Slashdot Mirror
Plex Media Player Now Doesn't Require a Subscription; Pass Users Get Kodi Plug-in (engadget.com)
Plex and Kodi, two popular home theater apps, can get both of them together. Plex has announced its new Kodi add-on so you can include your Plex library in Kodi (provided you're a Pass user). From a report on Engadget: The new plugin includes most of the features you'd come to expect from Plex, which means it'll play back nearly any video or music format and cleverly categorize your media library. It simply lets you run the two media centers simultaneously without losing any of your customizations. It's currently only available to Plex Pass subscribers (it will be released publicly soon) and it doesn't yet work with Plex Companion remote control, but it does sport a brand new user interface (UI) that Plex says helps to "showcase some of our new thinking."
Plex and Kodi, two popular home theater apps, can get both of them together.
Plex started off as OSXBMC a fork of the XBMC when the XBMC devs were focused heavily on Windows/Linux.
Who cares? Please talk more about fake news and how we can silence conservatives under the guise of protecting everyone.
I absolutely will not use any product that requires me to authenticate to something outside my firewall to access something inside my firewall. They don't get to know what when where I am accessing my shit.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I have no idea what any of it means, but I'm sure it's awesome.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I use Kodi nee XBMC at home. I have my media library on an SMB server, and it works pretty well with 2Kodi and some VLC clients scattered across iOS and some PCs. Why would i want plex?
https://www.plex.tv/blog/plex-...
A bit more insight into this in the announcement from the company itself rather than an article on the announcement.
"How can we make users pay *US* for them to access their OWN content, on THEIR servers"...?
We put a Plex in your Kodi so you can media while you media.
I'm not sure why this is news, since PlexBMC has been an available plug-in for Kodi for at least the past several years.
I suppose it's just a matter of that the Plex plugin for Kodi was essentially a DLNA client, which the usual crummy presentation that goes along with that, but IIRC it did show friends' Shared Libraries.
I use Kodi at home for personal media access, but I have a Plex Server that shares the same content for external access as well. I hardly ever use it, but I certainly can. The libraries between the two are already lined up, though Kodi and Plex each have their own database and metadata storage. If the two can reconcile those two things so that I only need one back-end for both, that's something I care about.
(Why Kodi/SPMC over Plex? Kodi offers better support for high resolution audio and has support for third-party tools for video playback, just in case I feel like throwing a GTX1080 at 4k upscaling or something).
If, on the other hand, this is just about getting a more polished interface for Plex libraries in Kodi than the one I had via the old Plex plugin, all I can say is "meh."
I'm a lifetime Plex Pass member, but they haven't done anything in years that makes me think a Plex Pass is anything but a donation to the project. I don't care about Kodi integration. I'd rather they work on getting music libraries to suck less or improve content filtering than get cloud streaming or Kodi integration or whatever other bullshit they've been doing lately.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
There are several additional features available through it such as photo tagging, fingerprinting of music, better grouping of songs to give you a 'plex mix' option, and early access to new features.
The best reason to pay for the pass is the same reason as any other open source software. If you don't pony up some money when you find software like this useful, it will cease to exist. If you want new features and new capabilities down the road, the best way to ensure this is to give them the few dollars to help keep them going. It's not like their price is unreasonable for what they deliver.
Ultimately your choice, as the free version is definitely very capable, but I choose to support their efforts with real dollars.
The big feature is offline syncing. If you travel or have a commute you can configure it to sync shows or movies. It will transcode them on to your phone/tablet and you can watch them without a data connection. When you reconnect to your network it will sync the play status and automatically transfer over new episodes you haven't watched yet.
There used to be more features that required it, but they keep moving those over to the free tier after they've been out for a while. Chromecast streaming was one of the killer Plex Pass features when it was first released.
Now, there isn't much reason besides offline support to subscribe unless you want to support the project. I did jump into a Plex Pass before they doubled the price, but the onetime fee is much better IMO.
You can run Plex just fine without a subscription. I run the backend locally on my media server with the Myth plugin and the frontends on Roku and on my phone. It pesters you to create a subscription but you can skip that and just set it up without one. Then I VPN to watch content remotely, without going through the Plex cloud or whatever it is.
12:50 - press return.
My KODI box is independent and only streams local stuff. Its a vault of stability and security in an ever changing software landscape. No logins, it just works. No thanks Plex. Full disclaimer: I have a lifetime sub to Plex, still dont want my Plex players to co-mingle with my KODI players.
Good-bye
"Plex and Kodi, two popular home theater apps, can get both of them together."
Editors are your friend, USE THEM.
