It'll be nice to have a media player that's native and not running in a browser, but according to what i can see in the forums, the UI is the usual brand of "our way or the high way" with little to no configuration or customization and even at least in one way a step back² from Plex Home Theater, which this replaces.
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.
Agreed. I watch a lot of sports and have been disappointed that they removed slow motion and frame by frame advance years ago and have little interest in adding it back. Still, I am paid for Plex pass to support them because I find it works better than anything else for me.
Agreed. I love what Plex allows me to do it, but the UI has taken a nose dive in recent months. Or at least the Roku app, which looks identical to this, has.
Though for all their steps backwards, this is a big step in the right direction. According to them, they can now develop and improve upon a sole app for all devices. With this move, we'll finally start seeing more features and refinement. See -> "massively improved efficiency when it comes to adding features and fixing bugs"
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 settings
Consumer software options must be added carefully and parsimoniously to avoid the "death" envisioned by the employee. Apps like this should just do the right thing, and PMs should spend some time figuring out what that is. If you want to spend hours tweaking something then get a bicycle or something. Once the interface is complicated at all, it basically just lies to 90% of users. (cf. Facebook and their ever-changing privacy options)
There's a bit of context that goes along with this, but in short the above quote is ridiculous, because they're throwing up a slippery slope argument in response to the smallest and most reasonable request, in a situation where there is no "right thing", since the software serves different people in different ways and making one way that serves all equally well is impossible, and hard-coding one locks out one user base. This is made worse by them locking out previous users with their changes by disabling usage patterns they previously provided.
this 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.
There's an add-on for Kodi called PleXBMC that lets you look up your Plex libraries, and some skins have specific support that replaces the default XBMC libraries.
Just in case i can save myself a bunch of time messing around: Will Kodi and PleXBMC run directly on android and connect to plex media server instances without needing an intermediary?
I'll admit it's not perfect (and would like to customize some of the options), but once they released that new UI in beta I couldn't stand using the old one. In general I find it much easier to navigate - and prettier to look at.
Yeah, before I tried it I envisioned some kind of VLC-like interface... but no, I installed it and it requires a key be input to identify and it goes fullscreen.. oh well, the browser app and mobile apps are fine.
It seems to work... not amazing, but okay, in windowed mode (settings, disable fullscreen). It still needs a "not ten foot" mode and proper scroll wheel support, but the mouse actually works with it by default, and it seems to have finally fixed the previously XBMC-derived trait of hidden menus and options with no on-screen controls for them.
I've been using it a few hours now. My only real annoyances are the lack of a quit button, and that they have buggered up remote control (harmony) support - windows htpc/steambox/vr rig.
Plex was great until they forced the Plex Pass on us. I have now switched to using the Kodi [http://kodi.tv/] and Emby [https://emby.media/] combo instead.
> Plex was great until they forced the Plex Pass on us
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.
Kodi all the way. IIRC, Plex is based on XBMC (now Kodi) but made proprietary. There's no need to sacrifice your freedom when Kodi exists and works very well.
Full discourage, I work for plex on plex media player and smart tv platforms,
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.
Before I could access my media server with the iPhone app. Then all of a sudden I was forced to register for a Plex Pass to be able do this.
For me at least, that made the whole app unusable.
Yeah there's nothing about Plex or any apps that requires a Plex Pass. When an app for a new platform is in beta it is put behind the Pass, but that's it.
For iOS, they actually require Plex Pass for syncing, which is kinda a shame as I, the server owner have it, but why should my users have to subscribe?
Sorry you missed out on the $75 lifetime license. It was worth every penny and will continue to be because I will be using Plex for many, many years to come.
Totally agree that the $75 lifetime was so worth it and glad I jumped on that when it was available. Personally, I think the current asking price of $149 is still way, way worth it for what Plex Pass provides.
Well, they are a company now and maintaining a half dozen apps isn't cheap. The alternative to a modest subscription would be ads; I prefer the subscription.
For anyone that is curious, I just discovered that Emby used to be MediaBrowser. A better name, but as someone who only checks in on these things infrequently I was very confused to discover "Kodi" and "Emby", only to realise I already knew them under different names.
Yup. I paid for the Android application and was excited to use it on my Xbox One. But nope.
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.
I am using Emby as a central media server. Emby takes care of the hosting and indexing of the material. Then I have multiple Kodi clients that consume the contents from Emby.
Does it sync your playback across devices and allow you to sync items for offline viewing? That's the main reason I paid for PlexPass, but would switch back to a complete open source option if it does that.
Although I also enjoy the ability to share my server with family and keep a separate kid-friendly profile for my daughter.
Took me a while...a long while...to wade through all of the fluff describing how plex is so awesome and can do everything before I found it still won't play ISOs. I guess it is awesome, it does all you need....as long as you preprocess and encode your media to a format it accepts. I feel like they really bury this key piece of information (as if, "who would even want that?"), but maybe I am a dinosaur with my preference for the quality of ripped vs. streamed media.
