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Plex updates for Android and Google TV, gets new remote control support and OUYA Announcement

Wednesday, August 15, 2012 16:10

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(Before It's News)

I personally love my Logitech Revue Google TV. It may not play amazing quality games, it may not give me access to everything my phone offers. For what it does offer and what it can do, it is more than enough for a family man to keep the kids entertained for years. One such app that I have always believed was a must have for any Google TV user is Plex. It is media platform that lets you connect easily to all the media formats you have stored on your PC, Mac or Linux computer over Wi-Fi. It does much more than that though, you can login via any web browser and access the same media, share your media with friends and even subscribe to channels that they offer, over 200 including CNET, YouTube, Vimeo and Revision3 . You can view photos, stream movies and listen to all your music.

Just a few days ago Plex was updated to version 2.2.1.2 on Android and on Google TV. The update offers up a huge number of fixes including odd search bar behavior and failure to connect issues. While a healthy list of bug fixes is always nice to see, it is the new optimizations and performance improvements for the Android app that are a very pleasant sight to see.

Plex for Android

NEW a number of optimizations and performance improvements around especially around page and image load times.
FIX an issue where loading dialog was not being dismissed properly.
FIX connection and reconnection logic to cope with failure to connect issues, network outages and transient network issues.
FIX to allow the audio player to seek backwards.
FIX eliminate progress indicators and option to resume audio.
FIX duration was sometimes not being calculated correctly.
FIX quit followed by a quick start no longer closes immediately on those nimble enough to have noticed this.
FIX don’t reload/rerender the home screen every time. Feel free to push the nifty refresh button in the upper left corner of the app to your heart’s content!
FIX a number of field reported crash conditions. Thanks for keeping those reports coming!

Plex for Google TV

NEW Support for Plex Remote controls. You can now use Plex for Android or Plex for iOS to control Plex on your Google TV!
NEW Media Info is now displayed at top of screen when playback controls are visible.
NEW Network logging (off by default) – which we may someday ask you to turn on if you run into an tricky issue when using Plex for Google TV.
FIX An issue where Plex was failing to fall back to transcode (from Direct Play) in some situations.
FIX Seek bar doesn’t jump around anymore.
FIX An issue where Channels list was getting lost on reload.
FIX Scrobble only once.
FIX Reporting progress too often when connected to wifi and talking to remote server.
FIX Flush Cache and Reset Defaults moved out of options menu onto preference screen.
FIX Removed unnecessary logging

The recent addition for using your Android device or iOS device to control the Google TV Plex app is a very nice touch. I will be playing around with that later this evening. Darrin, from Plex, made a small heads up warning on the Plex blog that we thought was not only important, but also kind of funny.

Fair Warning

The next version of Plex for Android will no longer offer support for Donut (Android version 1.6). If you’re one of the 17 customers this impacts please, please, PLEEEASE consider upgrading your Android device!

As for Oyua, which is the recently and hugely successful kickstarter gaming console that isn’t out yet. They have also recently announced that they will be supporting Plex. Adding one more notch in the devices belt that will make it even more worth the time and money.

Hit up your various Play Stores to get the latest update. If you don’t have Plex and wish to buy the app, hit up the QR code below for the Android version.

Application: Plex for Android
Developer: Plex, Inc.
Cost: $4.99