Advice for multi-TV Plex Setup

[monkeybongo]

Hi,

I'm moving from a condo with one TV to a home where I now have room for a projector in the finished basement.

I currently run an i5 Mac Mini as a server and run Plex on it to serve one of my TVs and host my movies mostly in MKVs. I use it to trascode movies to my iPad through the Plex iOS client

I'm looking at wanting another client to play movies from my Mac Mini over wireless N. My question is if anyone has any experience on similar setups:

1) Which device would be the best to connect to my plex library on my mini? (ATV, Roku, PS3/360 over DNLA)?

2) Is the i5 Mac Mini powerful enough to play a HD movie and transcode to another display? Will the picture quality be degraded over wireless N?

 

[maturola]

Well... there is not a cookie cutter here, you got multiple options, I will share the way I did it.

I got a ATV2 on the bedroom, another ATV2 on the office, and a roku on the Living room (At the time, ATV3 was not release and ATV2 had no support for 1080p, so Roku was the way to go for me).

Both ATV2 are jailbroken and running Plex client. Everything works fine.

Your i5 should not have any issue transcoding the content, if you are planning on transcoding 1080P 24f with HD audio, then N would be a bit of a issue. for most conent it should be ok.

I sometime stream to 2 TV at the time, and never had an issue, if the computer is busy doing other stuff sometime i get some loading in between, note that I am running a Quad core 2 (Q6600 i think)

 

[8CoreWhore]

Atv2 is $200 bucks right now because there's no jailbreak for atv3. Roku is on sale right now and has an official Plex app for it, no hack required. So...l cheap solution. Plus it plays amazon prime videos free if you have that.

 

[monkeybongo]

Thanks for the replies, I'm closely looking at the ATV3 being jailbroken or hoping that IOS6 will feature official apps for the ATV.

 

[reebzor]

I don't have a Roku, but if I could make the decision again, I would have gotten a Roku over the ATV2.

I also just bought a new Samsung SmartTV which someone has made a Plex client for. It's still in beta, but works well and the official app should hit the app store any day now. I still use my Mac Mini for Plex though.

 

[swordfish5736]

Watch the refurb section on apples website. Atv2's pop up occasionally for $69.00. At least when I got mine in April it still had 4.4.3 on it.

I run my plex media sever on a mini server. Both atv's can be connected with no problem. I've even had both running and a friend streaming to his iPad from a different location.


I used to use ps3 media server for everything but it was always sort of buggy. I was excited when plex launched there dlna client but I had issues with it( can't rewind, fast forward, pause/resume)

 

[monkeybongo]

I just ordered a LG 55" LED Smart TV and apparently supports a Plex client directly. I'll have to see if that works out but so far sounds like it's a bit of a pain to use.

I'll give that a try and keep an eye out for a Roku or ATV.