Plex on the New Apple TV | Hacker News Reader

Plex on the New Apple TV

blog.plex.tv

128 pointschkuendig63 comments

Can someone with the app please let me know if you can just autoplay tv series with this app?

Was annoying not being able to do that on the iOS app.

Kind of. The only way to do this is by selecting a season and an option to "Play Season X" appears, which forces you to watch the season from episode 1. I think most Plex clients have had this for a while. What I would like (and you too, probably) is to have an option to just autoplay the next episode from whatever is "on deck" similar to Netflix.

Yes, despite a lot of complaints about this behaviour, they seem unwilling to go back to revert back to the days where it simply started playing from whatever episode you had not seen.

This reminds me of how I wish Plex had a mode to actually manage media files rather than just watching them. I hate manually organizing files, and iTunes despite keeping very nice folder organization doesn't quite work for this purpose (no Season 0 support, no option for years in movie filenames).

Plex doesn't really have much of a notion of files. It prefers metadata that makes sense to non-technical users. While this is at the cost of tweakability, I think it's the right call.

Sick Beard will handle this for you (you can just not hook up a usenet client if you dont need that bit)

SickRage is a good fork if you're not into Usenet.

SickBeard development has been dead for like a year. Have you noticed how awful it has been at finding episodes?

SickRage is the fork that has lived on

True, I actually haven't. I only use SB for new release nowadays (streaming covers most old stuff) so maybe that's why.

There's also Sonarr (https://sonarr.tv/) which I really like.

I wish Plex had a mode where it was just a screen (or page) that showed a tiled list of my movies, and when I clicked one it would immediately start playing. All the other crap it does is annoying 98% of the time. Have a little gear icon in the corner that I can click when I want to go crazy. Other than that, just show me my movies damnit!

Uhh... The web interface does exactly that for me. A tiled list of all of my movies, and if I hover over one there is a "play" arrow/triangle icon that I can click and immediately start watching.

Can someone answer what is so special about Plex?

I have read the descriptions and it just seems very general, boring, and full of buzzwords... "organize your media library", so what?

I mostly just watch Netflix, iTunes Movies/TV Shows ... is this going to help me in any way do anything special?

No.

It's not built for you at all.

It's built for torrenters (and usenetters) who download massive collections of files, have them sit on local hard drives, and want easy ways to organize them and play them back. and it does an amazing job of that.

I used to have a large legally obtained CD and DVD collection. Getting a home media server, ripping everything, and using Plex to access is an awesome upgrade compared with physical media. In particular, avoiding physical media that will break for stuff like kids movies is great.

Also, managing all the photos we have and take so that they are available on all our devices is great, especially since we are a mixed iOS and Android household.

So no, it is not only for downloaders with massive collections of files.

This, but I also have lots of completely legit video and audio (audiobooks and music(mostly from bandcamp)).

> It's built for torrenters (and usenetters) who download massive collections of files

It's also nice for us who have had a physical media collection (video & music) converted into a pure digital collection and want to be able easily to consume that anywhere, anywhere and on any device with zero friction.

Especially local media-sync is useful for long trans-atlantic flights and works much better (and space-efficiently) than just copying the full-fidelity files to the device, which in the end may not be capable of playing them properly at all.

Basically Plex is very good at completely eliminating issues regarding playback format and compatibility and ensures whatever is in your library always plays back correctly at whatever target-device you have.

I'm not going to deny that torrenters etc probably represent a big portion of the Plex user-base, but I'd like to remind people that actually owning your own media-collection is a still a thing, and I don't see any reason to make software managing such collections a suspicious category to be in.

Yep. I used to be one of those guys with two 250-CD binders full of all sorts of music. I went to the used CD bin weekly through high school and college because they had deals with 3 discs for $10 so most weeks, I'd use my paychecks to pay the bills and tip money for CDs. Later on, I amassed quite a collection of DVDs as well.

Later on, I realized I was watching and listening to just about everything via my computer or mp3 player so I began the process of ripping everything to my RAID (now just a standalone NAS).

Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward so that's just about as legally dubious as downloading unlicensed copies. I just figured I didn't need the stacks of plastic circles laying around anymore and could use the cash.

