VLC and Plex Apps Coming to New Apple TV

[coolspot18]

Cool, although this sounds like a bit of exaggeration here... How'd you find a NAS with wifi that runs on batteries?

It's really wireless?

The NAS is tucked away in my closet; I don't have any USB hard drives, etc. dangling off my media player. Videos are streamed over WiFi or Ethernet to my media player (Roku w/ Plex, iPad, Android, PC, etc.).

In terms of wires, I mean all the portable hard drives, etc that illria uses to store his/her media.

 

[SHNXX]

This could be good.

 

[dannys1]

Yet. It's only a matter of time before Siri is opened up.

We've been saying that since Siri first launched! I can't see it, will have to keep content creators happy and letting people get results in Plex which will mostly contain pirated movies and TV shows shan't do that!

 

[coolspot18]

Yet. It's only a matter of time before Siri is opened up.

Possibly, but there are a lot of factors to consider; speech isn't as straight forward as people think especially if there is a need to do Natural Language Understanding.

However, the company that provides this technology to Apple already has an SDK for Android / iOS if you want to build Siri like applications.

 

[CobraPA]

The NAS is tucked away in my closet; I don't have any USB hard drives, etc. dangling off my media player. Videos are streamed over WiFi or Ethernet to my media player (Roku w/ Plex, iPad, Android, PC, etc.).

In terms of wires, I mean all the portable hard drives, etc that illria uses to store his/her media.

Yes, but the point is you've just moved a bunch of wires. Did your closet have power already? And ethernet? Most people don't have a network closet already, and may not want to wire one up. So that leaves them with the option of putting a NAS box (and all it's wires) somewhere. Or having a couple pieces of hardware in there entertainment center.

Just sayin'. I've got a NAS. I understand the benefits. But I won't call them wireless. And some people don't want to have hardware in two or three locations that all has to be available and always on just to watch their media.

 

[iliria]

Isn't using multiple hard drives and USB key against going counter to your concept of minimalism? I have a single 4-bay NAS tucked in my closet - I never see it, yet all my devices have access to it. No wires and no mess!

In fact, I haven't rebooted the device in >100 days.

It's probably the cleanest, wire free, setup.

In terms of size I doubt very much that a NAS with 4 bays is bigger than 3 x 2Tb WD Mypassport Ultra stacked on top of each other.

I already have the hard drives and streaming won't offer me any benefits (based on my needs anyway). I did look into NAS option a while back before buying the drives and it has its own issues as well (from what I was told).

My need is something which can be connected to my amp and to which i can attache my drives. It needs to have the ability to access mkv containers and playback or pass through files such as DTS, DTS-MA, Dolby HD and so on. WDTV does this however it has a bad habbit of freezing and lots of glitches.

I run Plex Media Server (backend) and Plex Home Theater (frontend) on a Mac Mini connected to my tv. No keyboard or mouse needed for daily operation, just an Apple Remote.

If a keyboard or mouse is needed, I connect via screen sharing from my main system.

Looking like this is my only option. Can the Mini play or pass through all the various sound files if connceted to an avr?

Its a nice concept in theory but with the same set up I find I need the keyboard and mouse for media editing, plex is also very particular about naming conventions and some editing in this area is often required. My Keyboard and Mouse are both Bluetooth and small.

I dont mind using the keyboard and trackpad now and again since I already have them linked to the Mini anyway.

Somehow I think a couple of large capacity external hard drives are less minimalistic than a small NAS.

My mistake. By large I meant in terms of capacity rather than size.

 

[cycomiko]

I hope this was sarcasm. Many Blurays come with iTunes digital copy. If your movie did not, then use MakeMKV and rip your bluray to a mkv file. Will work great with AppleTV once Plex is released. Bluray has far superior video and audio compared to anything iTunes can put out! AppleTV still cannot support lossless surround audio. The spec says it supports Dolby Digital Plus 7.1. No support for TrueHD or DTS-HD-Ma.

Many blur ray used to come with itunes digital copy. Crrently, most do not as they went to that abombination called ultraviolet. Ripping a blu-ray to digital is still illegal in most places of the world and requires some purchasing around a blu ray reader

 

[B2k1977]

I use Plex. This might be blah news. Unless you pretty much use the web player or ios you have to pay for a plex pass. i can't even run it on my playstation 4 without buying a plex pass.

