Is Plex still a thing?

robj20 said:
The biggest plus for Plex Pass is hardware transcoding. I have a few films such as Planet of the Apes with subtitles that really struggle without it. Probably get Pass as some point, I did try Jellyfin a while back but the app isn't available on my TV.
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Its actually on offer currently at £71 for lifetime sub.. I have been tempted but don't have the cash at the moment.

Only downside i have recently found is that the Plex App on my LG C3 doesnt support Dolby Vision even though the tv does.
 
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I found the native app on my Panasonic TV trash, so slow and laggy.

I like to use Roku devices as Plex clients, they have good support for the codecs etc and perform well.

Use our Plex server every day, don't have any of the remote stuff enabled, all just local.
 
My set up is a biostar J3060 board integrated gpu. Switched to a smaller case with built in laptop brick style PSU last month. Running Xubuntu

All our TVs have the app, as do the tablets. It is better on Roku though.
Have it set up
Films
Series
Kids films
Kids series
Stand up

It's good, get the odd wrong cover and have to fix manually every now and again.
 
Very much still a thing. Use mine regularly and although it's not without fault (sometimes lacking developer focus on core features / fixes, rather than extras), it would be one of my favourite pieces of software for the purpose it serves.
 
Is there a particular codec I need for makemkv?
I get an option to backup the disc to an iso file, I don't actually get to see the structure of the disk to select the parts and create an MKV file?
It isn't a massive issue as I can just backup to ISO and work it out later.
This is a pretty fresh W11 install. just downloading VLC to see if that helps
 
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if your ripping with makemkv you simply pick whichever streams you want and turn it into the .mkv container. you arent encoding so no codec is needed with that. if you want to then encode you will use something like handbrake where you might make it h265 or something, but you can obviously just leave it as a 1:1 if you have the space. if you are doing dvd its such a small amount of space I wouldnt bother, but an HD bluray will be big, and then I'd encode it
 
heeeed said:
if your ripping with makemkv you simply pick whichever streams you want and turn it into the .mkv container. you arent encoding so no codec is needed with that. if you want to then encode you will use something like handbrake where you might make it h265 or something, but you can obviously just leave it as a 1:1 if you have the space. if you are doing dvd its such a small amount of space I wouldnt bother, but an HD bluray will be big, and then I'd encode it
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Thanks for that.
At the moment Im just ripping each disk to an ISO.
I will get a Fire Stick on Friday and then I can experiment by taking a disk image I have ripped and encoding at various bitrates and quality settings to see what we think is acceptable minimum quality and then I can recode all the discs to that standard.
 
Been running Plex for years.

Was running it on Tiny Lenovo PCs for a long time (about 7 years). Last year upgraded to a Lenovo SFF instead, as my library was getting big and the tiny machines only supported 3 SSD max. Currently the machine has i5-12500 with built in graphics. I've got 6 NVME and 1 SSD in there so far, and there is space for 2 more SSD when the prices drop a bit!

The machine easily streams full 4K rips to my TVs built in Plex client with HDR and no transcoding (I disabled it in the settings). Machine only uses 15w of power as a result so I just leave it on 24/7. I also use the same machine to run gamepass cloud streaming connected to the TV. Works fine even with someone else streaming a 4K file over the internet from the server simultaneously.

Bought the PlexPass lifetime deal last year on discount, although it doesn't really add much for my use case. I use that Tautalli add-on for Plex that gives you most of the same functions, and more, as long as you're happy giving it access to your Plex account.


rp2000
 
I nabbed a NAB9 mini PC in the black Fri sales, stuck Proxmox on it and have installed Home Assistant and Plex server in their own LXC containers, they have one for Jellyfin as well so I will install that to compare. I also picked up the Plex lifetime pass.
I have a firestick due today along with extra RAM for the NAB9 (32GB->64GB) so I have some playing around to do. :D
Meanwhile the long and tedious process of ripping all the DVD's to ISO continues. While doing that I can research the best options for encoding them down to something more manageable file size wise, but the ripping process is painfully slow and boring. :(
 
robj20 said:
The biggest plus for Plex Pass is hardware transcoding. I have a few films such as Planet of the Apes with subtitles that really struggle without it. Probably get Pass as some point, I did try Jellyfin a while back but the app isn't available on my TV.
Click to expand...
I've got Jellyfin doing hardware transcoding on my Intel Quicksync CPU'd server. Works a treat - but yes, the app isn't on Samsung yet which is a pain for one of my pals!
 
I have PLEX just running on my desktop, it's just..... there, occasionally I'll watch a move from it, occasionally when I'm 120 miles away I'll also fire up plex on smart tv and watch a movie on it after remotely turing my PC on, it's a cool thing I guess. Kind of want a NAS to reduce leccy but too expensive.
 
Currently using a QNAP NAS with around 108TB of useable storage currently with 2 disk redundancy (RAID 6) - have 4 more 3.5 slots I can use, and 6 2.5 Slots (plus 2 NVME) in the unit to use. I will likely bite the bullet and buy an expansion chassis as well as the NAS itself has a fair wack of compute so will last long term.

Plex itself runs on a Lenovo micro pc on Ubuntu - it was running on a LXC container on proxmox but honestly I found it more hassle than it was worth and Plex is my primary application so it gets its own dedicated box.
 
Yep, Dell R720 with Unraid hosting Plex and various other things. Quite often watch stuff from my library when I'm travelling for work.
 
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