Either way, between rips and still occasionally buying mp3 albums on Amazon, I've got a load of digital media and Plex is an excellent way to stream it all to devices in my house. I use my phone or a laptop as the "remote" and the Plex server streams to my Chromecast, Xbox, or other computers from the NAS. It's a great setup. For people who want to use an Apple TV as their media extender, it looks like they have the option to use Plex as well.

Honestly this is a bit of a surprise since I thought Apple typically wanted to steer you toward iTunes for local media streaming but as someone who really doesn't like iTunes and generally avoids it whenever possible, Plex support makes Apple TV an actual option now.

> Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward

Personally I just threw them away because I was fed up with them taking storage-space (which in my flat is limited).

This means I can't prove ownership, but at least I don't feel like I'm having some sort of moral dilemma around my digital collection.

That makes sense, thanks!

Plex manages videos on your local network drive and streams them to your TV or computers over the network. It can transcode different format of the videos on the fly into the one your player recognizes. It downloads metadata (thumbnails, title, summary, review) for the video automatically. It tracks your viewing of the videos - new, in-progress (remember where in the video), and played. It groups videos in dozens of way as playlists to let you browse them.

I usually just dump the videos into my NAS and points the Plex server to it. The TV player points to the Plex server and streams the videos from there.

Doesn't Kodi(XMBC) do all that, for free, and without installing any software ?

Plex is significantly better than XBMC, it's night and day.

Plex is significantly different than XBMC. Plex is a media streaming/transcoding platform and organizer. XBMC (or Kodi) is a local media player and organizer.

A properly configured Kodi setup is far more flexible than Plex and offers a lot of significant advantages (PsuedoTV, for example) as well as a larger set of supported formats and playback options.

I use both pretty extensively and the idea of trying to replace either one with the other is distasteful. Different tools for different jobs.

kodi has pseudoTv too.

Plex is the one that doesn't have PsuedoTV

Huh? Is it? Every time I tried Plex is was more limited and clunky when it came to media library organization. And it required me to install software on my NAS.

nope it isn't. Kodi is more customizable.

Plex is easy to install, but Kodi is much more advanced and powerful. Atleast it is for my fire stick and home network

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

It's for people who DVR shows and collect tons of BluRays and rip them so they don't have to hunt down the disc and wait through "you wouldn't download a car" every time they want to watch a movie.

Well I was worried Plex was going to push that god-awful xbox one interface they just ruined PHT (Now Plex Media Player) with. I'll hold out on my RasPlex 2 with PHT for now until some of my friends pick up the new AppleTV but both Simplex and Plex's official app look nice.

PlexConnect was amazing for what it did and how it did it but was pretty buggy (no doubt not the fault of the creators) and constantly restarting it was a PITA. RasPlex is the best out there right now IMHO (direct play's everything I have) but I'd be happy to go back to AppleTV. I do really miss AirPlay and my family shared photostream as screensaver.

Time will tell if Apple let them integrate with Universal Search API.

Tim Cook says it will be open, but did not say when: http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/03/tim-cook-apple-tv-universal-se...

https://www.quora.com/Will-FaceTime-ever-be-opened-as-a-stan...

This might be different in that Apple controls the entire thing end to end. Whereas FaceTime they got sued and that may be why FaceTime never become an open standard.

Unlike what Steve Jobs did with FaceTime, generally, Tim Cook doesn't blindside the company by declaring something will be open on stage without discussing it with the engineers and rest of management beforehand.

Simplex had the advantage of being on the store day 1, had Plex had their app on the store day one I'm not sure I would've downloaded Simplex.

Nice to see this on the App Store.

what was simplex? just another developer that built an app to talk to plex servers?

was curious when i saw that on the app store what it actually did

Simplex is a Plex client. Quite good, actually.

Day 1? You mean Friday 10/30? I think that was the official "launch" date. I ordered my ATV4 in the middle of last week (and was surprised to see they weren't out yet), and it arrives tomorrow.

I'm gonna call Plex close enough to "day 1".

