Plex Arcade
plex.tv
plex.tv
I found this [1] but it appears to be that they were tracking only at a very generic level.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/5zrxtd/plex_the_compa...
I got rid of plex once they made everything (including metadata lookups) go through their system. And you cannot run plex without it calling home and requiring an account.
I dropped Plex because its quality was getting lower and lower, especially chromecast-wise.
When I tested it the Jellyfin server worked great. But the client apps were terrible in comparison to Plex.
I think that the main problem with Plex (some of those are the same as Emby) are:
* They are trying to add too many features (Plex Arcade? really?) while other features are not stable - chromecast queuing was working then not working then working again with every other release. In the end it stopped working for a while, and I quit using Plex. I just need something to have my collection organized, with a bit of metadata handling and a "watched/not watched" flag. Plex (and Emby) are trying to do an incredible amount of work on top of that.
* The price for the "deluxe" version is too steep for a self hosted solution. Netflix Standard is EUR 144/year, Plex is 40 EUR/year (about the same as Emby, btw). And I need to provide hardware, electricity, and content - it's just not competitive. I'd be happy to pay something between 10 and 20 EUR per year for a properly working software of that kind.
It happens occasionally that their servers go down and nobody is able to stream anything. I don't know why their servers are a dependancy in that chain at all, I probably looked it up before but I don't recall it being a good reason.
It's needed for authentication but locally, it should be nearly fully functional. At worst, you should need to set up a subnet that's allowed without auth in the server's network settings.
Aside from that, internet is mostly needed for downloading metadata and the server can work just fine without an internet connection.
Since I started using Plex near 10 years ago I’ve never experienced any sort of service unavailability.
You do need to be online though to set up a client for the first time to your local server, which is annoying, but has never been a problem for me.
On web:
- Screwdriver/wrench icon top-right
- In the left panel look for the "<your username>" heading, underneath it, click "online sources"
- Click "Edit" and change "Enabled" to "Disabled"
You won't see those sources again.
As for seeking, I never see delays when using direct play (which is near 100% of my usage). I tried seeking with a transcode just now and it takes ~1s from interaction to the video playing again, which isn't too bad and I don't think is avoidable.
If you watch transcodes a lot and this bothers you though, consider whether "Optimized Versions" (transcoding ahead of time) would be good for you. Aside from that, I don't think a solution exists, it's a problem inherent to seeking while transcoding.
Not a Plex employee or anything, I've just been using it for what feels like close to a decade now.
EDIT: I just watched some stuff through Plex on my Apple TV and seeking is actually instant. On the Apple TV, each button click jumps forward ten seconds or so and as far as I can tell, each jump is instantaneous, no buffering or delays whatsoever.
And on the client, make sure Settings -> Quality -> (Internet|Remote) Streaming is set to the highest setting.
Which those settings, my phone defaults to Original quality (no transcoding) even on cellular.
I'll double-check the settings on the mobile client when I have a chance.
If not is there a workaround? I often wonder if I should attempt to flash my TV’s OS. Does someone have experience with this?
For plex, I would recommend looking into an Apple TV, a new Android TV (the one where you can use a remote, older ones only support casting) or a nvidia shield - I can’t fully recommend them but i suspect they suck less than my experience. Failing that, a decent (i5+) nuc may work but ymmv.
I've been using kodi but recently my hdmi cable started going bad. CEC worked with that one but for some reason that I don't understand I can't get another cable that it works with. I've tried old and new cables, microhdmi-hdmi, hdmi-hdmi with a microhdmi adapter, combinations of the above, but no matter what I can't find another cable that CEC works with. Would you happen to have any idea why this would be happening?
Also when I switch back to the cable that's failing CEC works again. I can't explain it. And yes, I have CEC enabled on the TV.
I’d first try different ports on your TV, failing that try reformatting the system.
That said, I'm not too happy about Samsung pushing ads onto me after I paid many hundreds of GBP for the tv itself. It'd be cool if there was an easy way to flash some open source firmware onto it.
