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."

Comments

Full Circle.

[0100010001010011]

Plex started off as OSXBMC a fork of the XBMC when the XBMC devs were focused heavily on Windows/Linux.

F Cloud auth

[rtkluttz]

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.

Re:F Cloud auth

[Anonymous Coward]

You do release this is optional. And even if you do require authentication, you can whitelist IP and IP ranges that don't require authentication. I whitelist the IPs for my Rokus, FireTV, etc.

Re:F Cloud auth

[0100010001010011]

Then you haven't researched smart thermostats enough.

Radio Thermostat Company of America has an API (you can run you thermostat with bash scripts and curl if you want).

For others like my Carrier/Bryant there's a Perl project that MITM it so it can't talk to the outside. (Which doesn't require an subscription fee)

Re:F Cloud auth

[SScorpio]

I still run Kodi on my HTPC and have used PleXMBC for several years. The Plex player app was never that good, and Kodi is excellent from an interface perspective. But Kodi only had a shared library back-end database with no official stream lined daemon.

I'm not a fan of how uncustomize-able Plex is, but it's library is really nice to have. Being able to use Kodi at home, but then fire up Plex on my phone and stream something from my server to a Chromecast at a friend's house is great. Also having kids be able to use tablets since who watches TV now days, but keeping everything synced is well beyond what Kodi does.

The actual announcement

[clifwlkr]

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.

"showcase some of our new thinking"

[Anonymous Coward]

"How can we make users pay *US* for them to access their OWN content, on THEIR servers"...?

Re:"showcase some of our new thinking"

[clifwlkr]

Honestly it is much more than that. Like a song you are listening to? You can queue up a 'plex mix' which queues other songs similar to the one you are listening to. Actually works pretty good. Need to transcode that video from a codec not supported on your playback device? Plex does this. I even have one running on a raspberry pi in my truck with my music on it. I have an android car radio, and run their client as my music in the truck. Can pick a genre, song, etc and queue a plex mix while I am driving. All running on Linux. Also downloads and manages trailers for movies, etc. Want to watch a movie or listen to a song while at your hotel on business, or on the road? Plex provides an interface for that as well, with bandwidth optimization with re-encoding.

BTW, most of this functionality is available in the free version. If you want some of the more advanced features, you can choose to pay them for it. I pay for the pass primarily because I want to support their development of a server that really is great for all your media.

Or you could simply use an SMB share for all your music and hunt around by filename. A very different experience. I haven't even scratched the surface on the organizational capabilities for large collections that plex provides.

This probably isn't really news

[slaker]

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.

Re:English motherfucker

[slaker]

Re: Why run two?

Kodi for highly customizable local access and Plex Media Server for external access and transcoding for STBs, mobile devices and less capable clients (cough iOS cough)

Plex has had user authentication for a while, something that Kodi just got recently, and it's easier on Plex to track viewing where Kodi needs the gymnastics of a third-party database and some time investment to get that running.
On the other hand, Kodi is much more flexible for playback formats and presentation, and it has a much better addon ecosystem. Plex has Channels but they're an afterthought for most people, and the Plex presentation on a given client probably sucks unless you really love scrolling through long lists one title at a time.

Re:Can someone explain why this is cool?

[pr0fessor]

Probably because it's easy to setup and supports streaming for most of your devices out of the box cell phones, roku, fire TV, apple TV, chromecast, xbox, playstation, and a lot of smart TVs. one click mobile sync....

Plex never *required* a subscription

[kalpol]

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.

Re:Can someone explain why this is cool?

[drinkypoo]

Kodi's only documented centralized library feature is through a RDBMS and it only works if all clients have the same version of Kodi. Kodi headless mode is undocumented and woe to you if you want to get it working. Plex provides a shared media library which handles metadata for all clients. If you have many clients, and you would like the all to be able to use the same metadata so you only have to manage that once, you want to use Plex. (Or you want headless Kodi to be documented... but HAHAHA)

I prefer emby...

[Junta]

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.

Re:Plex vs Kodi for Audio(interface, FLAC, playlis

[slaker]

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.

Re:Fake news

[Stuarticus]

For someone who is being silenced you sure do talk a lot.