Over in the Plex Labs Forum, Elan said something about a planned or forthcoming pre-built SD Card image for making a “headless” Plexamp on a Raspberry Pi. In light of the recent announcement concerning the “unbundling” of media types into multiple Plex Client Apps, I guess Plexamp is the new Plex Music App. Great.
Can I expect a similar SD card for the Plex (video) app, PlexPhotos, etc? Maybe I could dump Roku altogether and get uncompressed 4K video over wired GB Ethernet. This would give me a Plex Appliance, which is yet another appliance Dear Wife won’t like, but we know TiVo is on its way out (they apparently dropped OTA for example) and we’ll probably want PlexTV to be the replacement. We already have an HD Homerun tuner and fool with it some through Plex. The Plex DVR and Live TV experience on Roku or Android isn’t as good as TiVo but we’ve accepted we’re not going to replace the TiVo unless there’s some miracle at Xperi and maybe not even then. It’s sad but. On the upside, Plex Discover looks really promising, but to really make it work it’s going to require Prime Video, Hoopla, Internet Archive (?), YouTube, PBS, and other streaming apps on the Raspberry as well. IOW, a whole new platform with a tiny market share for these guys to support unless “PlexPi” can provide (say) an Android emulator for them to run in.
Another problem with this is we’d want the TV display and the current Logitech Harmony Remote (yes, I know) to be the “head” for such an appliance. Maybe there could be another solution for input and navigation like a tablet or a wireless keyboard/mouse combo, but this is clunky compared to a one-handed remote with physical buttons. I don’t know what could be done. Not having to know is what was so attractive about TiVo versus the HTPC (remember that?). Maybe clunky is the price of loose integration – it always has been.
Very promising architectural direction for clients anyway. I’d love to see the backend revisited to move away from “files” and towards “containers” so PMS can support CD, DVD & Blu Ray Images with Cue Sheets, Album-at-a-Time FLAC+CUE and the like. But I understand that’s baked-in pretty deep.
Good work. Feeling better about Plex.
