It seems okay, but then you notice that it has some autocorrect and autoformat defaults that can be just as annoying as Word, if not more so. No, I don't want it to autofill words as I type them, because it has the annoying tendency to set them as autofilled when it's incorrect. These are words, not website urls.

But the place where LibreOffice fails hardest (just like every other OO variant) is that it WILL destroy formatting horridly in a Word document. One of the much-touted features of these suites is that you can work on .doc and docx files. Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time before they wreck the doc you were working on. It looks good to you, but the next guy who sees it will have tables screwed up, figures missing, tabs knocked out of whack, and a whole lot more. I'm sorry, but that completely ruins the value of this software for me. You'd think they'd have figured this out by now, but apparently the lauded feature of MS Office compatibility really isn't that important to them.

Plex has by far the best decoding engine for OS X. Nothing else I've tried will play 1080p as well. It's incredibly efficient.

The problem is that this application is absolutely crippled by the WORST interface EVER to be tacked on to a media player. I'm not exaggerating. I usually use MPlayer Extended for everything but 1080p because it's simple and easy to navigate. A few settings here, a few menus there, and it just works. Plex FORCES you to use a horrible, keyboard-only selection interface. It feels like a bad XBox 360 media center. There is no option for a standard preferences window. None. You have to use the arrow keys over and over, taking far more time to even FIND a setting than you would with a standard interface.

I can see why they used the keyboard-only interface. Navigation with the Apple remote, HTPC, okay, I get it. But to deny you the ability to use anything else is stupid beyond my comprehension.

In addition, you cannot disable subtitles. If the movie defaults to a subtitle track, then you're stuck with them. I have no problem turning them off in MPlayer, so why does Plex think that you're always going to want them on?

Plex has some awesome programmers working the engine. The people designing the interface probably flunked out of CS in their freshman year.

Very nice! A recent round of updates somehow flagged the root directory of my hard drive as invisible. I could still access it by the "Go to" command, but that was about it. Drove me nuts. I installed the developer tools, but apparently Setfile doesn't like messing with the root directory. However, this little script correctly reset the visibility attribute! Thank you very much sir, you're a gentleman and a scholar!

I had hoped to use this to bench Leopard vs Tiger on a less than supported machine. G4 450mhz, Radeon 7000, 512MB of RAM. Leopard was surprisingly responsive on it, and OpenGL Extensions Viewer ran fine, benching up to 1.4 and pegging it around 73-74fps on each. In 10.4.10...it crashed. Every time. So there's something buggy in this release, because I could not bench it on the old, supported OS, but I could on the new, unsupported (on that machine) OS. Strange.

I picked up MPEG Streamclip as a free transcoder for iPod video. The first thing I did with it was transcode some Divx formatted cartoons (very low bitrate) into H.264 low bitrate for the iPod, and I was impressed with the quality. Not great, but it actually smoothed out the artifacts from the Divx source, making it look better after being transcoded. I was starting to like this software.

Then I did some real media compression, and that's where MPEG Streamclip fell flat. I was running interlaced DV through for high-quality and mid-quality iPod. The high quality could have been much better, and has been when I've used Quicktime/Compressor. One of them looked downright terrible. The deinterlacing, while better than some, was still pretty lackluster and left jagged edges everywhere. The mid quality was about where I'd expect it, but still, I've seen better from other encoders. Another gripe is that I used multipass VBR maxed at 760kbps for the medium, yet it averaged less than 500kbps, and judging from the video quality, it would have looked a lot better if MPEG Streamclip had kept the bitrate closer to the peak. If you just want a free media encoder, well, you really can't beat the price, but if you're looking for the better encoding quality than this, you'll have to look elsewhere.