Fed up with their Apple TV, Gabe and Erik talk about Plex and the Roku Media Player. They cover what Plex is, how it works, and the advantages and disadvantages of pairing Plex with the Roku. Authorizing… Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 0:00 The discussion begins (as so many episodes do) by relating the challenges of the leading solution in the field: in this case the Apple TV. “The problem is you’re trying to pull a very large file from a very distant place” “And we’re spoiled” Choosing Plex Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 2:02 What is Plex? Plex is a media management application with server and client components. Since its early days as a fork of the XBMC Media Center, it has grown to a cross-plaform service which includes a cloud component. Serving your Files The Synology is a terrific NAS but it’s not the only server to provide an easy setup for Plex. On the Synology it takes a couple of clicks to add a Plex server. Once it’s up and running, the Plex server is controlled through the same web interface as from any other Plex server. The Plex server on the Synology runs well enough but large MKV files had a noticeable lag when loading. I think the default RAM configuration on a Synology is too small to run all of the standard file sharing services PLUS a Plex server. Using a Mac Mini as the Plex server provided a better experience. The files all still lived on the Synology NAS, so that rules out disk performance or network streaming as a bottleneck. One primary benefit of the Plex server running on the Synology is that it starts at boot and all of the files are available at any time. On the Mac Mini you’ll need to setup some scripts and cron jobs to check and remount the NAS if the Mini reboots. I’ve ordered more memory for my Synology since I really just want the Plex server running on my NAS. I don’t really want a Mac Mini media server. Let’s Talk about the Roku Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 10:27 Metadata Several years ago, I was using XBMC on an Xbox (the first one, not the new One–that’s not at all confusing, Microsoft), and I loved the way it displayed so much information about my movies and shows, but its crawler wasn’t as robust as it could be. I dug in a little, and saw that the best crawler (installed as a plugin) used TheTVDB.com as its data source, and I learned to follow the recommended file-naming conventions and manually edit the xml files (gross) when there were errors. This made everything look the way I wanted, and life was good. Somewhere around this time, I started to run my media center on a Mac Mini, which allowed me to start using MPEG encoded movies (the Xbox hardware had trouble decoding anything other than AVIs). This switch to the MPEG-4 format meant smaller file sizes (storage wasn’t especially cheap then) and the potential to utilize atoms to store the metadata in the video files themselves. The nice thing about this is that I never had to worry about what happened when a file which was renamed by iTunes or whatever, because the file itself held the data, including its “album art”. Initially, I manually set this at the command line using AtomicParsley, but soon enough, I wrote a script to do the heavy lifting for me. The next sea change for me was when I got an Apple TV and saw how television show purchases made through iTunes had better season and episode data than the DVDs I had ripped and encoded, with a fuller episode summary. This led me back into the atoms and I learned about what Apple was adding to the defaults. Fortunately, some smart people were there first and this fork of the original AtomicParsley project was able to write the Apple additions. It was a little hacky then, but this fork is well-maintained, and the process is much easier now. At this point, you are probably thinking that the word “easier” shouldn’t be in the discussion at all, bu
Fed up with their Apple TV, Gabe and Erik talk about Plex and the Roku Media Player. They cover what Plex is, how it works, and the advantages and disadvantages of pairing Plex with the Roku. Authorizing… Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 0:00 The discussion begins (as so many episodes do) by relating the challenges of the leading solution in the field: in this case the Apple TV. “The problem is you’re trying to pull a very large file from a very distant place” “And we’re spoiled” Choosing Plex Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 2:02 What is Plex? Plex is a media management application with server and client components. Since its early days as a fork of the XBMC Media Center, it has grown to a cross-plaform service which includes a cloud component. Serving your Files The Synology is a terrific NAS but it’s not the only server to provide an easy setup for Plex. On the Synology it takes a couple of clicks to add a Plex server. Once it’s up and running, the Plex server is controlled through the same web interface as from any other Plex server. The Plex server on the Synology runs well enough but large MKV files had a noticeable lag when loading. I think the default RAM configuration on a Synology is too small to run all of the standard file sharing services PLUS a Plex server. Using a Mac Mini as the Plex server provided a better experience. The files all still lived on the Synology NAS, so that rules out disk performance or network streaming as a bottleneck. One primary benefit of the Plex server running on the Synology is that it starts at boot and all of the files are available at any time. On the Mac Mini you’ll need to setup some scripts and cron jobs to check and remount the NAS if the Mini reboots. I’ve ordered more memory for my Synology since I really just want the Plex server running on my NAS. I don’t really want a Mac Mini media server. Let’s Talk about the Roku Listen to this section on SoundCloud: 10:27 Metadata Several years ago, I was using XBMC on an Xbox (the first one, not the new One–that’s not at all confusing, Microsoft), and I loved the way it displayed so much information about my movies and shows, but its crawler wasn’t as robust as it could be. I dug in a little, and saw that the best crawler (installed as a plugin) used TheTVDB.com as its data source, and I learned to follow the recommended file-naming conventions and manually edit the xml files (gross) when there were errors. This made everything look the way I wanted, and life was good. Somewhere around this time, I started to run my media center on a Mac Mini, which allowed me to start using MPEG encoded movies (the Xbox hardware had trouble decoding anything other than AVIs). This switch to the MPEG-4 format meant smaller file sizes (storage wasn’t especially cheap then) and the potential to utilize atoms to store the metadata in the video files themselves. The nice thing about this is that I never had to worry about what happened when a file which was renamed by iTunes or whatever, because the file itself held the data, including its “album art”. Initially, I manually set this at the command line using AtomicParsley, but soon enough, I wrote a script to do the heavy lifting for me. The next sea change for me was when I got an Apple TV and saw how television show purchases made through iTunes had better season and episode data than the DVDs I had ripped and encoded, with a fuller episode summary. This led me back into the atoms and I learned about what Apple was adding to the defaults. Fortunately, some smart people were there first and this fork of the original AtomicParsley project was able to write the Apple additions. It was a little hacky then, but this fork is well-maintained, and the process is much easier now. At this point, you are probably thinking that the word “easier” shouldn’t be in the discussion at all, bu