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Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

me your dad posted:

I currently have Plex running on my laptop, with output to our Roku. Currently we just use it to stream channels but I'd like to start ripping DVDs we buy for our daughter.

My laptop probably isn't powerful enough but our upstairs desktop computer is.

Can I run two Plex servers and have the Roku connect to the laptop for streaming and the desktop for local media?

Should work fine. I don't have a Roku, but I do have multiple servers and they just show up as an additional set of libraries.

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Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

TraderStav posted:

Amazon and HBO announced today that Prime video is getting HBO shows. I don't know if that includes current runs or just completed seasons.

Just completed seasons over 3 years old.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

I'm pondering consolidating things in my living room a bit and going from a dedicated HTPC running Plex HT to a Kindle Fire TV running plex. Anyone else made that jump? How sad am I going to be?

I've looked at things like the Roku in the past, and while it will do what I want, from an interface and speed perspective, an HTPC beats the living poo poo out of the Roku, so I'm a bit wary of the set-top box experience (chop chop plex on XBone plz)

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Stick100 posted:

If Plex recognizes everything then you should be fine. From the couple hours I spent with Plex Fire TV it seemed about as good as Plex HT. Where will the media be served from if you're removing the HTPC?

From a machine in my office over Ethernet. I moved the Plex server a while ago.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Malmanous posted:

I did this exact thing two weeks ago and I love it. It works perfectly with no stutters on any of my movies.

Ordered one, THIS BETTER BE GREAT OR ELSE :argh:

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

teagone posted:

What are the specs of your Plex server?

i7-3770, 8gb ram, ssd for os and mirrored WD red drives for media. Probably the biggest bottleneck is my MoCA run between the living room and office, but that's a pretty reliable 100mbps.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

teagone posted:

Yeah, a Fire TV running the Plex App will be pretty great then :). Not sure where it is in the settings, but be sure to set the Plex App on your Fire TV to always try and Direct Play with transcode as a fallback.

Looks like that is pretty much the default settings. I did get bit by the "lol plex on fire tv doesn't decode dts/dolby digital" bug, so pretty much all audio has to get transcoded, we'll see how annoying that gets.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

teagone posted:

Huh, its just a bug though right? The Fire TV should be more capable of decoding DTS/Dolby D. The Roku 3 is able to, but its Plex app is hot garbage in comparison.

It's a known bug, but there's been no talk of a timeframe for a possible fix. Of the non PC devices, Fire TV probably has best plex app, but holy poo poo every other app on that platform is bad (even manages to have a bad Netflix app).

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

I did notice this weekend that if you use the screen size adjustment settings on the FireTV to scale to your display, Plex is retarded and won't display full screen.

So if anyone else has this problem, that's the fix! There's overscan adjustment settings in the FireTV Plex settings menu, but apparently they literally do nothing. :confused:

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

chemosh6969 posted:

Can you not access Plex as a media server on a PS4 as you can on other consoles and devices? Do you really have to use a browser?

Nope, PS4 doesn't support DLNA.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Wow, Plex coming to both Xbox One and Xbox 360:

quote:

Plex today announced the release of Plex for both Xbox One and Xbox 360, its first TV app available on both Xbox gaming platforms, with an updated design that makes it easy to browse and enjoy personal media on the big-screen. The new design, which puts media artwork center stage, as well as incorporates new discovery features, will be brought to big-screen Plex apps in the future. Working with Microsoft, Plex for Xbox also supports Xbox native functionality like voice and gesture controls with Kinect.

“Plex for Xbox is an exciting milestone in our continued effort to help people enjoy their personal media, wherever they happen to keep it, on all of their screens.” says Scott Olechowski, Chief Product Officer and Plex Co-Founder. “It also happens to be the platform most requested by Plex enthusiasts, and we have worked hard to design an experience that will delight them and Xbox fans alike.”

Plex for Xbox One is available on Tuesday, October 7, to Plex Pass premium subscribers for free in the Apps store on Xbox Live. Plex for Xbox 360 will be available very soon. For those without a Plex Pass, Plex for Xbox One and Xbox 360 will be made available in the future for a one-time fee. Visit Plex.tv and read the Plex Blog to learn more about the new Plex apps for Xbox.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/09/prweb12191240.htm

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

porkface posted:

Not to be a dick, because I realize Plex isn't truly free, but is there a way I can give Plex the money for Xbox Live instead of Microsoft? It's a software that doesn't really require Microsoft to keep the Live network up and running.

I guess we'll see tomorrow, but I'm assuming that like the other video apps that Plex doesn't require Xbox Live Gold.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Yeah, Plex on xbone has been fine for me, seems like it has better codec support than the firetv (just going on what I'm seeing direct play vs transcoding)

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Mr.Trifecta posted:

So looking to get into Plex and getting a NAS. Having never done streaming or have a setup for it. Can NAS's be used to run the server or is it better with a standard computer? Anyone have any recommendations for a NAS? Was looking at the usual suspects of Drobo, Synology, QNAP etc.

Depends on the client set up. If your client needs transcoding a lot of the NAS units don't have the horsepower to pull that off. What were you planning on using? Do you have a receiver?

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Unacknowledged posted:

So this month or next I'm planning on moving to a more permanent solution for plex, downloads, storage, and other stuff that isn't my primary machine. It's a more expensive route, but I'm leaning towards a newer mac mini and a drobo. Anyone have any experiences to talk me out of this? I'm open to hearing other suggestions if anyone cares to share any with me. Mac will have more of a purpose than just a plex server / PHT box, eventually anyway.

I went this way for a while, but eventually moved to a more powerful server and a fire tv. It worked fine, I used the apple remote, which plex does a really good job of mapping functions to. It was pretty bulletproof for the wife/kids to use.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Medullah posted:

Is there any way for Plex to deal with movies that are split into multiple files? I have a bunch of movies that are split into 700mb chunks - Plex sees them but starts playing a random one. I'm assuming there's no setting to make that work without combining the videos?