Especially given that discovery on actual day one was so poor (no categories, no charts, limited features) that anything not featured was going to struggle a bit. Our app was written up a couple of times alongside Simplex but missed out on a feature despite getting an artwork request and only had a few dozen sales.

There was only one app showing up in search for the word plex. I'm sure that helped too.

I ordered pretty much minutes after it was available and it delivers tomorrow. Friday delivery required extra 17$, probably not opted by most.

Any news on what containers and codecs don't require transcoding? The new Apple TV ought to be pretty capable.

Containers shouldn't affect transcoding at all, might mean re-muxing but I'd guess based on what i remember for older apple tvs that pretty much only MPEG-TS and mp4 are supported as containers, and it has to use HLS for streaming.

Codec wise I wouldn't be surprised if it was only H264, H265, VP8, and MPEG2/4.

I'd give 50/50 on the MPEG2 support though, might be there just because the hardware had it and to ease releases from the DVD era.

I'd be very surprised if VP8 were supported at all -- nothing else from Apple supports it.

It will almost certainly have to be transcoded for the AppleTV.

It's one thing I'm not sure about, given that youtube loves to use it as part of webm.

It can't stream (not transcode/repackage) mkv/h264 etc? No thanks.

I don't know for certain. I'm speculating based off previous apple products.

Plex has a feature called Direct Stream that supports this use case:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250387-Streamin...

Addendum: It can stream mkv/h264 without transcoding quite well. I'm really enjoying Plex on my new Apple TV!

You mean hardware supported codecs? According to the specs page [0] it's pretty much the same as an iPhone. Standard H.264 <= 60fps 1080p, regular MPEG-4, HE-AAC. The usual MP4 containers. Most of Apple's audio codecs. The most interesting thing is the HEVC support [1] but I'm not sure how useful that will be given the patent situation. There are also rumours [2] that the A8 can deal with 4K.

If you mean software decoding, I'm not sure what you have in mind. The more interesting codecs (VP9, Thor, Daala) are too complex to decode in software on such a low power embedded chip.

[0]: https://www.apple.com/tv/specs/ [1]: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New... [2]: http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-66-plus-a8-chip-capable-of-4...

Good job finding the actual specs, I didn't bother to look, but it looks like I wasn't far off except in thinking that VP8 and MPEG2 MIGHT be supported. I'm surprised about the lack of H265/HEVC, even if it's not used much now it means that as things progress the ATV2 will end up being unable to support things in the future.

Believe you meant the 'ATV4', or as Apple refers to it, the Apple TV (4th generation)¹.

――――――

¹ — https://support.apple.com/kb/SP724

I was referring to software, as I figured the Apple embedded chips have gotten fairly beefy over the past few years and might be up to the task of software decoding. Thanks for the detailed response.

They might be able to deal with some of the older codecs like FLV or WMV but even many laptops struggle with codecs like VP8/9, with some users going so far as to use plugins [0] to disable them. I have a feeling you'd be hard pressed even getting something like 10-bit H.264 (common for anime releases) decoding in software.

Things like this have been attempted in the Raspberry Pi community but the last time I checked there was no success.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...

They absolutely can. My Sony Xperia Z3 (benchmarks worse than the new Apple chips) can play 1080p VP9 fine with software decoding.

Given that I have to have the video files in an ATV supported codec already, what is the advantage of using Plex over using iTunes to manage videos?

You don't have to. One of the main points of Plex is that the media server (the component running on your PC where the media files are) does Just-in-Time streaming transcoding. You keep your files in the source format; they're served to the AppleTV in a compatible format. You jump to 0:30:00 on the AppleTV; the transcoding process jumps to 0:30:00 in the source and renders+streams frames from there.

Any idea about audio formats? That's somewhat important for more serious home theater setups.

Just installed it and it works great. I had already downloaded the iOS version, so it just appeared under the "Purchased" section on the tvOS App Store.

Does it have support for local (or remote) Plex Media Servers? I presently use PlexConnect via a DNS override. Does this obviate all of the present shenanigans?

I'm using a Mac mini on my LAN as the server. I don't have the Plex Pass so I haven't tried using a remote server.

The native app is much faster and more reliable than using PlexConnect to replace the Trailers app on the old ATV.

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