Anyways, I could do with a simple soup to nuts spec sheet and less marketing fluff.
To me, DVD video "is" a folder of VOB files; the ISO is a redundant wrapper, and I wouldn't expect them to play it any more than they play e.g. movies within zip files. So, do they support direct play of VOBs?
I would guess the majority of users follow less than legal methods of obtaining their media, which is what I hear it handles well. It is unfortunate that they don't support this though.
I'm not sure why ISO vs other containers would be a matter of legal methods. I've ripped plenty of my DVDs and never thought for once to keep them in an ISO. Using MKVs allows me to compress the size and still keep extra audio tracks, subtitles, and chapters.
Sometimes the extras, trailers, etc. on the disc are interesting, but not interesting enough to go through separately processing them just to make a media player happy. I'd rather stick the disc in, rip and have a perfect simulation of physical media when using my media player. My Dune player does a great job at this.
Even for that, can't you just rip the disk to files (as a VIDEO_TS directory)? I believe Plex handles that, but I could be wrong.
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.
Actually, it's really not good at handling that sort of thing in my experience. The Plex server doesn't really browse the filesystem, it scans folders for media files and then parses the names. If you follow their naming scheme with your files it does a great job pulling in metadata and such, but if not it doesn't do so great.
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.
The most interesting new feature to me, beyond the UI itself - there's now some algorithmic generation in the movie/TV screens.
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 run Plex Home Theater on my Rasp Pi 2 and it provides the best experience of any plex client I have ever used (Chromecast, AppleTV + PlexConnect, FireTV Box, Xbox 360, Xbox One). I'm VERY disappointed in the new UI as I hate the "Modern"/Xbox look it has. I do NOT want side scrolling or variable-sized posters as it's very hard to follow. I want my on deck, recently added, and a quick way to browse and entire section. This is a MASSIVE step backwards in UI and I will hang on to PHT for as long as I possibly can.
The Plex app on the Amazon Fire TV (and stick) is fantastic. I'm a big Plex fan, but I don't immediately see any incremental benefits to running Plex Media Player, or why I would dedicate a Raspberry Pi 2 (much less a Mac or Windows box) to my TV for the purpose.
I've not been impressed with the Fire TV Plex app. The video stops playing every 3 minutes. I have a roku 3 and roku stick and never have the issues.
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).
I have a Windows box under my TV that runs Plex. It also runs a web browser, which means it's incredibly simple to look something up on Google Maps, order some food from Seamless, etc. - not to mention be able to video chat on Skype and play video on any web site out there, not just ones that have apps for platform X.
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.
If you frequently sit in front of your HTPC-enabled TV with a laptop, connecting the two together using http://synergy-project.org/ is amazing, UX-wise. You don't ever have to pick up a remote, or try to get Bluetooth peripherals to work over an 8' distance; you just flick your mouse up "past" the top of your laptop screen, do a few things on your TV, and flick back.
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.
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 use a wireless mouse that sits on my coffee table. I also have a wireless keyboard that I keep on the shelf underneath the coffee table, but most of the time I don't need it.
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 good news is that you've been able to do this for years. Not sure why you came here to complain about something you've (nearly) always been able to do with OS-provided media players or VLC.
I'm not talking about opening videos on my computer, don't be ridiculous.
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.
Ah, I had assumed that because the plex app in the announcement is an app for opening videos on your computer (I know that Plex does other apps as well, but this SPECIFIC one is just desktop OSs), that you were talking about that.
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).
Personally I don't agree with you at all. I prefer what you call "media browsing experience" or "As a user I dont care about files and folder, I just want to watch movies.. show me that!" It is about time to get rid of the filesystem concept.
But anyway in Plex you browse by folder since the beginning, and you can still do it in this new version of media player, as you could do it with a file browser + VLC solution
This is good news. I'm using RasPlex on a Raspberry Pi 2, which for all its shortcomings is the best home entertainment solution I could find. This has the potential to be better (where better means more reliable, with better user experience).
I really like the Home Theater but I really think the killer feature would be adding Netflix/Amazon/Hulu seamlessly. I know they've tried but have limited success.
The build instructions are pretty straightforward, I think the biggest issue is it needs Qt 5.6, which you're not going to find in major distributions at the moment.
It appears to be a complete machine image for the Pi: "Pex Media Player for embedded devices is a small Linux based operating system that turns your Raspberry Pi 2 or Intel HTPC into a dedicated media playback device."
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)
That is the RasPi port of Plex Home Theater -- the previous player which is no longer being developed.
"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.)"
Seems a little confusing yes, but looks like they rewrote the player from scratch to better unify interfaces across platforms and improve usability. It's also open source [0].