Plex has pretty good documentation about this:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200264966-Naming-Stacked-or-Multi-Part-Movies

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

TheScott2K posted:

How's the XBox One app? I've been thinking of getting PlexPass for it since the XBone seems to handle 60hz HDTV streams really well (while the Chromecast tops out at 30 fps), making it a candidate for One True Box status - does it have a greater ability for Direct Play? Being able to let my wife watch something without my main desktop having to transcode it would be a real plus.

I think its better than the roku/fire tv apps, although not quite as good as PHT on an actual HTPC.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

savesthedayrocks posted:

Can you set an apple time machine backup to a win8 box? I've moved away from windows to an all apple environment

Yeah, it's a bit janky:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-nas-windows-share-time-machine-backup/

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

havenwaters posted:

Seems like a Plex issue since you can get 5.1 with Kodi/XBMC while using the PleXBMC add on or through Plex setting XBMC as your external player. You may also be able to use the Photo Viewer (which can play video files) as your external player. You lose plex's ability to track what you've watched and there is some setup involved for the kodi stuff (either by itself or as an external player). Photo viewer I'm not 100% sure on with respect to 5.1 audio.

No, it's a Fire TV issue from my understanding. Kodi can do decode itself, Plex relies on what the FireTV provides, and it doesn't handle that natively, but requires a receiver to decode.

I assume Plex people are waiting for Amazon to support more codecs, which will never happen because amazon lol. There are the workarounds you mentioned with external players.

Maneki Neko fucked around with this message at 19:56 on May 28, 2015

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Sheikh Djibouti posted:

Many thanks! Sounds like there's a reasonable chance we can go in the direction I've been thinking about, and I'll definitely check out ffmpeg (my OS is Windows 10) and mkvtoolnix.

We seem to have gathered a ton of old DVDs over the years, probably about 250-300 in all. We'll rip alot of them but probably not nearly all. And if it comes to a choice, I'll rip fewer to keep a reasonably decent resolution.

I'll still have the DVDs, at least for now, they'll just be buried in the basement, so (I think) I don't care about mirroring. Any ballpark sense of how much average space per DVD the mp4s are likely to take up? The available RAID hard drives seem to include some extremely large sizes (e.g., 4TB WD Reds), so hopefully a two bay NAS would be big enough.

I did the same thing a while back, but I did do mirroring, just so I never had to redo that process again. I did a pair of Mirrored 3TB and did conversions using Handbrake to mp4 for DVDs and MKV for Blurays. DVD movies averaged around 700mb for what looks like decent quality to me, Blurays ended up around 3-6GB. I usually kept the original audio tracks and also added a stereo version.

I've got around 800 gigs free left out of those 3TB, and that also includes me ripping all our TV dvds as well.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Moey posted:

What dicks. Dumping PHT for this and requiring plex pass.

What, just need plex pass for the preview

"It’ll be free for everyone after the preview period."

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Atomizer posted:

My Plex server is coming along nicely. I'm at 300 titles and adding a couple dozen every day. It's still going to take a few months to finish ripping all the discs and to transcode them though. Interestingly, I'm running into a small number of unreadable DVDs; there's no correlation between age or brand of disc, and indeed most or all of the oldest (>10 years old) DVDs are fine. Nevertheless there's a failure rate of a few percent, for anyone curious. All the more reason to get rid of thousands of DVDs and have everything accessible on a single server.

One question though: does anyone use drive management software like Storage Spaces or DrivePool?

I ripped about that meant DVDs and I don't think I head any unreadable discs, that's interesting.

I've been using storage spaces since the Windows 8 days (upgraded my plex server to Windows 10 as soon as it was available) and its been rock solid for me.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Kalenden posted:

So with this new deal for the plex pass, is it worth it?

Is lifetime guaranteed lifetime for example? I got recently bummed out by, for instance, Evernote changing their subscription plans.

Also, is Plex likely to evolve into a good direction?
Just looking into insight for a lifetime-type deal such as this

I bought Plex lifetime back in 2015 and have more than gotten my monies worth. They've been good about moving the platform forward and adding features and I don't see that changing anytime soon for the enthusiast market.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

I'm getting tired of the Tizen apps on my Samsung tv and was going to add either a Roku Ultra or an Apple TV 4k. How much of a pain in the rear end is Plex on Apple TV these days? Is it going to be mostly transcoding?

Most of my Plex content is H264 video, with audio being a mix of AAC/AC3/DTS (I generally tried to include both AAC/AC3 or AAC/DTS where possible, but not every file has AAC).

Maneki Neko fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Nov 24, 2019

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Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

I have an extremely basic question that I have been finding multiple answers to, and so I thought I would ask here. If it's the wrong place, I apologize. I've been thinking about ripping all my dvds and setting up a home server for plex and was wondering if anyone here had done the same. If I have approximately 1,000 dvds and rip them all, I'm guessing that's around 4tb of data, which I could stick on an external raid drive with 10tb of space and attach to an old mac mini to use as a server. Has anyone done anything like this? My major fears are underestimating how much hard drive space I need and also losing all the files after I spend a year or two of Saturdays ripping them all. Are there any angles I'm not considering, or is it feasible to do it with a single external HD with RAID to mirror everything?

I did the same thing years ago but transcoded to MP4 with an AAC audio track and the AC3 audio track, my movies generally landed between 1-2 gigs, with some a bit higher and some a bit lower. That seemed a lot more functional than straight DVD rips.

We aren't watching them as much as we used to the past, but it did mean I could get rid of the boxes of DVDs I had in my garage.

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