Again, what about VR? Millions of users there too? Worth maintaining 4 different devices and showcasing them on the homepage? Or yet another pure marketing gimmick?
But yeah plenty also have far, far less.
I have no idea. I havenāt seen Plex post anything about VR and I donāt have any āinsiderā information. I also havenāt seen any Plex VR releases for the past six months. Or maybe they have numbers to show itās a growing market. Or not. I have no idea.
Pinging @elan for his insight. But he will probably end up ignoring the question like in the other threadā¦
He tends to do that if he doesnāt like the question
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To lighten the mood, if you donāt know about this company take a look.
They more or less were first to market with a full hardware and software solution that spawned the idea for things like Kodi, Plex, Emby and the countless numbers of media streaming solutions out today. Its priced for the elite accordingly and we should all take a step back and think about how Kodi, Plex and Emby have brought the technologies to the mainstream for DIY. From the most modest setups to the grandest setups, this kind of setup was out of reach for most people.
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Just point it out, In under 2 days this has now become the most commented post in the desktop players category followed by āPackages for Linuxā
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Yeah a lot of the same people are posting. Accept it and move on, or ditch Plex and move to another system. Easy choice.
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You are missing the point. Where would plex be without the small minority of HTPC enthusiasts that has been here for years telling friends and family about plex? How many of those millions of users are here because of them? Does the metric say anything about that? Iām probably staying with some odroid coreelec plugin solution, but I must say Iām really disappointed and understand all the anger. But itās not all bad, we got tidal and they are really good with metrics according to CCIS.
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Ok, my sadness about dropping HTPC support aside, letās talk about this new PC app. Iām all for consolidating development efforts to better support the clients that exist, thatās a great plan. And Iām very happy that Plex supports so many different clients, I use a couple of them. So letās talk about this new windows app.
Right now from a user perspective, doesnāt seem to add much value over the web app. I get that there are improvements under the hood, thatās awesome, hopefully it leads to improvements in the user experience (otherwise whatās the point!). Itās also brand new so Iām good with it not yet having all the features it will eventually have, letās give some time to add those features, thatās great.
So looking at the features that exist in other Plex clients, and considering what a good PC media player should do, here are the things I would consider pretty important:
- Download/sync - Itās been finally added! thatās great, thanks Plex (I really mean that). I assume itāll improve with time so download location can be selected and even so that downloads could be transcoded to lower quality if desired. Itās been a much requested feature!
- Come on folks, audio passthrough is really a must here. Everyone has been talking about how the new app uses MPV as the player and why thatās so awesome, well MPV supports audio passthrough so shouldnāt it just be a matter of exposing this feature?
- The app really needs to be able to scale to different screen resolutions so it can be readable at high resolution. It doesnāt now, but according to forum posts this is being actively worked so I expect improvements soon here. Iām not talking about a 10 foot interface. Iām talking about scaling the PC interface to work at different resolutions and sizes.
- It should also allow the display refresh rate to be matched to the content. If my movie is 29.97 fps, and my laptop screen isnāt, then there is a noticeable quality impact. Iād be ok giving this feature up, but if youāre making a flagship player it should be there.
- Some may disagree, or consider this less important, but I should be able to navigate with my keyboard, not just my mouse. Skipping forward and back, play/pause, all these things are so much easier to do with my laptop keyboard while Iām watching something. With all the cool things that Plex does, surely a few keyboard shortcuts are not that difficult to implement.
In my opinion these are not HTPC needs, they are what I expect to see in a good dedicated PC media player. For use on my laptop, or desktop, or whatever. So Plex, what is your vision for the desktop app? Will it be a quality media player, able to compete with Apple TV and Shield, and other players that you already support? Or will it be a token app that never really feels like itās as good as the rest of the Plex ecosystem? Elan, I guess this question is really for you, what is your vision for this new player?
And coincidentally, if it had these features Iād use it on my HTPC without complaint.
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Thereās lies, damn lies, and statistics. PMP is #1 in my household. Itās the driving force for Plex with my family. The fact that we have 2 ATV, 3 IOS devices, and a Sonos system that hang off it rests solely on PMP being a great HTPC solution for my theater. I also share my server with multiple friends who use any number of android & ios devices.
The statistics lie to you because they donāt (and cannot) accurately represent the importance that the users place on a specific platform. The iOS platform is nice but the fact that Iāve listened to music across it for many hours today only means Iām on a road trip. It has nothing to do with it being a better/more appreciated platform than PMP.
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Pretty similar to my situation. While I use PMP less than Plex web, itās because I use Plex web for frivolous things, like leaving a TV show Iāve watched before playing on a second screen (for hours) for background noise. Iām sure iām not the only one that does this, therefore skewing your statistics.
PMP is still top tier for quality TV/movie viewing both in performance and feature set.
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Exactly. Itās the quality value of the plays that cannot be captured. Iāll play hours of music in my car or at my desk via plexamp. When I really want to LISTEN to the music though Iāll put it on in my theater with the audio DSP setting for music active and soak in the experience. Thatās worth far more to me. Although I donāt watch much video elsewhere the fact that I have the broadest codec support via PMP is important. Equally important is that I donāt have to bounce through other stuff to get to Plex. Itās always there ready to go. I hit the Plex icon on my touchscreen and the projector powers up, the system switches to the plex source, and itās all ready to go. Itās slick, it has that high end feel that a high end theater should have. It looks good out of the box on my 110" screen.
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Does anyone else think that the best PMP replacement might be Kodi with PlexKodiConnect? Iāve been trying it out with a friend of mine whoās also a longtime Plex user and, with enough tweaking, it seems to provide a pretty good user experience, plus you get to Direct Play everything. Obviously itās more annoying to set up and not ideal by any stretch, but I wonder how well it would work for many of the folks here?
PlexKodiConnect works great, Itās a lot easier to manage your library. I have used it on my setup even though I still mostly use plex as I donāt care for any of the kodi skins.
I will add my 2 cents in my dissatisfaction with the termination of the computer apps. I will say the if you primarily use your HTPC for movies on a computer like an Intel NUC then Kodi does a good job and can also be easily installed as an embedded LibreELEC standalone player. āAllā you have to do is setup SMB sharing on your server (a Mac mini in my case) and add the plex libraries to Kodi. It works well for movies and supports passthru for all of the audio codecs that the plex app does in the embedded version. The Transparency skin is closest to a plex experience. However, the scraping for tv and music was not nearly as good as plex, and I could not figure out how to correct the problems (was not up to surfing the Kodi help forums for help). Doing this does not screw up plex on any of the streaming clients. So I guess we have to hope that the Shield TV continues to support passthru and that plex continues to support shield tv! I will be getting one when the embedded plex app quits working on the NUC, sighā¦
if you just use plexkodiconnect plugin, the plex media server will do all the scrapping and your content will be available in kodi.
I did not find a plex plug-in for the embedded version of Kodi, are u running the embedded version and if so could you direct me to where it is?
Ok I found the site, but it seems to not be under active development, is this true?
jellyfin (fork of emby & it;s free) Iām using it and have no complaints so far.
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