Plex.tv

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I setup a Plex server with a Raspberry Pi 3b+ today. It really could not have gone smoother. Between the RetroPie, ArPiCade and this thing, the usability of Raspberry Pi devices really is easy and amazing.

I followed the instructions here - https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-raspbe ... ex-server/ and got the server going in less than an hour. Everything Just Worked.

The advantage for me is getting content to the television downstairs where my wife and I can view it. Now I can download stuff on my main PC, SFTP it over to the Raspberry Pi and we start the Plex.tv app on our phones. It knows about the Raspberry Pi running Plex.tv. We then Chromecast it to the TV. I would imagine if you wanted you could hook the Raspberry Pi up directly to your television, but what we have now works great. My wife likes a minimalist living room so this is another board that can live in the arcade or whatever and wireless communicate with everything it needs to.

Pretty slick, I like the whole setup a lot.

[Flack]

Hey, that's great! The Pi really is amazing and versatile!

You should be able to add a USB drive to that Pi server, if you want to start building a media library. If you ever want all the episodes of Teddy Ruxpin to it, I know a guy.

If you do decide to connect that Pi (or a separate client one) to your television, there are lots of bluetooth remotes on Amazon that look and feel like regular television remotes that work with the Pi. Then again, "happy wife, happy life" and all that. :)

Either way, kudos on the project! I think this is my next Pi project:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/magic-mirror/

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Best of all, for most people the hardest bit of reproducing this project at home won’t be the Raspberry Pi end – frankly, the bit we’d expect you to find most tricky is making the wooden frame.

That's.... accurate.

I have a giant-ass arcade control pad I made which is fine, but the wood thing was the toughtest part. It still does not have a bottom.

The lack of cables and stuff around the TV has made a huge difference. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't want to live in a house decorated by a man. Maybe a man on Queer Eye. But I've seen a house I decorated. I don't know if any of you were in it at the end. I had the Milker's brother paint every wall eggshell. I took off all the art. I was getting ready to sell it, but I wasn't THAT ready. It was great. I do know some of you were in the house when the kitchen was painted in salmon and that was awful.

I had a 25" HDMI cable that went from the 360 to the TV. We'd use the 360 for games sometimes, but mostly for retro stuff to be honest. Nothing the RetroPi can't do. So I folded up the giant cable and brought the 360 upstairs. It's the little things we do.

(/giant-ass HDMI cable unwraps itself like an automatic garage door spring, decapitating me)

[Flack]

I recently bought a 30' flat HDMI cable off of Amazon for $15. Being flat, you can either tuck it in where the carpet meets the wood trim along the wall, or run it around a door frame. I didn't really need a 30' cable, but I remember when I bought my PS3 this guy tried to sell me a 6' cable for $79.99 at Best Buy, and spent five minutes explaining to me how "not all digital signals are the same." I politely passed on the cable and bought one from Dollar General on the way home that I still use to this day. But even that cable was like $10, so a 30 foot cable for $15 just seemed like the way to go this time.

When I built by first PC-based video server (RIP PiVo), it was in a full-sized tower filled with hard drives and fans. Had I balanced them more carefully, I suspect the whole thing would have taken off like a drone when I fired it up (woosh!). My entertainment center had two cabinets with doors for speakers on the bottom row. One of them hid this PC -- and by "hid" I mean you could still see the lights behind the cloth grill, hear the fans and hard drives, and feel the heat blowing out when you walked by. In contrast, the Raspberry Pi I'm currently using with one of my televisions is mounted to the back of it with a small square of double-sided Velcro that I got from the same Dollar General I got that HDMI cable from like ten years ago.

This post has been brought to you by Dollar General. For all of your non-name brand and inexpensive needs, please visit Dollar General. Free shipping on all orders over $50, or pick up at a store near you using our convenient store locator. Dollar General: Not just for Generals anymore (TM).

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I am trying to get this going again. The Playstation 4 does have a free Plex app, and I installed it. It could not connect to my Plex server on my Raspberry Pi, because the version of Plex was out of date. I ssh'ed into the Raspberry Pi, and the machine itself is out of date. It was so out of date that I could not do a straight sudo apt-get install on it, I had to edit the sources.list file to point to a modern distribution server. OKAY!

I eventually got the Pi to go, and it has been upgrading. Because Starlink doesn't give you a specific IP address, I have the Pi connected to my other ISP that does and it's slower, so it's grabbing like six years of Debian updates right now. Afterwards, hopefully it automatically upgraded Plex but if it did not, that is fine, I can do it manually.

This should let me connect to the Plex server via the PS4, and should hopefully get me into a spot where the Plex server remembers how far along I am watching a video. Flack's comment about attaching a USB drive to it is awesome. The ones I grabbed from Ali Express the other month will be perfect for this!

(I am doing all of this to avoid the ads that Amazon put on their shows. Also, it will allow me to stream all the stuff I have downloaded over the last forever many years.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This ended up working great! The Plex Pi server is on its own ISP (well, with other stuff, but you know what I mean) and I can access it on other wireless networks. I put a movie over there that my wife and I wanted to see and it worked out great. The transfer speeds are also such that it's really speedy, there was no lag and no loss of quality.

Plex also remembers where you are in a movie across devices.

