Hi! I am trying to get this to work tonight for the first time and am having a super buggy and confusing experience. For example, when I try to watch “King Baby” by Jim Gaffigan in the “Comedy Central Channel”, the app acts like it’s going to start to play and then tells me either “the channel isn’t responding” or worse, “Plex Media Server is not responsing, skipping in 5 seconds”… so can you tell me … which is it? I am using Windows 10 and the Plex web player in Chrome, because the app you let me download … also doesn’t run. I don’t know why the media server (my notebook hard drive) needs to respond to run what I believe is web content, but maybe you could explain that some other time.
However, I have saved a Youtube to my “watch later” list and can get a show on another channel to play (no mention of media server not responding etc. whatsoever). So, let’s say I want to watch the John Adams/Paul Revere episode of ‘legends and lies’ from Fox News on my Roku box, and for convenience, I would really like to put that episode on my ‘Watch later’ list rather than hunt through what can feel like a dozen menus with the super-clunky Roku controller … is this possible? Can I ‘mark’ a show from one of the channels in Plex to be added to a ‘watch later’ list to queue these up more conveniently on a Roku?
It is this ability to ‘tee up’ content for which I have subscribed to Plex. If you can clarify this, it will be most helpful. I am not particularly interested in sharing my hard drive, etc. with you as a ‘media server’, so can we focus on the former?
Cheers,
A subscriber
You can go to Plexit supported websites and use the PlexIt bookmarklet to add videos to your Watch Later. See the Plex It! support articles for more on using PlexIt/Watch Later.
You cannot add videos to Watch Later from within a Plex channel. Why? Because when you access a Plex channels from your Plex player app, that channel is installed on your Plex Media Server. So that Plex Media Server must be running and accessed by your Plex player app in order to play videos from that Plex channel, because that is where all of the channel code is installed.
Watch Later videos, on the other hand, are stored completely online. Watch Later uses your Plex account to access your list of video links that are played using online code provided by Plex. So your Plex player app only needs to be logged into your Plex account to access Watch Later videos. Even if you do not have a local Plex Media Server running, you may still be able to play Watch Later videos, as long as those videos are compatible with your Plex player and do not require your Plex Media Server for transcoding.
So your Plex player app is accessing Plex channels and Watch Later differently because they use different code located in different places. Plex Channels use code stored on your local Plex Media Server and Watch Later uses code stored online with your Plex user account.
Most likely the issue you are having playing videos from the Comedy Central channel is because it is failing to transcode the videos. Videos from the Plex channel for Comedy Central are RTMP format. The Chrome browser and the Roku do not direct play RTMP videos, so your Plex Media Server must transcode those videos for them to play on the Plex player apps for those devices.
So you need to allow transcoding in your Plex player apps and Plex Media Server settings and have Plex Media Server installed on a system that has the CPU power to handle transcoding if you want to watch videos from the Comedy Central channel on your Plex player app for Chrome or the Roku. This is true whether you are accessing the videos from the Plex channel or from Watch Later.
Plex channels just access existing online content offered by websites. The websites accessed in the Plex channel decide what content they want to offer and what format they want to provide for that content. Since no Plex player/device will support every format that may be available on every websites on the Internet, transcoding may be necessary to play the media offered in a Plex channel. Otherwise any media offered in a Plex channel that is not compatible with your Plex player will fail to play.
