensed under the LGPL).

Features

Audio/Video playback and handling

Plex can play multimedia files from CD/DVD media using the systems DVD-ROM drive, local hard disk drive, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), ReplayTV DVRs, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play ) shares, or XBMSP (Xbox Media Stream Protocol) shares. Plex is designed to take advantage of the systems network port if broadband Internet connection if available, using the IMDb to obtain thumbnails and reviews on movies, and TheTVDB for TV show thumbnails and metadata, CDDB (via FreeDB) is used for Audio-CD track-listings, and album-cover thumbnails via AMG. Plex can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Plex also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Plex can in addition upscale/upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV-resolutions.

Format support

Plex can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats. It can decode these in software and optionally pass-through AC3/DTS audio from movies directly to S/PDIF output to an external audio-amplifier/receiver.

:Supported formats/codecs::* Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs (including DVD-Video, VCD/SVCD and Audio-CD/CDDA):* Container formats: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support):*Video codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP, including DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264, including Nero Digital), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak, :*Audio codecs: AIFF, WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Speex, Vorbis and WMA.:* Digital picture/image formats: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA:*Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, SMI, SRT, SUB, VOBsub, VPlayer

Video playback in detail

video offers.

The Video Library

The Video Library, one of the Plex metadata databases, is a key feature of Plex. It allows for the automatic organization of your video content by information associated with the video files (movies and recorded TV Shows) themselves. The Library Mode view in Plex allows you to browse your video content by categories such as Genre, Title, Year, Actors and Directors.

Audio playback in detail

For audio playback, Plex includes its the audio-player called PAPlayer (Psycho-Acoustic Audio Player) developed in-house by the XBMC deveopers. Some of this audio-player core's most notable features are on-the-fly audio frequency resampling to 48kHz, gapless playback, crossfading, Replay Gain, cue sheet and Ogg Chapter support.PAPlayer handles a very large variety of audio file-formats: MP2, MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, AACplus (AAC+), APE, FLAC, WavPack, Shorten, AIFF, WAV, DTS, AC3, CDDA, WMA, IT, S3M, MOD (Amiga Module), XM, NSF (NES Sound Format), SPC (SNES), GYM (Genesis), SID (Commodore 64), Adlib, YM (Atari ST), ADPCM (GameCube). It also supports many different tagging standards: APEv1, APEv2, ID3v1, ID3v2, ID666 and Vorbis comments.

Music Library

The Music Library, one of the Plex metadata databases, another key feature of Plex. It allows for the automatic organization of your music collection by information stored in your music file ID meta tags, like title, artist, album, genre and popularity.

Digital picture/image display in detail

Plex handles all common digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshow with "Ken Burns Effect", with the use of [http://www.codeproject.com/bitmap/cximage.asp CxImage] open source library code. Plex can also handle CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files, this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

Add-on plugins (widgets/gadgets) python scripts

Plex features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Python widget scripts allow non-developers to themselves create new add-ons functionality to Plex, (using the easy to learn Python programming language), without knowledge of the complex C/C++ programming language. Current plugin scripts add-ons include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema guides, Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast, and much more.

kins, skinning, and the skinning-engine

Plex source code is based on XBMC is noted as having a very flexible GUI toolkit and robust framework for its GUI, using a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible. Users can create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites dedicated for XBMC (and Xbox) skins trading.

Programming and developing

Plex is (just like XBMC) a cross-platform software application programmed in C++ (and some Assembly), Plex uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) framework with OpenGL renderer for all versions of Plex. Some of the libraries that Plex depends on are also written in the C programming-language, but are used with a C++ wrapper and loaded via a built-in DLL loader when used inside Plex.

Limitations

This is a list of current software limitations in the Plex code, (Plex's source code is based on XBMC so Plex has the same software limitations as XBMC).
*Plex can not currently play any audio/video files protected/encrypted with DRM (Digital Rights Management), such as music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, MSN Music or Audible.com.
*The ISO 9660 and UDF reader classes currently in Plex's source code do not support reading multisession authored CD/DVD-media. This means that Plex can as it is today only read the first sessions of a multisession burnt CD or DVD media disc.

Legality

Copyright

Plex software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) by the developers, meaning they allow anybody to redistribute Plex under the conditions of that GPL license.

Patents

For most popular video and audio codecs, Plex includes native support through free and open source software libraries, such as LAME, faad, faac, libmpeg2, and libavcodec (from the FFmpeg project). Since these source code libraries are released under free and open source licenses they are legally redistributable. However, some of these compression methods algorithms, such as the popular MP3 format, are in many countries protected by software patents. Absent a license, this could possibly make it illegal in certain countries to distribute compiled versions of Plex which includes support for these formats.

Other

Plex also includes libdvdcss to support playing back DVD-Video movies encrypted using the CSS (Content Scramble System) encryption. The distribution of executable versions of Plex containing this code could possibly fall afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S. and the EU Copyright Directive in European Union member countries which have incorporated it into national law, this have however not been proven in any court for an open source project before.

See also

*XBMC, the cross-platform open source media center software that Plex was forked from.
*Boxee, another cross-platform media center software that is also a fork of XBMC.
*MediaPortal, media center software for Microsoft Windows that was also originally based on XBMC.
* [http://www.telematicsfreedom.org/en/flossmediacenter Plex against other FLOSS Media Centers in Comparison Chart]
*List of other software video players
*List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
*FFmpeg, the audio and video codec suite that Plex uses for all its audio/video player cores

Notes