The first release of Plex/Nine will be the one that doesn't set your house on fire, withdraw money from your kids' college fund, or cause your lawnmower to throw rocks into passing cars. At least not simultaneously.
I wouldn't like to be your neighbor while you're testing and developing then ;-)
Yay, my bug will be fixed! Who says the developers don't listen. :lol:
You kid, but that actually happened to me when I was living in Minnesota. I was peacefully mowing my lawn, birds were chirping, the sun was out, and out of the corner of my eye it seemed like I saw a projectile shoot out and slam into the side of a car that was passing my house. My mind said "that cannot possibly have just happened" so I ignored it for the next three or four seconds until the car pulled over, and the occupants got out and headed in my direction.
Fortunately they were extremely reasonable, and I ended up cutting them a painful check for around $300. The next day I called my insurance company and asked "so, just hypothetically, if my lawnmower started shooting rocks at passing cars and/or children, is that covered?" Turns out it was covered, but with a deductible of $1000 (the Europeans reading will laugh at this: "So let's get this straight, you pay for insurance so that you don't have to pay, but you have to pay anyway?").
There's deductible in EU as well ... usually much lower than in the States though. Unless you mean you'd rather pay for the accident than have your insurance premium go up next year.....
My understanding was car insurance in the UK didn't have deductibles, but I could be totally wrong. This british guy I used to work with use to tell me that the basic model of insurance in the US was "We take your money. If we ever have to give you any, we raise your rates so we get it back, and then keep on taking your money" which I found amusing.
Dammit, if I take this thread off topic any more I'm going to get yelled at.
Sort of, but they got you another way. When I lived there there wasn’t a deductible but there was a ‘no claims bonus’ ie the longer you went without claiming the more your rates went down. And if you don’t have a no claims bonus but do claim, we’ll put the rates up i.e. don’t claim or we’ll screw you. I’ve made a number of claims in the US and my rates haven’t gone up, but they also never go down when I don’t claim for years. Same wine, different bottle (it wasn’t worth claiming a lot of the time).
That was 15 years ago mind so its probably all different now.
Ah! You got someone who has no idea what they're doing! I'm an insurance consultant here in the States and property damage to others is covered under liability which NEVER contains a deductible in the US of A. Only damage to your personal property or the house itself (from certain named perils) is subject to a policy deductible. Liability, Loss of Use (or additional living expenses), and Medical Payments to others are covered without deductible.
On another note I love what you all are doing and really look forward to using the next iteration!
Wow, great to know, I may actually purchase another lawn mower now instead of cutting the grass with a sickle.
Elan!! yelling
First off I’d like to say I’m extremely excited for Alexandria and I think I’m really going to benefit since I’ve got lots of mountain biking movies and concerts in my library that are a bit of a pain to access with the current library. I also really like the idea of media flags automatically being added for my files (280+ Movies and 30+ TV Series is just too much work for me to manually flag them).
But I do have a question about Alexandria, this question may have been answered before but I did do a quick search and couldn’t find the answer with no luck so I’ll ask. I’m wondering if the filenames will have to be formatted in a certain way for the media flags to be automatically added? Right now I have almost all of my movies labelled like “Black Hawk Down.mkv” but would I have to have it labelled as “Black Hawk Down.720p.Bluray.DTS.mkv” in order for the movie to be tagged perfectly?
I have a friend using XBMC right now and he said all of his content was automatically flagged but he also has his files labelled with the extra pieces of information. Sorry again if this has been asked before.
Finally, I know there is no definite release date and the devs all have lives beyond working on Plex, but would it be possible to get a general estimate of how far away a public beta may be? Should we be expecting days? weeks? months? Sorry in advance for being another nagging fan who can’t wait, if you can’t give an estimate I completely understand.
The files are scanned and analyzed for "tags" without having to name them in any specific way.
We're hoping for a wider beta before too long with the understanding that it'll be an in-progress type release with some things missing, but still very functional. However, I'm extremely skittish about putting any date or even timeframe on it because I really hate disappointing.
Fair enough, by the way thanks for all the work you’ve put into Plex it’s really appreciated.
Thanks for the kind words, we really appreciate them.
Hi Elan,
Thanks for all of this, I’m really excited to try it out when it’s released. Just a quick question…
In your blog post you mentioned that the Library will be decentralized. Is it safe to assume that it will run as a separate program in the same manner as the Plex Media Server? If so, I’m wondering if it will be PPC compatible? My media is all hosted on an old Power Mac G5 and it would be nice to have the library running on the same computer that serves the data.
Just curious, thanks!
It is part of the Plex Media Server, so as long as we can get the auxiliary libraries built for PPC, shouldn't be an issue.
this has been the most sought after feature for me for as long as I can remember, and im happy to let you know the wait is over. Xbmc has now solved this in their latest builds. All that is required is for you to do a basic install of the sql server of your choise on the puter hosting your media (or whatever puter u want on your lan). I run MySQL. Once installed you need to modify advancedsettings.xml in order to have xbmc use your sentralyzed library rather than the local sqllite. Whats even better is that sql allows for several concurrent sessions, meaning that you can have several xbmc's connected while reading and writing to it.
A separate SQL server would only solve one of the countless problems the current library has - centralised access. Comparing the work that's gone into Alexandria to what's essentially just the same old database running on a different machine is kinda insulting ;) Besides, making the end-user set up an enterprise-class database system themselves and tweak XML files to enable it is hardly the most user-friendly way of getting access to that feature. Yeah, I'm sure many members of this forum could handle it, but not the general public - if any of my family members/friends were required to perform technical acrobatics like that just to get a movie library up & running, they'd switch back to Front Row in no time.
Maybe it's just a case of the Plex project having a different ethos to XBMC. XBMC seems to include more experimental, niche features at the expense of simplicity, whereas the Plex team try to give priority to features that appeal to the masses, and might take a bit longer to get there due to the focus on stability & ease of use. We'd never, ever release a feature that required the user to jump over that many hurdles to get it set up. We very much prefer the "it just works" approach :)
Ah-men to that. Lets keep that ethos and go the extra mile to make something the masses can use, not just the nerds :)
M.
No insult intended. However, the dude asked for a specific functionality that Xbmc 100% provides pretty easily. Sure plex 9 might turn out better, if it ever sees the light of day. Meanwhile, I suggest using Xbmc.
your choise of words really make it sound more difficult than it is. Setting up MySQL took me less than 5 minutes. Its ALOT easier than for example setting up outlook. The xml contains 5 lines of text. All you will need to know is the ip of the box running the server. Hardly rocket surgery.