As with most new features, they're releasing for PlexPass first and moving to (free) public availability after a waiting period.
Nope, just that the preview is for Plex Pass subscribers. They usually roll things out at previews for the premium people first.
> 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.
No. They stated that Home Theater is still available and open sourced, although they are not working on further development and are focusing on the new Plex Media Player instead.
Does plex finally support reading files from network shares?
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.
So, just snagged this, I've been using plex for about as long as it has existed - went from XBMC (on a hacked original XBOX, of course) to Kodi to PMC....
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.
The constant Plex Pass reminders are very annoying also.
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.
What authentication? If you just use it in your local subnet you don't need to log in. I've been using the free version for years and I do not have a Plex account.
Wrong. On Roku, at least, if you want to watch Plex you MUST have an online account now. And, you're not able to manually add your server if the Roku client can't auto-discover it. For some reason I have to do that, but they took that option away.
They've "streamlined" it to the point of unusability.
For Roku, you want the "Plex Classic", instead of "Plex", channel if you don't want to be forced to sign in.
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.
Skip sign-in, manual server entry will definitely be part of Plex Media Player, right now we don't support it since the app is gated with plexpass which means you _need to sign in_ so we can validate your subscription status. but signing in will not be required when the app leaves preview and plexpass requirement is dropped.
source: I wrote skip-sign in, manual server entry in the core platform.
Ripping DVD's/BluRays is a very popular way to do it. Plex also has "channels" for streaming content but they are a crap-shoot on if they work any given day and I've all but given up on them.
>Ripping DVD's/BluRays is a very popular way to do it.
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.
It's extremely reliable if you have something like Sonarr/Sickbeard constantly running (checking rss feeds every 15min or so). A lot of stuff gets DMCA'd be there is a still a ton of content there, it's by no means dried up or dead. Sonarr/Sickrage can use torrents and usenet though so it can fallback to torrents (or use them primarily if you desire).
I have a fairly large Plex library that's 100% legal.
- 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.
The new UI for Plex Media Server is a big improvement over the old one, in my opinion. Plex has some limits, but it does one thing better than any other option, and I continue to be a huge fan.
It was great until they redid their UI. Now it is absolutely painful.
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.
You know... Or provide a better way to pay for and access their content...
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.
Certainly the only stuff I watch through a media player is stuff I couldn't find on iTunes, Netflix, or Amazon. I'm sure there are legit use cases, although none spring straight to mind, except for people who encoded a bunch of their DVDs a decade ago.
I record TV with Windows Media Center. While I can use an XBox 360 as a Media Center Extender, buying a bunch of them is a bit ridiculous. We use Plex to stream that content throughout the house. It's not as nice as having a native extender, but it works quite well.
This is really nice and all, but only bored billionaires can afford the kind of data plan you need for movie watching. Ripping DVDs (legally) is still much cheaper. And I can store them offline where I want.
Thankfully, Plex works great for local media as well. I run a Plex server on one machine and that gives me a nice way to browse and cast media from my NAS to multiple rooms in the house. It's actually the easiest and most functional method I've found for watching local media in my living room via Chromecast (using my phone just as a remote).
Agreed. I got a Chromecast recently for media streaming from my PC. I've looked at several options, including Emby which is mentioned in this thread, but Plex is by far the best all-round choice.
I also use the "Videostream for Chromecast" chrome app a lot. It's less of a media library than a "play this on my chromecast" tool with an Android remote that can also choose files from your hard drive. I have less buffering with it, and it seems to know the media formats that chromecast supports natively better, as it doesn't transcode nearly as many files as Plex does.
Sadly the server is not open-source which in the linux world means it works on the one version of the one distro that they tested it on and anything else is a crapshoot.
it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. There are packages for Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS. I've been using the Ubuntu package on Debian unstable for years and never had an issue. Still, it would have been nice if the server was free software.
My broadband has no quota, my 4g mobile plan has no quota.
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.
Which 4G operator/plan you have that does unlimited 4G roaming? I have 3 that sort of has free roaming but their data speed gets crippled if you go over some not very high (100MB or so I guess?) threshold.
I have an older Three contract that they are still honouring, and I haven't yet experienced speed restrictions that were noticeable at all, or been capped.
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.
Kimsufi is popular on the Plex.tv forums but I've found this [0] to be the best deal around. Get an i7, 16GB Ram, 2x3TB HD, 20TB bandwidth (out, in is not metered), 1Gbps pipe for only ~$30-35/mo
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?
Unlimited. When we moved house recently our main internet connection was my phone, and I didn't hold back on streaming HD video at any point. Racked up close to 30GB in that month, and had no problems at all from Three.
AFAIK I have previously used several hundred GB in a month over Three (when moving house) and it wasn't throttled at any point. Anecdotal, but I'm not aware of an obvious limit.
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.
² http://i.imgur.com/Ygde8Px.jpg