FAQ
From Plex
General Questions
What is Plex?
Plex is an indie fork of the highly functional and successful XBMC to the Apple Mac OS X platform. Like XBMC, Plex is open source and licensed under the GPL.
What are the goals of Plex?
To take the power and functionality of XBMC and get it completely ported to the OS X platform. To offer XBMC in a package that runs on (more) modern hardware that is more "accessible" to the non-expert user. We would like for people to be able to experience XBMC in just minutes - and be as simple as downloading and installing any other Macintosh application. Also, as many long time XBMC users know, the legacy XBox platform simply does not have the horsepower to play HD content. Plex hopes that by targeting an OS that's underlying hardware is refreshed on a pretty regular basis will allow the project to continue to be able to play media as it gets increasingly higher definition and higher bit rate.
What are the longterm goals of Plex?
To be the best media center for the Mac, offer tighter integration with OS X platform and to give users the best of what XBMC and OS X offer. Eventually, we would like Plex to behave and feel like a completely native Mac application.
What is the relationship with Plex and XBMC on Linux
The XBMC, XBMC for Linux and the Plex teams all have a very good relationship and similar goals, however, it is important to point out the the Plex does not speak for the XBMC and/or XBMC for Linux teams. Plex is a direct port of XBMC for Linux, and at this point strives to replicate most of XBMC's capabilities on OS X. The OS X platform is much closer to Linux than the XBox or Windows platforms, so OS X code is completely based off of the Linux port code base.
Where can I find more information about Plex?
What platforms are supported today?
Currently, we are only supporting Leopard on Intel.
What platforms will be supported?
Our plan is to support all current Intel Mac hardware.
Will you support PPC and/or Tiger?
It's unlikely that we will ever support PPC. Many people think that it is as simple as "checking PPC" in XCode, it is not. Additionally, as stated above one of the goals of Plex is to support HD playback on most hardware this is just not likely on legacy Mac PPC hardware. Tiger support is not a near term goal, but it is a possibility in the future. It's obviously quite possible to get Plex to work on Tiger, but the team has determined that it is also non-trivial. As we get closer to a 1.0 release we will poll the community to see how much demand there is for Tiger support.
Will this run on AppleTV?
We believe that it is probably technically possible to get Plex to run on Apple TV hardware. The processor would be underpowered for most HD content, and it would probably perform very closely to the original XBox hardware (unless someone figured out how to utilize the onboard h.264 hardware). While it seems to be technically possible, this team has no plans to support Plex on Apple TV. We are big fans of both Apple and their technology, so we are not willing to engage in anything that Apple could consider "hacking" or encouraging people to hack. Our official recommendation is you want something like Apple TV, either buy an Apple TV, or spend the extra $200 and get a Mac Mini and be able to do both!
Usage
How do you support remote controls?
How should I name my files so they will show up in library mode?
Please read our Getting Started Guide.
How do I get video Information and what does it all mean?
To get information about the video you are playing hit the 'i' key. This will overlay info and statistics about the file. It should look like this:
Thus far this is the information provided that I can figure out is:
Line 1 is audio stream. In this case the Audio is AC3 at 48000 Hz and it has 5.1 channels.
Line 2 (and 3) is Video stream. In this case it's a h264 video with a resolution of 1280x544
| aq/vq | these are the % of cache remaining for each respectively. If they reach 0% the buffer is empty and you will get a "rebuffering" message |
| cpu | this is how much CPU is dedicated to each function, in this case 77% for video and 4% for audio. |
| bitrate | bitrate of Audio/video |
| fps | Frames per second the video is playing at |
Line 4 is info about the player.
| dropped | Amount of frames dropped |
| source bitrate | total bitrate (audio and video) of file |
Other
Where can I get help?
You can find help on our Plex User Forums
As always please search the forums first, and keep in mind we are not officially recommending this to be used by anyone that isn't willing to be a bleeding edge alpha/beta tester.
How do I report bugs?
Check the forums to see if anyone else is having the same problem. You can find info how to submit a proper bug report there.
Again please search the forums or LightHouse to make sure your bug has not already been entered.
How do I suggest features?
You can find steps on suggesting a feature on our Feature Request Page
How can I help?
If you have time to spare please help by editing and creating pages on our Wiki. Currently there is very little documentation online and any help preparing this will allow developers to focus on fixing bugs and adding features.
If you are a developer, tester, company or other project and would like to chip in and help somehow please see us on the forums
If you are an end user, hit the Donate button! That helps us pay for bandwidth, different Macs and remote controls to test, and of course beer.
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