OSXBMC for Mac re-named: Say hello to Plex
- July 7th, 2008
- 5 Comments
The media hub once known as Xbox Media Player, then Xbox Media Center, then XBMC, then ported to Intel-based Macs and called OSXBMC is now known as Plex. The name change was announced at the weekend, while many of you were celebrating your country’s independence.
As explained on the application’s official Web site:
The one name that stuck was Plex. I like it because it evokes “cineplex” and the suffix means “comprising a number of parts” which the application certain does. In mathematics, you use the suffix to mean “ten to the power of the number” (e.g. oneplex = 10).
And look how great Plex can be…
The name of the skin here is Aeon, and it’s great. Really great. It makes Front Row look weak. I’m not exaggerating when I say I spent at least six hours on Saturday fiddling around with all the settings, and adding the many movies I’ve collected over the years to Plex’s database.
Again, try it out. You won’t find a better interface for a home theater PC.
CLARIFICATION!
Right, the whole project hasn’t been re-named, just the Mac fork (OSXBMC) that we mentioned some time ago. The XBMC name is alive and well on all other platforms, including the non-forked Mac version. This version, Plex, forked off from the main XBMC development tree a little while ago.
Long story short, OSXBMC is now known as Plex. Thank you, and may God bless America.
AlTheKiller (Who am I?)
1 month ago
XBMC for MAC and OSXBMC are two different projects. OSXBMC forked from XBMC’s MAC port and changed its name to plex. XBMC for MAC is still alive and well.
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Elan (Who am I?)
1 month ago
Just to clarify Al’s comment above: The OSXBMC team ported XBMC to the Mac, contributed the changes back to XBMC, and the forked the code for a variety of reasons.
Gamester17 (Who am I?)
1 month ago
Another clarification of the XBMC name and its ports and forks:
To start with the title of this article should to stay correct be renamed from “Xbox Media Center Mac Port Called “Plex”…” to the complicated “XBMC for Mac’s OSXBMC fork renamed to Plex”.
You see, the original XBMC is no longer named “XBox Media Center”, since it was made cross-platform (ported to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) it was a few months back officially been renamed to “XBMC” (and that is not an abbreviation any longer, see xbmc.org which is the official website).
XBMC (at the xbmc.org website) is and always will be the original upstream version of XBMC (and forks like Plex, Boxee, and MediaPortal will probably always continue to copy code updates from the original XBMC, same as we do from them if they implement a new feature or function that we like, that iss the nature of open source).
Now to the recent history and reason of OSXBMC being renamed to PLEX; Elan Fieldgold, as then Team-XBMC developer member, originally ported XBMC for Linux to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard later forked away from XBMC and called his fork OSXBMC (I will not go into details but the fork was due to development practice differences), Elan and Team-XBMC at that time agreed that it would then be best if he renamed it from OSXBMC to something else as Team-XBMC plan on continuing our version of XBMC for Mac to avoid the confusion from having two Mac OS X version out there with “XBMC” in the name. Now almost months later Elan has announced that the new name of OSXBMC is Plex, and that a new domain will be followed soon called plexsquared.com
So to sum up:
OSXBMC (www.osxbmc.com) becomes Plex (www.plexsquared.com)
XBox Media Center (xboxmediacenter.com) is now just XBMC (xbmc.org)
Team-XBMC (xbmc.org) will continue developing XBMC for all platforms
XBMC for Linux
XBMC for Mac
XBMC for Windows
XBMC for Xbox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC
Claudio (Who am I?)
1 month ago
Where does one go about getting these Skins for Plex, or OSXBMC or XBMC — whichever one is best. The skins look purdy, and a lot better than the default one. But when I try to go to the site for the “Aeon” skin (shown?), it’s down down down.
bear (Who am I?)
1 month ago
is it going to be for gaming console’s like the xbox or some other game just wanted to nkow