We love our second-generation Apple TV (that's the black one), but mostly because we've hacked it with aTV Flash to add Plex, the media server client software that pretty much smokes Apple's own. But with the aTV Flash 1.7 update this week, Plex is gone, and now we're sad.
FireCore, LLC announced the availability of aTV Flash (black) 1.7 on Thursday, adding integration with trakt.tv, a free service which scrobbles ratings data on what you watch back to a profile so it can offer recommendations on other stuff you might like later on.
Okay, that's not exactly the kind of feature we'd consider headline worthy, especially when we're fairly selective about what we watch when we're not busy banging at the keys here at MacLife.com.
To be fair, aTV Flash (black) 1.7 does offer more, including localized movie poster art and ratings, a beta of the new AirControl, read-ahead buffering for SMB and NFS shares and improved video rotation detection for MOV files. But it's what FireCore didn't tell us about this update that's the most troubling.
It seems aTV Flash (black) 1.7 doesn't want to play nice with Plex, the media server client plugin that's usually offered as part of the bundle of goodies FireCore offers. Unfortunately, having Plex installed is causing grief for some users, throwing them into an endless boot sequence after upgrading to 1.7.
Worse yet, the update removes Plex entirely from the Apple TV if the installation actually succeeds -- something FireCore failed to note in the 1.7 release notes at all.
FireCore now recommends that aTV Flash (black) users remove Plex prior to upgrading to 1.7, but neither the company nor the folks behind Plex seem to know what it's going to take to get a proper update to Plex so we can shake this serious bummer we have going on right now.
That is, until we remembered Plex is also installed on our Roku, making things (almost) right with the world again…
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