I’m new to plex and wondring if it would be possible to play cd games off of my plex server. Backing up…I have plex installed on my freeNAS as a plugin which is on bare metal. I want to essientially download all of the cd’s with a dvd drive and be able to play them straight from the NAS rather than downloading them one at a time as I want to play them etc. is this possible?
If so how to you go about attaching a physical disk drive or would I do that straight from a pc?
Thanks in advance sorry if this is a noobie question I tried googling this but couldn’t find anyone trying to do this
It’s only a media streaming application like Movies, tv shows, music and pictures and some features via Plex like web shows, etc. Of course it’s all media you already have.
This is definitely not something Plex can handle now, but I wouldn’t put entirely out of the realm of possibility for the future.
The Plex Team does tend to watch trends and they try to follow into new spaces that emerge when it seems appropriate. Netflix has been very vocal of late about their intent to get into game streaming, and has already dipped their toes with some interactive video content. Google and Microsoft are touting upcoming game streaming platforms as well, and Sony already has one, but I would guess those products have piqued Plex Devs’ ears less than Netflix’s forthcoming offering will.
But if Plex does want to move into that space, classic CD/floppy games might be a great entry point. I’m not sure what types of games you have, but I could imagine a situation, probably still many years off, where Plex Media Server rolls in an implementation of DOSBox (open source emulator) to allow remote streaming of classic DOS-based games hosted on a powerful enough server. For that matter, anything that can be emulated and for which adequate open source code exists should theoretically be approachable for Plex. RetroArch would actually be the perfect platform to incorporate as it uses modular cores to emulate basically everything, and has been ported to just about everything with a CPU already.
If you haven’t already, you should add a feature suggestion on the relevant forum section (here). You have to be a Plex Pass member to post there, however, so if you’re on the fence, maybe get a trial. Just don’t get angry and cancel because they don’t immediately add your request. It’s a big one, but I think one worthy of discussion, if not frank consideration.
The other place to watch is the Unofficial App Store. HowToGeek has a great guide for setting it up. There’s nothing like this on there now, but if someone with the right knowledge, skills, time, and interest gets onto this idea, it could very well show up there first. One potential “quick and dirty” method for implementing could involve screen-streaming from a server installed on a specific platform (probably Windows of macOS), essentially allowing the server to run an external application with some sort of front end for loading the game files, then streaming the contents of that application’s window and passing input back-and-forth to it. It would likely introduce a fair amount of latency so you’d want to be selective in which games you used it on until the process was refined (management sims would be good). That type of implementation would break a lot of the conventions for PMS proper, but it would be easier to achieve and a perfect fit for the UAS. While there is some fragmentation in the apps space, Plex tends to prioritize feature parity for all server platforms, which is probably why they strongly favored HDHomeRun’s network-based tuners when DVR functionality was added.
