After a very long wait, the official Plex app is now available on the Apple TV. Plex for tvOS organizes all of your video, music, TV, and photo collections, and streams them to the Apple TV. With the free Plex Media Server on your home computer and Plex for tvOS, you can watch and listen to all of your personal media on your HDTV.

The app is free in the Apple TV App Store and requires the latest media server (note: you may need to download and install the very latest server manually for now on certain NAS devices).

There truly isn’t any other platform we’ve wanted to be on for as long as we have the Apple TV. Today’s the day, and we’re celebrating.

The instant the fourth generation Apple TV was announced with an app store, we here at Plex pumped our fists in the air with excitement, as we raced to download the new Xcode and read the developer documentation. Our immediate goal was to be on the platform at launch, which means we didn’t have much time. What we did have was a clean modern iOS codebase for our new app.

We formed a small team which combined a handful of engineers and designers across four countries and as many timezones, who literally worked around the clock (thanks, round planet!).

Here is how Plex describes the technical details of their tvOS app:

We had some tough choices to make. The new platform allowed for two very different ways to build apps, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages. The easiest was TVML, which is a custom markup language evolved from the earlier version present on previous generations of the device. TVML is a markup language for media interfaces, meaning that it’s incredibly easy to make the beautiful screens you’re accustomed to seeing in the Apple apps. On the other hand, they allowed running full native code, which was obviously essential for games, and provided the highest level of control.

We timeboxed two days of prototyping using both technologies, and quickly realized that a beautiful native-looking UI build with the native SDK would take much longer than using TVML. On the other hand, the limitations around the TVML media players led us to want to use our native code from the iOS app.

Fortunately, Apple makes it incredibly easy to bridge between the TVML/Javascript world, and the native world. So we worked hard to combine the best parts of both into the nascent app.

The other important decision to make was how we would generate the TV Markup Language. After a bit of experimentation, we settled on a clever mechanism whereby we’d request XML from the media server, and then transform it using XSLT into TVML. Said with fewer acronyms and more gesticulating, we essentially transform the output from a Plex Media Server directly into the beautiful screens you see on the Apple TV. (And yes, we had to make a few small tweaks to the API, which is why we require a brand new media server for the new app.)

Note that DRM-protected content (such as video from the iTunes store), ISO disc images, and VIDEO_TS folders are not supported in Plex for Apple TV.

Also available in the Apple TV App Store is Simple X – a third party client for Plex Media Server. It can browse and play videos from Plex servers both on the local network and remotely. However, it does not currently support Mucis or Photo sections in Plex.

Related articles:

• Pangea releases five tvOS games with support for 3DTV
• MAME emulator running on Apple TV 4
• VLC coming to the new Apple TV
• tvOS not coming to Apple TV 2 and Apple TV 3
• How Apple is fixing what’s wrong with console gaming today

Be sure to follow Apple TV Hacks on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ for all the latest Apple TV-related news.

The post Today’s the day: official Plex app for Apple TV released appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

Although it has been possible to use Plex on the Apple TV for years now, it has never been simple to get it working on your device: you had to either jailbreak your Apple TV 2 and use an unofficial Plex client, or hack a non-jailbreakable Apple TV 3 using PlexConnect and hope that you won’t lose the hack with the next software update.

It looks that with the new Apple TV, everything will be much easier for Plex fans.

ITWorld reached out to Plex via email and Scott Olechowski, the co-founder of Plex replied, saying that the official Plex app for the new Apple TV is actually in their plans:

We are very excited to have a crack at bringing our users Apple TV. It’s been a long requested platform and we’re excited to work on it. We want it, our users want it…

There is no question we will be able to offer Plex on the platform. There are multiple ways to go about it, based on the tvOS SDK we now have access to. We are now evaluating the best path for Plex and will begin work in earnest once we have evaluated the options.

Plex iOS app is already in the App Store, so it looks that there will be no reason for Apple to reject an official app for tvOS when Plex submits it to the Apple TV App Store.

Check out: How to get Plex working on Apple TV 3

Apple TV 4 will be available at the end of October starting at $149 for a 32GB model and $199 for a 64GB model.

Be sure to follow Apple TV Hacks on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ for all the latest Apple TV-related news.

The post Official Plex app is coming to the new Apple TV appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

We’ve been so busy lately going through all the rumors on the upcoming Apple Television that we forgot to let you know that the Plex client for Apple TV 2 has been updated to version 0.10 (and later on to version 0.10.0.71 – beta 2). The new version brings some significant changes, like DirectPlay support and Full myPlex support, and supports Apple TV 4.3 and 4.4 firmware.

Highlights of the release:

• Full myPlex Support – view your myPlex queue or Friend’s shared server.
• Top Shelf is now configurable – You can choose which Plex Media Server, then the Section, and Recently Added or OnDeck – the posters are added to the shelf for easy selection.
• Badges! Grid and Bookshelf view now sport badges!
• DirectPlay Support – now works on the ATV client. Avoid transcoding! Save the Planet!
• Directories are now loaded asynchronously. That means that you will see a nice spinner while waiting for the directory to load.
• Memory leaks galore fixed – more stable, particularly on media playback.
• Many annoying bug fixes – more useable. The UI is becoming more consistent, reliable and snappy!
• Added settings for subtitle size and audio boost.
• Fixes capability settings on AAC. The ATV only supports 2 channels AAC.
• Fixes where you couldn’t disable DTS and AC3 support under 4.4.4.
• Tons of fixes to the main menu where categories should show up faster and more reliably.
• Correctly order Channel, Search and Queue in the main menu.

Installation

The installation has also been improved. You can now use plex-atv-installer on your Linux or OSX box.

Installing using the installer:

• Download the installer here: https://github.com/P…/zipball/master
• Unzip it
• Open Terminal.app and enter the plex-atv-installer directory
• update: if you have an older version installed, first run

./plex-atv-installer.py remove

• Run

./plex-atv-installer.py -b beta install

to install the beta.

Note: if your Apple TV is not named ‘Apple-TV.local’ and if you have changed your login password on the atv you need to check the usage of Plex ATV Installer here: https://github.com/P…aster/README.md

• Done!

Installing manually:

• SSH into your ATV
• Run

wget https://nightlies.plexapp.com/plex-atv-plugin/repo/com.plexapp.repo.beta_1.0_iphoneos-arm.deb

• Run

dpkg -i com.plexapp.repo.beta_1.0_iphoneos-arm.deb

• Run

apt-get update

If you have an older version installed please remove it first:

dpkg -r com.plex.client-plugin

• Run

apt-get install com.plex.client-plugin

• Run

killall AppleTV

• Done!

Known issues:

• Some high profile H264 MKV’s will not play back on ATV. There seem to be something that the transcoder does here that is not working out for the Apple TV.
• Badges in the bookcase doesn’t work correctly.
• The devs have seen, in some cases,  a serious issue with network connectivity disappearing from the atv. But they haven’t been able to say for certain it’s because of plex-atv, it might be the jailbreak for 4.4.4 instead.

Note: the current version is 0.10.0-720fd8d1 and it only works with Plex Media Server 0.9.5.2.

[via Plex forums]

You may also want to read:
IceFilms XBMC add-on for Apple TV is back, now supports RapidShare links
AppleTVHacks Best of 2011
How to jailbreak Apple TV 4.4.4 using Seas0nPass – untethered (tutorial)
How to Watch Hulu on Apple TV 2

The post How to install Plex 0.10 on Apple TV 2 (tutorial) appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.