I’ve just finished a first, experimental binary package for Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit (32-bit coming soon). If you’re feeling saucy, give it a shot. It should have all real dependencies enforced (and therefore tell apt or dpkg what else it needs installed to run). Best of luck.
You can grab the package at: https://github.com/downloads/gewalker/plex-linux/plexmediacenter-0.9.5.2_amd64.deb
Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit package available at:
https://github.com/downloads/gewalker/plex-linux/plexmediacenter-0.9.5.2_i386.deb
Share and enjoy!
It looks fantastic on my Ubuntu box. It does everything except actually play videos. My library is hosted on another machine.
I’m thrilled. This is VERY encouraging. 
It should play videos too, actually, if there is a plex media server that it can see (or that it can connect to via my.plexapp.com). Almost all functionality should be in good working order on this build.
What's it doing when you try to play videos?
The little "please wait a moment" tab on the bottom of the screen shows up, and then disappears, and then nothing else happens.
Oh, and when I said it looks like everything's working (except playback), I mean it is *really* encouraging. No configuring whatsoever, and all of the remote libraries and plugins and everything showed up. It's really awesome.
As for the playback error, I've not looked at the log yet. If I had to guess it's probably an audio assertion or similar, since (for some reason) Ubuntu 11.10 isn't happy playing sound over HDMI yet.
Interesting. If you figure out what's barfing, please clue me in.
Will do. The box is packed up in our luggage now, so it'll be the new year before I have a chance to tinker with it again.
Once I got the audio working and connected to a Cat6 line, I had the same issue as above. I've still not tried installing PMS an serving locally, either.
This is excellent news! I’ll definitely be trying this out very soon! Any thoughts to running a PPA for Ubuntu users ( https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas )? Perhaps a weekly / nightly build if it can be automated?
Right now I'm packaging with Effing Package Management (fpm) since I cannot get debuilder to build the source tree successfully. If anyone has experience doing so, I'd love to have a working ppa for Launchpad. have at it.
I know this isn’t a real good test, but I was able to install the 32-bit package in Ubuntu 11.10 using VirtualBox. I haven’t tried the channels (doubt I would use it), but the movies do not start. I click on the movie to play and nothing happens (either resume or start new). I do have 3D acceleration in VB.
I have compiled Plex on my Wheezy laptop and that worked fine.
Again, using VB is probably not a good test of the install, but I don’t have any other hardware to try it on.
Unfortunately, the only 11.10 systems I have are the VM's I built these on. I'm planning to upgrade my desktop to 11.10 soon-ish, and I'll hopefully be able to produce more reliable results thereafter.
I have tried the packages on my laptop running Ubuntu 11.10. Everything seems to be working fine except actually playing video.
The log says the following:
<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% NOTICE: Creating Demuxer<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% DEBUG: SECTION:LoadDLL(special://xbmcbin/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-50-x86_64-linux.so)<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% DEBUG: Loading: /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-50-x86_64-linux.so<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% DEBUG: SECTION:LoadDLL(special://xbmcbin/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so)<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% DEBUG: Loading: /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% ERROR: Unable to load /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so, reason: /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so: undefined symbol: NeAACDecClose<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% ERROR: CDVDDemuxFFmpeg::Open - failed to load ffmpeg libraries<br />
16:34:05 T:139802922198784 M: 0% ERROR: OpenDemuxStream - Error creating demuxer<br />
I have tried several different videos from my PMS running on ubuntu as well. I'm using transcoding.
Let me know if you need any more info to debug this.
I know whats wrong here. Don’t know why yet though
I opened a bug here: experimental package kind of broken. · Issue #13 · gewalker/plex-linux · GitHub
Should be an easy fix.
Installed the latest minimal ubuntu 64bit.
plex loads and i’m able to browse content from the plex server. Some thumbnails show up. others dont. bunch of little ui bugs. video doesn’t play at all.
this seems like the most relavent part of the log dealing with playback. going to try building from source next…
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% NOTICE: Creating Demuxer
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% DEBUG: SECTION:LoadDLL(special://xbmcbin/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-50-x86_64-linux.so)
11:46:05 T:140345101158144 M: 0% DEBUG: thread start, auto delete: 0
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% DEBUG: Loading: /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-50-x86_64-linux.so
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% DEBUG: SECTION:LoadDLL(special://xbmcbin/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so)
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% DEBUG: Loading: /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% ERROR: Unable to load /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so, reason: /usr/local/lib/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so: undefined symbol: NeAACDecClose
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% ERROR: CDVDDemuxFFmpeg::Open - failed to load ffmpeg libraries
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% ERROR: OpenDemuxStream - Error creating demuxer
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% NOTICE: CDVDPlayer::OnExit()
11:46:05 T:140345080178432 M: 0% NOTICE: CDVDPlayer::OnExit() deleting input stream
I built PMC from source today. still got the same errors.
-n8
yes there is an bug. The avcodec-52-x86_64-linux.so is linked wrong or is the wrong version.
I don’t have any time to look at it atm sorry. gewalker takes some timeout too, so please stand by
Just reporting the same problem on my fresh install onto an oneiric 64-bit system. Exact same error.
Also, one UI glitch noted: It doesn’t come to the front of the unity launcher/menubar. XBMC does so I expect it’s possible. 
Wondering: Is it possible to build it to link against system libraries. I note for instance that oneiric has libavcodec-53; and this system in particular uses the medibuntu version. But the error message indicates we’re using a libavcodec-52 embedded into the package.
minor addition, of course that's the medibuntu libavcodec-extra-53 package on my system; the one with the codecs that are stripped out of the debian-default libavcodec for being insufficiently Free. I think that includes the AAC format that seems to be missing in these error messages (even though I also encountered the error playing something with a DTS audio track). Has this build been built with that stripped version by accident instead of a fully-featured one? :-)
edit: just making sure i get emails of replies
we use our own avcodes lib build from a very recent version of ffmpeg. The system versions are to old and don’t have all features.
I’m still busy so please stand by
In any case, setting --enable-external-libraries on configure didn't work. Build exited after leaving directory xbmc without any apparent error report but rather sooner than expected. Certainly not time enough to make coffee! Sadly this wasn't because of an unexpected turn of speed from my machine, as make install then failed because there was no xbmc.bin.
Confirmed, the ffmpeg in the plex source is 0.8.5.git vs. 0.7.2 in oneiric/medibuntu. I had been misled by the use of the 52 and 53 in the library names, and now I have no idea what that relates to. :-)
Build completes normally here without --enable-external-libraries and installs... Fails to play in exactly the same fashion as before, as expected, I guess.
