Introducing the Plex Media Player
blog.plex.tv
blog.plex.tv
Not to knock Plex itself. The server/encoding/play-on-any-device pipeline is amazing.
Just saying that their UIs need developers who actually care about what their users want.
I suppose their server software isn’t … I’m not sure.
Just now i browsed through a thread where a user was complaining about about the UI being atrociously lacking of options and how it slows down people.
A plex employee said:
> I personally think 'just add an option/setting' is not the ideal
> solution. Death by 1000 cuts, and all. I can see the argument for one
> setting, but they add up. And then it's combinatorial attack. 'Oh, did
> you toggle switch X and Y?' 'No?' 'Oh'. Not where we are now, but I
> don't want to end up there, so am (probably overly so, as my coworkers
> can attest) aggressive in avoiding explicit settingsthis has kind of always been the Plex way, hasn't it? If you want powerful customization and configuration you use XBMC/kodi, and if you want a pre-configured player that just works with as little config as possible you use Plex. It's never been a very customizable player.
They did what now? I've been using Plex on my home server and all of my mobile and TV devices and I haven't had it "forced" on me at all. Everything works great. Typically. Until I have to restart FireTV every few days because it stops playing audio from Plex for some odd reason.
I gave up and now running kodi on raspberrypi
we removed the plex pass requirement for smart TVs a few days ago, they are all free to all users. But as someone that works with smart TVs many hours a day, I would stay with rpi, it's a much much better platform, can direct play more formats without need for transcoding and in general more stable.
Just running some Amazon Fire TVs with XBMC/Kody at home, all hooked into my NAS. Next step is going to be building a shared SQL database so all the media positions are lined up.
Although I also enjoy the ability to share my server with family and keep a separate kid-friendly profile for my daughter.
Anyways, I could do with a simple soup to nuts spec sheet and less marketing fluff.
Not trying to be a dick, just always interested in how other people handle media and what works best for them. I am VERY familiar with software not interested in dealing with the particular way that I store things.
You can subsequently choose to view files by "folder", which doesn't actually browse the filesystem directly but instead looks at the database to see where the file came from originally. My experience trying several times since Plex came out (most recently last year) is that this is extremely unreliable and wonky. It'd always mis-recognize files or they'd be completely missing even though they were on disk. They outright do not support directly browsing files AFAIK.
So in other words, if your files are reasonably well organized and named following one of the conventions recognized by Plex then it does a pretty amazing job organizing and scraping. On the other hand, if you just have random files that are scattered about or organized by folder or perhaps named differently then Kodi works a whole lot better because it just lets you drill through files on disk (it has a library too, which is functionally about the same as Plex and suffers from similar drawbacks). On the other hand, Plex has way better device support and while you can get transcoding to/from devices in Kodi, Plex is a lot better at it most of the time.
It looks like the Movies screen will automatically offer up unwatched movies with recent release dates, as well as groups of unwatched movies from the same director ("Top movies by ..."). If you actually go into a movie and open the Extras menu, along with trailers/features (if you have a Plex Pass), it'll show you other movies by the same director and with the same lead actors.
Similarly, the TV screen has groups for recently aired TV episodes, and even has shows grouped by the channel they're currently airing on (!).
It's a neat use of metadata, and it would be interesting to see it go further. It would be really neat if I could, say, choose Star Trek TNG and get an automatically generated list of the best 10 episodes (with data pulled from thetvdb, IMDB, etc), or if I could go into Movies and choose an option to group movies by randomized Netflix-like specialized genres.
I got fed up yesterday and realized I could use a raspberry pi w/ http://www.rasplex.com/ instead, and it's been working great. I use my phone as the remote - and so far so good.
Edit: I should of noted that using Prime Video from the Fire Stick works perfectly (and it's faster to fast-forward etc than the roku).
If all you want to do is watch videos from Plex then no, there's no point changing hardware. But you'd be surprised how much you end up doing through the TV when you can.