This is why I left Plex too. It shouldn't be hard to find your own content on a service that exists to play your own content.
Plex has been the best $120 or so that I've ever spent and I'm not kidding. It's a load off to not worry about managing media and adding music to various devices all the time.
How well does jellyfish seamlessly do these things?
An aside but I do find it darkly comic that we're now streaming retro games. The ROMs are at most a few MB big but this service will burn through that in seconds.
Either way, I've yet to have a suitably positive experience streaming anything interactive on either LAN or WAN. I see the improvements that have been made and many friends swear by it, but it may just be that I'm too sensitive to input lag and even the rarest encode/decode hiccup.
I hope this changes soon, I'm having a hard time figuring out how they launched with this. I know pulls aren't indicative of total users but: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/plex
Hilarious.
Joking aside, it's cool that's they're actually doing this legitimately, but you can already buy Atari collections on every platform imaginable. That doesn't feel like much of a draw.
> just Atari games
Which platforms can be scanned in and show metadata in Plex?
We support showing metadata for a range of retro cartridge-based systems. Only games for the following platforms can be included in the Games library
Arcade
Atari (2600, 5200, 7800)
Sega (Genesis, Game Gear, Master System, 32X)
Nintendo (NES, Super NES, N64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance)
> it doesn't work ... besides appletv and maybe the new google tv
Which player apps support Plex Arcade?
The following Plex client/player apps currently support accessing Plex Arcade:
Amazon Fire TV
Android (mobile)
Android TV
Apple TV
iOS
macOS (desktop) (Keyboard control only; no gamepad support)
Plex Web App (Chrome and Chromium based browsers only)*
Windows (desktop) (Keyboard control only; no gamepad support)
more app support coming soon!
This feature is fine, but I would really like to have more control and deactivate features that they try to push on me.
I don't need news and I probably want need these games, and I don't like stuff just 'showing up' unasked.
There's no way to force a refresh either.
I tried using a Windows 10 laptop (Ryzen 5 2500u) to see if it was any fault of the raspberry pi, and noticed the decoding time for the video went from 1.8ms on my rpi to like 14ms on my laptop, which was using the Vega gpu to perform the decoding. No bueno. Was able to turn the fps up to 60, and things seemed okay, but when I got into a good action game (Warhammer Vermintide 2), it was not a good experience. The latency on decoding was just causing too much of a dissonance between my input and the video output for it to be playable.
I will note that the video decoding was lightning fast on the raspberry pi, though. Makes me wonder if maybe the rpi 3.0/3b might perform better. I don't really want to buy one to find out (would rather wait and get a 4.0 once they release support for it).
In the end, I really couldn't get anything running to my liking. I'm sure it is fantastic for game streaming for some people, though.
Getting started is also annoying as it seems you need to manually provide bioses and there don’t seem to be any good guides by the labs team. There seems to be a third party tool that does help. https://github.com/vanstinator/core-manager
Finally the supported gpus in arcade’s page seem to not be correct. My hackintosh is running a gt710 which is in the list but trying to play anything results in a parsec error 15000.
I wonder if it's possible to play a local multiplayer game using this/parsec or moonlight. I'd love to set it up such that I could play something like Unreal Tournment split screen with two different people in two different locations streaming the same game to both devices and using our controllers are separate inputs on the same computer.
I'm curious though how this will work on all the different devices. One of the benefits of plex is that it's available on everything--iOS, roku, samsung TV, apple TV, you name it. However, most of those controls are not meant for arcade games.
If anyone from the plex team is reading this--I'd love to hear if there's any plans for controller integration or anything?
Looks like it's built on Parsec + RetroArch.
I would like to use Plex for streaming but it does not support my particular set of media use cases (ISO files). That may have changed but I gave up waiting years ago.
Conversely, Xbmc requires X11, and last I checked (2016) didn’t do a great job at central server for storage and pretty much only ran on Linux/Windows thick client hosts.