Don’t know about XBMC, never understood it, but Plex gives me episode titles… always has, from the first one I used on my jailbroken ATV2, to Plexconnect on the ATV3 and now on the ATV4.
[quote=“PaulG, post:37, topic:259, full:true”]
But Plex also seems very limited - can do folder for the program, subfolder for the season, and then the names of each episode (no matter what their title, they’re just listed as “episode 1” etc), and that’s it. XBMC’s similar, I think?[/quote]
Plex does do full episode titles and correct naming of them too (i.e., Season 1, Episode 2 etc and will get the details about the specific episode too).
You must not have your Plex setup correctly (or your media is not properly named). In order for Plex to correctly catalog your media, you need to make sure your media is named properly. Refer to here for guidelines. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/categories/200028098-Media-Preparation
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I only recently used Plex and must say I was so impressed.
I’ve recently gone through and upgraded a substantial amount of my media to higher resolution, this created some issues with playback - symptom being intermittently insufficient buffering.
As an aside, I’ve recently had to switch routers as a result of FTTN NBN, so I’m suspecting that the router may have a part to play here too.
After experimenting with a few different clients
- PlexConnect on ATV3 (had been working 99% fine for several years)
- Built-in Plex app on my OperaTV-powered Hisense TV (because I’m a masochist)
- Chromecast
- Xbox 360
- Windows 10 on Surface Pro
I’ve come around full circle and am once again using my Mac mini as both the server and the front end - which is funnily enough the reason I bought the mini in the first place 4ish years ago.
Using the same box for server and front-end has eliminated potential network issues from the picture and more importantly, restored the WAF (wife approval factor) of my Plex setup.
I think I’ve finally done it! I’ve come to love Plex!
My QNAP NAS has been upgraded to an i7 3770S (from an i3) so has more than enough power to do the job along with 16GB RAM (although it also runs a couple of VM’s so it’s not all for Plex).
The ATV4 app is pretty good and now appears to be very responsive either because it has improved (which is likely) or because I have more power behind it now too (although I’ve tried running on a Mac Mini too and never liked it). One of the big parts has been that my Wife has come along for the journey this time… by which I mean she has done pretty much all the work in fixing all the non auto-matched content.
I’ve even signed up to Plex Pass which means extra content (like trailers) automatically there and most importantly that all new unwatched content is also synced across as it appears using magic. Even watching old content is easy, tell it to sync, mark it unwatched and away it goes syncing the defined number of episodes and deleting the watched ones at it goes. I can also just walk to any TV in the house and pick up where I left off without having to work out what I’ve already watched… loving it.
It’s this centralised library function which has always had me interested, but the way it all worked before just never clicked for me until now.
So I probably need to grab one more ATV (probably a new 4K one 
) for the lounge room replace the Mac Mini that used to live there (and before anyone asks, that machine has been migrated to Server duties for Caching and Time Machine).
Speaking of ATV and my new setup, the ATV remote is a necessary evil. It’s both excellent and terrible at the same time. While I can use my Logitech Harmony report to control everything, that swipy remote really is better for interacting with the TV (It’s also very nice that the functionality is also now built into iOS11). Sadly that means two remotes rather than just one, although once the TV and receiver are on I tend to only use the ATV so I can just use the little one since it can control the volume of the receiver too.
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I’m majorly invested in Plex now… (Xbox One version) And yet… Maybe I’m missing a simple button click, but telling it to play the “next episode” in a tv series seems to be a major task (especially for a 4yo, whom the system needs to be accessible.)
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On the ATV app (also on iOS) it does seem to just auto play the next episode in a very similar way to Netflix.
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You can turn auto play on and off
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After a recent move, I don’t had a Time Machine backup at the moment. I have a Mac Mini as a Plex Media Server (for ATV, iOS and other Macs locally and remote), just wondering how you have set up your mini to run Time Machine on the network?