It's a bit of the feeling of having a second (big) monitor hooked up to your computer (or using Apple's AirPlay "extend display to this monitor" mode in OSX) but having the two be separate computers is actually a good thing, frequently:
• I don't have to worry about having something CPU-demanding (like a streaming Flash player in Chrome) running on the TV while trying to compile on my work laptop; neither one will cause choppiness in the other.
• I run all my torrents on the HTPC (because that's where I want to play the videos from anyway) and have QoS enabled on my router, so my laptop's network connection is never clogged.
There's also the benefit of the pixels of a TV being far-enough away that you can get away with a lot of scaling. Presuming a 60" 1080p LCD at an 8' distance, turning on Windows' "Extra Large" DPI Scaling, or force-enabling OSX's HiDPI mode, looks really good (e.g. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47375701/ss20151022-1108...).
You only get 960x540 effective pixels from a 200%-DPI-scaled 1080p TV, so some things might not fit on the screen and will necessitate temporarily toggling back to "regular" 1080p. Also, you'll probably want to full-screen most apps, to get something like this (http://i.imgur.com/YDN6VuZ.png). It's a lot like using a netbook.
It's pretty great for reading long articles in particular; I find there's less eye-strain than looking at my laptop—maybe because the glyphs are so clear, and maybe also because I'm focusing on something farther than 2' away.
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Wireless-Keyboard-Multi-Touch...
It's not fancy, but it does the job well - barring some signal issues that I think must be specific to my apartment, as I haven't seen anyone else complain of them.
I cannot express how annoyed i am by the sentiment in this thread that every app must serve the needs of every person. Plex is a media library first and foremost. "I don't want a media library" is not a valid criticism of a media library app.
The only reason I clicked on this post at all was because I've been using VLC for so long I thought maybe this was an alternative I've never heard of.
We're talking about plex, and plex is for streaming from one thing to another. I've been able to stream from OSX to roku using plex but each version keeps getting worse. The last version was so bad it didn't even let you browse folders. I think there were so many complaints they released 'plex classic'.
I'm trying out emby again right now, looks much improved and like all I need.
Anyways, it seems that standard DLNA is what you are looking for. I don't know the current state of support for this is, but I know my 8-year-old Thecus NAS and PS3 both supported it and worked great together.
Otherwise I recommend switching to a RasPi2, and trying out the media player images, several based on kodi, which were able to play from network drives just fine in my experience.
Plex has always been about libraries and metadata. Sure, it had vestigal options from it's break from XBMC, which WAS focused on that, but these were never a focus in the past 7 years.
Also, according to other threads here, Plex Classic was mainly released to ensure that there was a free version on the Roku, while Plex Pass is required for the mainline app. This isn't how it works on any other platform (ios/android = pay for the app, plex pass is only for sync).
If you looking for the Raspberry Pi 2 downloads or the x86 download for Embedded Device you need to sign into your plex pass account first, then theres a button on the downloads page called "Plex Pass Downloads"
It seems as its a beta its only open to plex pass subscribers.
It's Taken me 30minutes to work this out (luckily I am a subscriber)
"Is Plex Home Theater still around? Plex Home Theater is still available and open source. We’re no longer actively developing it and are focusing our efforts on making Plex Media Player the best experience possible. (We’ll continue to make bug fixes for PHT for now.)"
As with most new features, they're releasing for PlexPass first and moving to (free) public availability after a waiting period.
> Will it be available to everyone? The new app is launching as an early preview version for our Plex Pass subscribers. Once the preview period ends, it will be available to all users; we’ll make another announcement when that happens.
So both SACD and Dolby Atmos work now?
Anything that supports bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD should support Dolby Atmos, and you can already bitstream TrueHD with Plex.
No idea on SACD
Plex is based on XBMC (aka Kodi), which supports reading from the network natively, which leads me to believe they disabled this on purpose and I've never understood the rationale behind it. It makes plex almost useless to me and anyone else who uses a nas or similar to store files. Expecting that I will run plex itself from my nas because they disabled network access is laughable.
