We haven’t blogged about a media server release in a while (even though we’ve been churning them out; check out this thread). But there’s so much good stuff in this otherwise unassuming release, we thought we’d take the time to walk through some of the changes. The release is available for Plex Pass users and will be available for the general public shortly.

First of all, one of the most requested things after our giant music release was support for Last.FM scrobbling, and as a heavy scrobbler myself, I’m thrilled to let you know you can now hook up your account with Last.FM via your account page on plex.tv. Not only is it easy to link your account, Last.FM scrobbling will work with any Plex app, and even works if you’re listening to music on a shared server!

There’s another thing people have asked for, which is the ability to set audio and subtitle language preferences when accessing shared servers. We figured we’d make this really easy, and allow you to configure your language preferences globally (again, on plex.tv). This way your settings travel with you to any servers you access, magically.

Next up, we’ve added an advanced Network preference which allows you to register any number of custom connection URLs with plex.tv. This can be very useful in a few cases: if you’re using a VPN to get back home, if you’re using a reverse proxy in front of the media server, or if your networking configuration is otherwise unique. It’s now simple to publish any connection you want for all clients to use (N.B. if you don’t specify a port, it’ll automatically use the port it opened up in your router.)

Finally, we’ve added the ability to make Mood mixes from the albums view, which means it’s now possible on apps which don’t support a track view yet.

Less visible to the user, we’ve made a big change to the core components we ship with the server (scanners and agents). These used to be updated and installed separately from the media server itself, but we’ve moved to bundling them and locking them to each server release. This will increase reliability, since there were cases where the components could be corrupted due to interactions with antivirus and backup software, e.g.

You can find the full list of changes in this this release (which is available right now for all Plex Pass users) in the release forum!