The 30 quid media streaming face off

[FD3Si]

ZesPak said:

I reccon some rose-tinted spectacles were involved as well .

Chuckle
OK, that may be 'time spent actually doing something'.
But using this guide:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/838501/Raspber...

10 minutes to put the thing together, DL image, set burning to SD (walk off and leave it doing it, have a brew) and it wa honestly that easy

[onlynik]

ZesPak said:

Good to hear, I know I'd never be able to push through "streaming" in our house without it being very easy to use. The Chromecast allowed it to be very easy for the wife and she uses it daily without needing my assistance, which tells me enough.
Once she was hooked to some of the shows, she now uses it on the other TV on the Xbox 360, which also works great but you do need a universal IR remote to control the Xbox, as I'm pretty sure she won't be too happy faffing about with a gaming controller.

Plex and Netflix both work great on the Xbox and on Chromecast, as well as on new Samsung Smart TV's. But non-tech people do seem to be forgetting that setting up something like Plex isn't a small feat. It all works rather easy but it DOES require time and patience and some technical knowledge. I wouldn't want to pay the hour-by-hour invoice for setting up Plex for myself. Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool and I'm a lifetime "premium" subscriber. But you have to want to do it and be able to. If you ever got any linux distro working properly on a machine (even the likes of mint, ubuntu), you probably know what I'm talking about.

I've installed Plex on both a Mint and a Windows 2008 server. The windows installation was, as to be expected, a lot easier to do.

I've Plex running on a Mac Mini (slightly more than £30), as I never managed to get anything running on a Pi without buggering about for ages.

Plex app installed on an Amazon Fire Stick, now the wife uses that more than XBMC, she like how she can stop on one device then watch the rest on another (her iPad for example)

[ZesPak]

onlynik said:

I've Plex running on a Mac Mini (slightly more than £30), as I never managed to get anything running on a Pi without buggering about for ages.

Plex app installed on an Amazon Fire Stick, now the wife uses that more than XBMC, she like how she can stop on one device then watch the rest on another (her iPad for example)

I'm not questioning Plex per say, as I said, it's a great tool. It's more stuff in the lines of your library.

My media library was huge and in total I probably spend several days cleaning everything up so it could be picked up by plex. Then still, plex doesn't pick up ISO's, so I had to convert these one by one to mkv. If you then want to add subtitles in the equation...

But, like you said, once properly set up it's a great app and the availability on Android, iOS, WP, browser, xbox and several smart tv platforms, just makes it so versatile.

I just wanted to warn that setting up something like that isn't always the "click through installation" people make it out to be.

[onlynik]

ZesPak said:

I'm not questioning Plex per say, as I said, it's a great tool. It's more stuff in the lines of your library.

My media library was huge and in total I probably spend several days cleaning everything up so it could be picked up by plex. Then still, plex doesn't pick up ISO's, so I had to convert these one by one to mkv. If you then want to add subtitles in the equation...

But, like you said, once properly set up it's a great app and the availability on Android, iOS, WP, browser, xbox and several smart tv platforms, just makes it so versatile.

I just wanted to warn that setting up something like that isn't always the "click through installation" people make it out to be.

Yeah, fully agree with you.

[Digitalize]

After setting up XBMC (or Kodi or whatever it's called now) for someone, Plex is FAR better at scanning file names than XBMC, multiple things would fail that were copied straight out of my Plex library where it scanned fine.

[marctwo]

onlynik said:

I've Plex running on a Mac Mini (slightly more than £30), as I never managed to get anything running on a Pi without buggering about for ages.

The latest version of Rasplex (0.7.0) is very good indeed and can even handle Dolby TrueHD decoding on a Pi2.

http://www.rasplex.com/

[Too Late]

RPi 2 running Openelec.
SUPER DUPER!

[clonmult]

I'm now more than a little happy with my chromecast, although only as a result of Videostream.

Its kinda cool when a video has finished downloading on the PC, get a notification on the phone that a download has completed, click that notification, tell it to stream to the chromecast, away it goes.

Videostream is a little naff on organising my video library, but that is relatively minor.