Also their UI has consistently been going downhill for the last several versions.
The Home Theater client was based on XBMC, but it only ever connected to the server.
Though I still prefer Kodi for its FOSS-ness.
It's good. Makes the experience far more consistent with their current offerings for devices, and as far as I can see, nothing particularly important seems to have gone walkies - handles impressively awkward subtitles with aplomb, channels all still work, in fact it's easier than ever to sling on reddit videos and sit and stare.
All in all, approval.
They're also designed to be confusing and to give a user the impression you have to sign up for Plex Pass to continue using Plex. Plex is awesome together with Chromecast anyway.
They've "streamlined" it to the point of unusability.
That version is open sourced (https://github.com/plexinc/roku-client-public). The Plex developers have abandoned it, for updating the newer client only; but it's still perfectly usable as the old-version.
source: I wrote skip-sign in, manual server entry in the core platform.
It also works with a Raspberry Pi client without authentication.
Is it really? Because I know nobody doing that of several Plex users. Maybe with a few of beloved DVDs from their library, but not for 99% of what they watch.
* Sonarr/Sickbeard/Sickrage (TV)
* Couchpotato (Movie)
* Headphones (Music)
* Sabnzbd/Nzbget (Usenet download clients)
* Deluge/Transmission/etc (Torrent download clients)
- Legal music from iTunes and AmazonMP3.
- Ripped discs using MakeMKV.
- A rigged-up pipeline of tuning TV using an HDHomeRun, recording with MythTV, and a custom script to invoke Myth's commercial skipper, remove the commercials (using avconv), and rename according to Plex's desires. I used to have it compress the files down, but I let Plex do that on sync/play, since it'll usually have to transcode anyway.
The first is super easy and definitely legal, no matter where you live. There may be some legal issues around breaking the DRM when you rip a disc, and it's not 100% dead-simple (some DVDs have weird structures). The third requires some pretty substantial babysitting.
i would use the worst UI in the history of computing if it had every title i would ever want to watch.
For example, I don't always want to watch the next episode of a series--I often want to see all the episodes I have in there. Yet I'm not forced to dig for the option to find that. Combined with the fact that there are unhelpful icons without tooltips (because its on a Roku) and my wife ends up helplessly confused by their UI.
And that's just one nit. In general I now try to use the Plex iPad app (which rocks), and then punt it up to my TV. Unfortunately the tracking doesn't work great on that so I can't easily scan around the show in the iPad, and have the TV instantly reflect that.
I used to use it all the time, but there's no way I'm logging in to plex to view local media.
Now that's a feature Kodi can't rival.
Ripping DVDs is 1000X a better experience than watching a buffering icon spin during primetime. Offer me a way to legally download an mkv/mp4 and play it through whatever player I want and/or transcode it if I want and I'll be falling over myself to give you my money.
People were stealing music prior to its release not because they were thieves at heart but because it was the only way most of them could find most of the music they wanted.
iTunes put the entire music industry to shame by simply showing that if, instead of fearing downloading, they had given a good, legal venue to sell music, people would in fact be willing to pay.
My home in London, UK has Plex, and when I'm in the US on business I stream movies to my mobile.
This all costs me nothing more than my standard broadband contract (GBP 30 per month for 150Mbps connection) and my mobile contract (GBP 15 per month for unlimited 4g in lots of countries).
I do rip my DVDs, but I also stream them so I don't have to choose in advance, transfer files, etc.
I have heard that they are phasing these contracts out though, and the new contracts aren't as good. I shall be holding on to this one for as long as possible.
EDIT - Unless you meant consuming from mobile, in which case I pretty much agree.
What's their policy on P2P traffic? I host fairly large data sets for analysis at work and the most stable way to get them from one place to another is via packing them into torrents. Would this be frowned on / throttled?
I didn't quite understand that. Is this only for mobile? And does it suddenly stop working if you use a Wifi hotspot rather than a capped downlink?