 

[d.smith]

This could be good.

 

[coolspot18]

In terms of size I doubt very much that a NAS with 4 bays is bigger than 3 x 2Tb WD Mypassport Ultra stacked on top of each other.

It's about the size of two large novels placed side by side, it's probably not much larger than 3x3.5" external drives stacked together. However, only one power cable and one network cable will come out of the device. You'll also have several advantages like redundant disks and aggregated storage volumes.

Once you get a NAS, you'll probably never go back to using external USB drives for storage except for backup and recovery

I use Plex. This might be blah news. Unless you pretty much use the web player or ios you have to pay for a plex pass. i can't even run it on my playstation 4 without buying a plex pass.

What's a couple dollars for an excellent application? The devs have to eat too.

 

[LordVic]

What's a couple dollars for an excellent application? The devs have to eat too.

Plex basically is the centre of my media consumption world. I use it to stream all my music, TV, Movies, Home Videos, to just about every single device in the house (4 TVs, 2 Tablets, 2 Computers, 2 laptops).

I never have to worry about formatting, encoding, re-encoding, mixing and the such, since Plex handles all that on the fly.

The Channels allow me to watch many of the TV / Programming I'd watch anyways without cable, such as CBC, Comedy Central, Food Network, etc. There's even addons now for NFL sunday ticket.

They've added some great features: Like along with Meta Data linking, now they've got extras that are streamed online for those Movies. They've got photo syncing with your mobile device for automatic picture uploads from your phone to your plex library when on WiFi.

It is well worth the lifetime subscription for me. I know this sounds like a sales pitch. But so far, for someone who wants synergy between their devices and centralized storage and management, Plex has absolutely been the one solution that has solved just about everything I ran into.

 

[coolspot18]

It is well worth the lifetime subscription for me. I know this sounds like a sales pitch. But so far, for someone who wants synergy between their devices and centralized storage and management, Plex has absolutely been the one solution that has solved just about everything I ran into.

I'm glad I picked up a Lifetime Pass last year; ever since they started charging 'serious' money for the application, development has accelerated significantly. Revamped iOS client, major overhaul to the music subsystem, music videos, trailers support, movie extras. Also, support for almost every type of Smart TV out there...

Personally I think it was well worth the money.

However, ever since they raised the lifetime pass to $149.99, I can see why people aren't stumbling over themselves to buy it. Perhaps Plex should have some sort of "rent-to-own" plan, i.e. 6.99 for 24 months to get a lifetime pass.

 

[LordVic]

DIdin't know they raised the price. I bought my lifetime a couple years ago. at $74 it was absolutely worth it.

I'd still say at $150 it is, but understandably "steep' for a lot of people who are used to paying 4.99 for apps or $60 for desktop programs

 

[interconnect]

Plex can do three things (generally automatically):

1. Direct Play, basically the same as XBMC, VLC, etc. and play the file directly.
2. Remux, if a file is H.264 but stored in an unsupported container (i.e. MKV), Plex can remux on the fly to a compatible format (i.e. MP4). There should be no loss of quality except additional processing overhead.
3. Transcode, for the hard cases, Plex can recompress on the fly to a compatible format - there is a slight loss of quality, but it really depends on the source material bitrate and the transcode quality you set in Plex.

In short, Plex will support MKV one way or another - whether it's Direct Play is a different story.

Right, I totally get that. What I'm saying that if the box doesn't support the MKV container or DTS audio, Plex will have to transcode in those cases. This uses much more CPU usage and may not matter for some people, but when you have 3 or 4 or more streams going at any given time, you want to conserve CPU usage as much as possible and have everything Direct Playing. The same thing happened with Plex on the Roku until Roku eventually added native MKV support.

 

[interconnect]

I run Plex Media Server (backend) and Plex Home Theater (frontend) on a Mac Mini connected to my tv. No keyboard or mouse needed for daily operation, just an Apple Remote.

If a keyboard or mouse is needed, I connect via screen sharing from my main system.

I do the same exact thing and I use a Harmony 650. My NAS is in my basement where my all my Cat6 runs go to, where my switch is, etc. Everything has access to it and no wires anywhere.

 

[interconnect]

Its a nice concept in theory but with the same set up I find I need the keyboard and mouse for media editing, plex is also very particular about naming conventions and some editing in this area is often required. My Keyboard and Mouse are both Bluetooth and small.

