July 25, 201312 yr I've tried Plex on both my Roku and Raspberry PI, and I find both of them are constantly buffering on me to the point of being unwatchable. XBMC on the raspberry plays so much nicer. And IMO, the skinning and themes on XBMC for a home PC is much better than Plex. But for tables, and phones and streaming away from home, Plex is in the Winner. I also like to use a 3rd party scraper for nfo info as well. Its a lot easer IMO when you go to rebuild a front end client. Have you tried a version of the Plex server in the last few months? They introduced a brand new transcoder that has fixed the constant buffering problems I had in the past. Works flawlessly now. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2 Same here. I had a few problems with buffering on the Roku with older versions of PMS, annoying but not bad enough to make it unwatchable. All the versions of PMS since the new transcoder was introduced (maybe last 6 months or so), it has been flawless, no buffering on any of my devices.
July 25, 201312 yr Plex all the way IMHO, although I'm sure the variety of clients I have (none of which are HTPCs) made Plex a better fit for me than XBMC. Plex running on my unRAID server and many different devices including Rokus, Samsung Smart TVs, iPhones, iPads, and laptops, all of which have Plex clients. The Plex Sync feature is also awesome for easily transcoding and storing content on devices such as iPads for offline viewing. Does your Samsung smart tv play .avi and .mkv files without needing plex to transcode the files? I ask because I have another computer that has a pentium 4 which would most likely have problems transcoding the movies but if your Samsung tv supported those files then I may be able to skip building a HTPC... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2 As far as I recall, the Samsung TV has direct played everything I have thrown at it, including .avi and .mkv. I don't recall the server transcoding any content played on the TV. I will stream some of those file types tonight and check to be sure and report back. EDIT: list of file types natively supported by my particular model (although most are the same). http://www.samsung.com/us/support/faq/FAQ00047278/50975/UN55ES6150FXZA
July 25, 201312 yr the Samsung TV has direct played everything I have thrown at it, including .avi and .mkv. TVs can decode mkv now? Seriously? I'm so out of the loop.
July 25, 201312 yr the Samsung TV has direct played everything I have thrown at it, including .avi and .mkv. TVs can decode mkv now? Seriously? I'm so out of the loop. It will depend on the codecs used. MKV is just a container (albeit a very capable one), and the encoding of video, audio, subtitles and chapter info inside the MKV container can be very wide ranging.
July 25, 201312 yr Author Plex all the way IMHO, although I'm sure the variety of clients I have (none of which are HTPCs) made Plex a better fit for me than XBMC. Plex running on my unRAID server and many different devices including Rokus, Samsung Smart TVs, iPhones, iPads, and laptops, all of which have Plex clients. The Plex Sync feature is also awesome for easily transcoding and storing content on devices such as iPads for offline viewing. Does your Samsung smart tv play .avi and .mkv files without needing plex to transcode the files? I ask because I have another computer that has a pentium 4 which would most likely have problems transcoding the movies but if your Samsung tv supported those files then I may be able to skip building a HTPC... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2 As far as I recall, the Samsung TV has direct played everything I have thrown at it, including .avi and .mkv. I don't recall the server transcoding any content played on the TV. I will stream some of those file types tonight and check to be sure and report back. EDIT: list of file types natively supported by my particular model (although most are the same). http://www.samsung.com/us/support/faq/FAQ00047278/50975/UN55ES6150FXZA Wow that is pretty awesome! Thanks for checking that out. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2
July 27, 201312 yr Plex all the way IMHO, although I'm sure the variety of clients I have (none of which are HTPCs) made Plex a better fit for me than XBMC. Plex running on my unRAID server and many different devices including Rokus, Samsung Smart TVs, iPhones, iPads, and laptops, all of which have Plex clients. The Plex Sync feature is also awesome for easily transcoding and storing content on devices such as iPads for offline viewing. Does your Samsung smart tv play .avi and .mkv files without needing plex to transcode the files? I ask because I have another computer that has a pentium 4 which would most likely have problems transcoding the movies but if your Samsung tv supported those files then I may be able to skip building a HTPC... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2 As far as I recall, the Samsung TV has direct played everything I have thrown at it, including .avi and .mkv. I don't recall the server transcoding any content played on the TV. I will stream some of those file types tonight and check to be sure and report back. EDIT: list of file types natively supported by my particular model (although most are the same). http://www.samsung.com/us/support/faq/FAQ00047278/50975/UN55ES6150FXZA Wow that is pretty awesome! Thanks for checking that out. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2 My recollections were correct. The TV direct plays (no transcoding) both .mkv and .avi. As S80_UK states though, it depends on the combination of codec and container, not just container type. See the link in my previous post for a list of container/codec types that the TV can play natively. For reference the .mkv I tested was H.264 and the .avi was MPEG4.
August 27, 201312 yr As far i know plex is based on xbmc. is there a way to share the mysql db of xbmc with plex? I m using xbmc for htpc and planning to setup plex for my samsung tv in the kitchen.
August 27, 201312 yr As far i know plex is based on xbmc. is there a way to share the mysql db of xbmc with plex? I m using xbmc for htpc and planning to setup plex for my samsung tv in the kitchen. NOPE plex doesn't use the mysql possibility that XBMC has and they have additional tables for example plex has so much more ways of sorting your collection that are not possible in XBMC even with smart playlists although Frodo has a lot of improvements on this already
August 27, 201312 yr You can do things the other way around.. use Plex for the DB and use something like PleXBMC to read Plex's DB in XBMC.. it's not too bad http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Add-on%3APleXBMC
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