For fuck's sake, this is embarrassing. Do you guys even read the submissions or is it just a matter of managing to get the cursor over the "Publish" button?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I'm setting my living room home theater again. I'm cutting the cord.
I'm using Amazon FireTV boxes near each tv for streaming (netflix, amazon and PS VUE for 'cable channel streaming'). I have Tivo OTA Roamio in living room and Tivo minis in other rooms to DVR and stream local HD channels.
In my living room, I'm setting up my good stereo again...THIS is where I'm looking mostly for Plex or Kodi.
I am wanting to put all my good, high end rips of music in FLAC on a computer in my house somewhere...and be able to access that through my Amazon FireTV that hooks HDMI into my new Marantz AV preamp/decoder, which I'll then enjoy to my speakers for when I just want quality music time. I figure this would be one of the easiest ways to have lossless music set up and play. I'm hoping Plex or Kodi would work for this?
Which one would have the best front end, for just playing music (I know they both do other media)...can you make play lists on them both? Playing and choosing songs next to play in real time, etc?
Is one better than the other at this? Is this functionality built in to ether..or are there plugins required..if so,w hat's the best plug ins?
I know both can do video and other media and of course I'll use that too, but right now, ever since I get my good stereo up running again with the new AV unit, dual SET Tube amps and Klipschorns...I like to just jam to good music too and am trying to figure the best set up to do this with my equipment I've put together so far. Again, ONLY playing FLAC for lossless music.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Both handle lossless just fine. For strictly music there is a trade-off. PLEX makes it easiest to centralize your media and access it from multiple devices. KODI has a nicer user interface and more pleasant experience scrolling through your libraries, and is very customizable as a interface. Kodi has more filters and allows you to most easily add your own artist artwork/fanart/etc.
I use both actively, but more and more just use PLEX for music, primarily because of compatibility with Chromecast Audio, of which I have three and can play music in multiple rooms. Since there are Android and Roku playback apps, it presents the wider variety of easy playback options.
Both are great. Kodi still is my preferred movie/video client.
Whatever you choose to do, make sure you tag your music rips meticulously and consistently as you do it, and your experience on either will be much better.
Plex Media server would be a relative resource hog when I tried it. That plus all the nickle and diming over plexpass made me go to an emby+kodi solution for that media.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
BTW, both have playlists. PLEX's are a bit easier to build, if you use a PC. KODI has a nice feature called 'smart playlists' which allow you to set criteria and automatically generate a list (genre, folder, artist, date, etc)
I'd say Kodi because I think Plex handles audio poorly; I don't really like its flat organizational structure and the ongoing inability to customize your view of that. Plex also insists on interacting with metadata I don't want it to. There's no way to fix Plex, so I just don't use it for music.
I'm a big fan of using the Music Pump Kodi Remote for Android. I like the way I can browse my music from that and send the output to whatever Kodi device I feel like using with it. How useful that is depends on where and how you access Kodi devices; it's glacially slow on an Rpi or other old ARM device, but it's fast, fast, fast if your Kodi system is running on a decent x86 box. Kodi also gives you better options for playing back DTS-HD and other exotic formats, which is something to keep in mind of you have a multichannel setup and a bunch of SACD rips somewhere.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The only place where offline syncing is even all that interesting is iOS clients, since everything else has some kind of facility for directly copying the files you'd like to watch. You can't sync from a shared library, either. So either you have the technical knowledge to set up a Plex Media Server and point it to all your data but NOT the understanding of how to move a 2GB file on to a mobile device using an SD card or FTP/SMB client, or Offline Syncing isn't that big of a deal either unless your mobile OS prohibits FTP/SMB/SD Cards.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Article Title: Plex Media Player Now Doesn't Require a Subscription; Pass Users Get Kodi Plug-in
Plex has announced its new Kodi add-on so you can include your Plex library in Kodi (provided you're a Pass user).
PlexPass is a $4.99/mo subscription service!
Plex's player apps have not required a PlexPass sub to use for awhile now, but you do have to pay fix bucks for the app. Plex claims the apps are free but they only work for one minute if you don't have a PlexPass, or pay the one-time $5 "activation fee". They should just be up front and charge for the app at install.
"How can we make users pay *US* for them to access their OWN content, on THEIR servers"...?
... utilizing Free and Open Source Software ...
Hmm.. sitting in my house I connected to my brother's Plex server with my Android phone. I selected a TV series to sync and it started remotely downloading the transcoded file.
It's true with non-iOS devices you can just copy the media directly. But having the files automatically transcoded is nice. I don't notice a difference between 1080p and 720p on my phone's 5" screen so why take up more storage on it when I could just hold more content. But keep the full file on the server.
You might not care about syncing watch status, but for people who keep a large library, that can be a huge feature.