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In the olden days you used to have to buy OSX Server (which is only about $30 or so) to run a Time Machine Server. Now it’s actually just built into High Sierra. (Which sadly I found out after buying it 
)
Head into System Preferences, then sharing. Share a folder, then right click on it and go into “Advanced Sharing” and select “Share as a Time Machine backup destination”.
You might also be interested to know you can also setup Caching of iTunes/App Store/iCloud content with the Caching server from High Sierra now too (the only other thing I really used in Server in the past).
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So, prediction that Server will not make it into Super High Sierra?
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An interesting idea, for most normal humans there is very little reason to use any of the Server services, the only exception being maybe VPN if you wanted to get back into your house… but then I did say ‘normal humans’
Caching and Time Machine sure, but beyond that people don’t tend to need internally shared Calendar, Contacts Mail, Message Servers etc etc.
Maybe it becomes a freebie (or just built in) in the future, but then it’s not exactly expensive for those businesses who might want those features.
Server has been dying for a long time, ever since Apple stopped making server hardware.
The only places I ever saw it being used was in schools and they have all moved to the Google Apps infrastructure now as they get it for free and there is minimal IT cost to them for it which was certainly not the case with OS X Server.
Getting back onto topic…
As evidenced by previous posts within this thread, I was all-in on Plex for quite some time.
I find that as the developers seem to spend more time and energy into adding features I don’t want e.g. photos, news feed, DVR - my satisfaction with its core function of being a media player diminished with each version.
So much so, right now I’m not running Plex at all - just using Infuse on ATV4 and my Mini is just a dumb file server - no transcoding necessary because Infuse can play pretty much anything in my library, except for the 4K 60fps files - and I have an ATV 4K coming this week for that.
I’ll probably change my mind again down the track - I’m fickle like that 
We’re still loving Plex in our house, have a media server with all of our media on it and 4 Raspberry Pi’s running RasPlex around the house and it works flawlessly all of them time, would never consider going to any thing else, least of all back to the Apple TV as it simply dose not handle a library of TV series as large as our as well as Plex does. If it had a hierarchical display system i.e Show / Series / Shows rather than Show / Series - Show (ie. a single layer list) then we may never have moved but with around 41 TV shows and 187 seasons between them Apple TV/iTunes was just not a good fit (and I have tried Plex on the Apple TV and simply did not like the interface when compared to that which the Pi uses)
I still need to make use of that. I should buy the latest RPi model to give it a whirl. My mate says it works great… perhaps this year I might try that.
I’ve got a lifetime plex subscription which I am not using too much at the moment. Thinking of turning my i7 7700k into a server and plex will probably live on it with disks being added (vs buying another Synology NAS).
I’ve been trialing unRAID for about a week now and have Plex Media Server, Sonarr and SABnzbd running in Docker on it and it works a treat - very easy to add additional storage to as well and pretty low cost for what it is. My only concern is the somewhat convoluted process to replace the parity drive when you want to add disks larger than it to the array (the parity drive has to be the same size as the largest drive in the array).
Plex is now doing their own embedded version. Suitable for devices like the Raspberry Pie.
Interesting, this is the first time I’ve heard of this.
I’ve just found it and downloaded it, It’ll be interesting to see how different the interface is to the one RasPlex uses as I really haven’t liked Plex on the Samsung TV’s or PlayStation
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update - Have to downloaded on running now, looks like I’ll need to cable it to the network then do setup of wifi via. SSH as there is no in built wireless configuration/settings at the moment - this guide appears to cover the setup pretty well though.
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update 2 - Plugged it in to Ethernet and had a play, don’t really like the interface that much as it is too hard to find things and to see the detail of the TV episodes (ie. episode description), think we’ll be sticking with RasPlex as it works better for us, but I may set up one test/play Pi to try the official client on and see if I can get used to it
And the prophecy was found to be true.
I’m back to running Plex with my trusty old Mac mini performing server duties and my Xbox One as the front end.
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