Tag: plexapp

Hardware-Accelerated Plex media server on Ubuntu?

Plex logoI have been using Plex media server on my AMD six core machine for a while and its good but cooling is a issue. About 9 months ago I installed a Nvidia graphics card hoping to take advantage of the new hardware acceleration option. However I realised its a non-starter as it required a Intel chipset not AMD.

Then over the last few months I got my hands on a secondhand HP Z800 workstation with 4x quad core 2.8 ghz processors (yes 16 cores in total). It came with 12 gig of memory which I was planning to upgrade if things work out. It came with a PCI-Express Nvida Geforce graphics card, so I was thinking everything is set. just install Ubuntu with Plex media server, install the proprietary Nvidia display drivers and sit back and enjoy?

I wish…

Here is Plex transcoding inception from 1080p with DTS (Blu-ray sourced) to something suitable for my Pixel 4 (I had to turn off play original, to force it to do the transcoding)transcoding with htop

You can see it much clearer in the htop terminal. Look at those cores running transcoding tasks.

Plex with transcoding

Here is Plex not transcoding inception from 1080p with DTS (Blu-ray sourced) to my Pixel 4

not transcoding with Htop

Quite different from the above, the machines is hardly doing anything over its 16 cores. But the bandwidth is a problem outside a local network environment

Plex not transcoding

If anyone has successfully got hardware-Accelerated Streaming working on a Ubuntu server, let me know!

Plex’s future, without its server?

halt and catch fire

Plex recently announced they were making major changes and that we should be excited about Desktop AF. What wasn’t said was the media server is being killed?

Years back, the most common Plex implementation was to attach a home theater PC (HTPC) to a TV to stream media. With the proliferation of cheap streaming devices like the Chromecast, Apple TV, and Fire TV, almost no one bothers with HTPCs anymore. Thus, Plex is retiring the TV interface with the launch of its new desktop app. This will, no doubt, upset some Plex fans nonetheless.

dates

Upset? Absolutely and its now in direct competition with Kodi too.

I’m now in the market for a alternative to Plex. Originally I was looking at Emby a long while ago but frankly I don’t want to switch to another freemium product.

Jellyfin and Triton look good but its early days.

Jellyfin is a personal media server. The Jellyfin project was started as a result of Emby’s decision to take their code closed-source, as well as various philosophical differences with the core developers. Jellyfin seeks to be the free software alternative to Emby and Plex to provide media management and streaming from a dedicated server to end-user devices.

TRITON is a media pipeline that aims to go one step further than services like Jellyfin and Plex provide. Media is fetched from a magnitude of supported protocols (HTTP, S3-compatible, Usenet, etc), converted into multiple different quality levels, and then uploaded to a S3-compatible storage provider. This enables cheap storage and ensures that buffering is never a problem.

Lots more research is needed, including a look at what others are doing with the Plex announcement. Although I did find Ampache and Airsonic which could be useful for my mixcloud issues. Imagine if they were federated too?

Podcasts in Plex? But which Plex?

Verge podcast on PlexPodcasts on Plex, at long last?

I was excited by the news of podcasts on plex

So excited I decided to switch to the beta version to give it a try.

Now I know its beta but after closer inspection of the blog post, I noticed everything was focused on the player application. As most of my Plex use is as a server, I was expecting to see podcasts as a plex scanner/agent option or even better a library type.

Currently it seems like you can create a podcast library on the Plex player/app but that doesn’t sync back to anywhere. I expected that under my user account I would see the new podcast library on my Plex media server too. Trying to create a new podcast library also goes no where when using the web interface to the media server.

My hope is this is just a beta issue and it will be rolled out to the media server too. Because right now the point of Plex is the sync capability around one app. This does make me wonder about Plex’s previous move which upset a lot of people.

Till this is clear, I’ll be sticking with my elaborate podcast sync system.

Boxee & Plex go for the cloud

In the old days it was kind of clear…

  • XBMC was the original and was a lovely but a little rough around the edges, maybe the kind of person you have to explain before taking him home to meet the parents.
  • Boxee was XBMC’s social and flirty younger sister who wanted to settle down and become famous.
  • Plex was the good younger brother who acted older than he was and went to oxford to hang around talking to hipsters.

Ok thats the way I think about it at least…

But its interesting that Boxee has started to slice of ties with the original XBMC community (too famous too fast?) and also started to making in-roads on Plex with there new cloud system called cloudee.

I stick with XBMC because I like the rough around the edges style. But I will be the first to say, I’ve got nothing against the cloud for home entertainment, just doesn’t really feature in my life right now.