Mac OSXBMC Becomes Plex

OSXBMC Becomes PLEX

The open source media player for the Mac formerly know as OSXBMC has a new name – Plex.  In the words of developer Elan – “Think Mediaplex, Movieplex, but more than movies and media, obviously…..The suffic “-plex” actually means “comprising a number of parts”…

“As most of you know, we’ve been searching for a new identity since we split from XBMC. Names aren’t easy to come by, and domain names are even harder. We received some great suggestions from our user base (Meteor Center, Media Hugger, etc.). Ultimately though, we wanted a name that was easy to communicate, a bit more abstract, and less tied to media or center.

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).

Because there are no four-letter domain names left (seriously, try to find one!) we decided to square the plex, so to speak. Think of either plex^2 or plex squared (the beta logo below tries to connote the word “plex” inside a square that might represent a TV screen). The domain names are plex2.com, plexsquared.com, and plexsquare.com for good measure. They are not active yet.

In the coming days, we’ll be working on the rebranding process, including the application packaging, logo, web domains, etc. In the longer term, we have some exciting things in the skin department as well. Stay tuned, and thanks for all your support; we really are lucky to have such an great community.”

plex.tv

3 Comments on "Mac OSXBMC Becomes Plex"

  1. A more detailed 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

  2. Thanks for the clarification Gamester17. I guess XBMC will always be xBox Media Center to me as that’s the platform where we started to use it (and still do everyday).

    I think the new “Plex” name on Elans fork will help to remove the confusion.

    M.

  3. My name’s actually “Feingold”, not “Fieldgold” 🙂

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.