Plex Releases Slew of Updates - Windows 8 App, Web App & Server

Related: Plex, Home Entertainment, Windows 8

A slew of updates have just been announced over at the official Plex blog, check it out!

First up, we have a major update to the Windows 8 Plex app with a bunch of bug fixes, much improved support for keyboard navigation, audio/subtitle stream selection, universal search, a lovely interface to the channel store, and a new high quality (but experimental) option for video playback which allows re-muxing most H.264 video. It's available in the Windows 8 store right now.

ChannelStore

Next up, Plex/Web is kicking it Gangnam style with an awesome new release, including the much requested ability to upload custom posters, with drag and drop, no less (or from a URL), some sexy tag completion in the editor, support for retina-quality posters on retina devices, and lots of bug fixes. You'll get the update automatically within the next few hours, or you can force an update, as usual.

Tag input

Artwork upload 2

You know it's going to be a big year when we have two photos of Barkley gracing a release post! The second one of course celebrates the new new release of the media server, which has the usual bag of goodies and fixes. You can download it right now from the usual place.

NEW: Music sections support searching by album.
NEW: Massive performance improvements for some DLNA streaming scenarios.
NEW: Allow players to specify a protocol and respect their port.
NEW: (API) Support for filtering movies by studio.
NEW: (API) Support for sorting by last view date.
NEW: (API) Added endpoints for uploading custom media assets (e.g. posters). Used by Plex/Web.
FIX: Some cache control header updates.
FIX: A few crashes.
FIX: (Windows) Workaround for Win 8 security model preventing Plex for Windows 8 from connecting on same machine.
FIX: (Windows) Crash on start.
FIX: (Windows) 100% CPU when Plex for Windows 8 is running.
FIX: (Transcoder) External SRT files with BOM marker weren't getting rendered.
FIX: (Transcoder) Faster startup.
FIX: (PlexSync) Transcoder now handles anamorphic video properly.
FIX: (PlexSync) Sometimes converted files could be bigger than source files.
FIX: (PlexSync) Ratings directory was missing.
FIX: (API) New /channels/arts endpoint which returns channel background art.
FIX: (API) Resolutions filter can be itself filtered.
FIX: (API) Don't return empty studios.
FIX: (API) Global on deck has mixed parents.
FIX: (API) Make sure recently viewed channels have identifiers.
FIX: (API) Fix incorrectly escaping JSON.
FIX: (API) Fixes for media asset uploads, and select/lock upload.
FIX: (API) Fix alphanumeric paging with non-alphanumeric characters.
FIX: (DLNA) Hopeful fix for some heap corruption.
FIX: Fixed a few (very) rare deadlocks.
FIX: Fixed iTunes channel for iTunes 11.
FIX: (Sync) iPad 4s weren't using the right profile.
FIX: (Transcoder) Faster starting for transcoded audio.
FIX: (Transcoder) Fixes for RTMP with new transcoder.
FIX: (Transcoder) Speed up WebKit transcoder starts.
FIX: (Transcoder) Fix for some remuxing cases with Win8.