I have a 230GB flash drive that I just stuck on the side of the Pi. I'll be able to easily load that up with treadmill content. To health! To consuming content in a completely legitimate way that sends money directly to the coffers of corporations! To lies!

[Flack]

Hey, good job getting it going again! You can also add Plex to your phone so that when you are in the office and want to watch something, it magically does it.

There's an app called PlexAmp that specializes in streaming music from your Plex server. When I set it up it seemed real important and then I discovered Spotify.

I was really hoping the price of Raspberry Pi 3's would drop after the 4 came out, and the 4's after the 5 came out, but neither happened.

[Da King]

Now I can download stuff on my main PC, SFTP it over to the Raspberry Pi and we start the Plex.tv app on our phones. It knows about the Raspberry Pi running Plex.tv. We then Chromecast it to the TV.

Holy fuck. 4 hops to watch TV? Way too much fucking work.

Let me introduce you to IPTV.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Hey, good job getting it going again! You can also add Plex to your phone so that when you are in the office and want to watch something, it magically does it.

Ok, I did it! It's streaming! MOM, I"M STREAMING <- I don't remember where that quote is from, but it is from something.

I am sure having a giant hole in my router is going to be a problem some day, but fuck it.

There's an app called PlexAmp that specializes in streaming music from your Plex server. When I set it up it seemed real important and then I discovered Spotify.

Whoa! I don't have Spotify and do have MP3s. Thanks, bro.

I was really hoping the price of Raspberry Pi 3's would drop after the 4 came out, and the 4's after the 5 came out, but neither happened.

It really made it the right decision to not just buy a new Pi, but get the ones around here to work. I remember having the desire to make a Gameboy clone from a Pi Zero or something many years ago. And I just went and bought the very affordable Pi Zero. I hope those days come back.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Now I can download stuff on my main PC, SFTP it over to the Raspberry Pi and we start the Plex.tv app on our phones. It knows about the Raspberry Pi running Plex.tv. We then Chromecast it to the TV.

Holy fuck. 4 hops to watch TV? Way too much fucking work.

Let me introduce you to IPTV.

One hop is because the ISP I use to get it from the jump box to my home computer is fast, but not the ISP I use to have the Plex server online. That is a "mountains ISP" issue.

I don't know what IPTV is, though I have seen you mention it.

Oh wait, my original message was from years ago. We don't have a Chromecast any more. It's still many hops though, that is true.

[Da King]

I don't know what IPTV is, though I have seen you mention it.

Pay $x. (Maybe it's $11 for 1 connection for 1 month... maybe it's $75 for 2 connections for a year, etc).

Want to watch literally ANYTHING on live TV? Blue Jays games? Rockies? Sabres? Avs? Canadian junior hockey? Minor league baseball? PPV Boxing? UFC? Swahili armadillo wrestling? Just turn on that channel.

Want to watch literally ANY show? From anywhere? Network, Netflix, Hulu, any other source? Just search it and watch it. On whatever device you have. Phone, laptop, any streaming device, etc.

Things you dont have to do:
- Source it off a PC
- SFTP it to another device
- Build a raspberry pi
- Attach external storage
- Tie up a device casting it to another device

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, but it's $11 a month. Right now our cable bill is zero.

The Plex thing has been fine. The Raspberry Pi is in an area where it can just be left on. It's ok. For now. We'll see.

[Da King]

Yeah, but it's $11 a month. Right now our cable bill is zero.

How many Sabres/Blue Jays/Rockies/Saints games can you watch for zero?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There is a pirating site that I go to! They have the games. Well, they list like 20 other websites that have the games. That said, there are constant freezes, and some of them have started blocking browsers using ad blockers.

After a day like today where I just did not have the motivation to get anything done, paying $11 for this stuff is sounding better. So I might do it. You have created a good argument.

[Da King]

There is a pirating site that I go to! They have the games. Well, they list like 20 other websites that have the games. That said, there are constant freezes, and some of them have started blocking browsers using ad blockers.

After a day like today where I just did not have the motivation to get anything done, paying $11 for this stuff is sounding better. So I might do it. You have created a good argument.

I've used this service for 2.5 months. Install an app on your (non-Roku) platform of choice, configure it up with a URL/username/password, and you're good to go. $139 for a year includes 5 connections (share with friends and family). I've watched heavily-viewed PPVs with no buffering/stuttering/etc. It's basically as good as cable, at 1/12 the cost.

If you want to try it out, you can use one of my connections for a few days. Lemme know and we'll get you hooked up with a good app, and the login info.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

As an experiment, I have been seeing if the Plex server on the Pi can simply exist without me having to reboot it. It can't. I just tried to see if it was accessible today... and it's not. The Plex app gives no insight as to what is wrong, but the thing can't simply sit untouched plugged into a router and work.

So, I'm out and I'll look at the thing Da King has mentioned. Doing nothing should be pretty easy, but Plex can't handle it. They want like 200 - 300 bucks for a "lifetime" license.

[Da King]

I will do nothing for you, for just $100!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Good point. There are lots of other ways to spread that money around haha

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I put Longlegs on the Plex machine, tried to stream it upstairs. Couldn't keep up with the stream. It stuttered after a few seconds.

I just want a small computer to plug into the HDMI port of a TV, I guess, with lots of storage. This Plex experiment is over.

We paid $18 to rent the movie over Amazon. It was worth that.