It isn't a great concept in theory... it actually works. I have my setup like that and you can do all that on another computer in the house, over your network! No need to do directly on your Mac mini.

 

[nebo1ss]

I use Plex. This might be blah news. Unless you pretty much use the web player or ios you have to pay for a plex pass. i can't even run it on my playstation 4 without buying a plex pass.

Not sure I understand this. I have been using Plex since it was only available on OSX. The server on any platform is free. I paid a few dollars for an IOS client a few years ago and get all the updates and run it on multiple IOS devices. I also run the OSX client on my HTPC "Mac Mini" which is also free. I do not have a plex Pass. I Know a plex pass gives you early updates on their latest version but a general release within a couple of months sees to be normal.

 

[Keirasplace]

Right, I totally get that. What I'm saying that if the box doesn't support the MKV container or DTS audio, Plex will have to transcode in those cases. This uses much more CPU usage and may not matter for some people, but when you have 3 or 4 or more streams going at any given time, you want to conserve CPU usage as much as possible and have everything Direct Playing. The same thing happened with Plex on the Roku until Roku eventually added native MKV support.

If what's in the container is X264, transcoding takes almost no CPU at all (since that'S what IOS decodes natively in mp4 containers), at least on my computeré.

 

[Tech198]

Good for this... no need to use Plex Connect anymore.

 

[coolspot18]

This uses much more CPU usage and may not matter for some people, but when you have 3 or 4 or more streams going at any given time, you want to conserve CPU usage as much as possible and have everything Direct Playing.

True in a worst case situation you will be bound by your server CPU. I personally have a E3-1276V3 processor on my Plex server which has plenty of cycles, but the average user will probably only have a CPU that can transcode 2 streams max (i.e. i3).

 

[LordVic]

True in a worst case situation you will be bound by your server CPU. I personally have a E3-1276V3 processor on my Plex server which has plenty of cycles, but the average user will probably only have a CPU that can transcode 2 streams max (i.e. i3).

if you're running a house where 1 or 2 streams is the norm, it's probably more than fine to run off a modern i3. I had been running Plex for 2 streams (with transcode) fine for the longest time on an old Core 2 Duo. When I added more possible stream sources however, it was worth it to upgrade my server to a haswell i5-4570. I have never, come even remotely close to saturating that CPU with transcoding.

 

[rhett7660]

I currently have a Mac Mini 2011 running my plex server and my content is being served up from a NAS box. I have had zero issues with listening and watching multiple streams while using Plex. I have tested it out with two blu-ray rips running, one to my tv and one to a computer in another room and listening to music via my iPhone and did not have any buffering or stuttering. Now I didn't look at how the mac mini was running though. But it worked without an issue.

 

[Ray2]

I hate to say it, but it may not yet be appropriate to say these apps are coming to Apple TV. It may be better to say "the developers are working on apps." We don't know the full criteria for acceptance into the TV app store - they may be more stringent than for iOS, especially if Apple is trying to get cooperation from the TV industry for an internet TV service. They'll probably be accepted. Probably...

And, assuming availability, it works well enough to release to family. Something you don't count on with Plex. User since .7 Beta. This could be a long process. I would not run out and buy a new ATV assuming Plex will run on it.

 

[Mac-D]

I totally agree. I've been using a Mac mini running PLEX with a 4TB external HDD hooked up to my TV as a media server and it does everything I want. As much as I'm intrigued by the new ATV I would lose the ability to directly access and play all my media files so I just don't see the point of getting one even though I'm really tempted.

The only reason to get an apple tv with the system you have is if you wanted to watch plex in another room.
I have the mac mini plex sever connected to a projector and 140" screen for my main room, but would love an Apple tv with plex on our lounge room tv with an actual app. The plex samsung app is total crap on the Tv right now.
Also I have discovered to you can add recored digital tv to plex, you just need a eye tv for the mac mini.

 

[Ray2]

There's a host of boxes available that run Plex. With known pros and cons and known effect of updates. An ATV running an initial version of Plex may not make you very popular with the family. My biggest issue with Plex is the developers toss untested updates out frequently. And they frequently don't work in one way or another. I learned to ignore Plex updates long ago. Once I had a version that functioned in all respects, I stopped updating. I'm running quite old versions of Server and Player. And I no longer have to run into the tv room to fix one thing or another.