I understand the Parsec subscription to play licensed games but how can I play my locally owned games?
If I have the required game files for a supported platform why do I need a Parsec subscription?
Thanks
Parsec is used for streaming; the way we’ve integrated, the server does the emulator and then streams to the client, a centralized model much like we do for video. So even if you have the game files, the gameplay itself is streamed.
That makes sense, I would still like to see the option of a one-time purchase license just for the Parsec component without the Ataria games as the option for a lifetime Plex Pass subscription was one of my main reasons for going with Plex.
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i totally agree that would be awesome, but unfortunately that’s not how the license works with them (per user monthly). so we don’t have flexibility there.
Is there linuxserver support on the horizon?
Well in that case I think the idea that other people had of running the games directly on clients doesn’t sound to bad especially given how many platforms emulators support.
The other option could be the implementation of moonlight or a similar game streaming solution which doesn’t require a licencing fee.
Is there any specific reason Parsec was chosen over Retroarch individually? It should have all the features needed. Of course I’m not a plex employee so I don’t know the fine details, but it seems like the groundwork is all there.
Sure a fine company and all, but doesn’t seem like the ideal candidate for plex.
Also anytime I can mention it, a huge issue many are having (I think I’ve seen a consistency of it on Sony Android TVs, but that may just be because they’re the majority of Android TV), but games aren’t scaling. On my 55" 4K TV, streaming n64 takes up just a tiny little corner, GBA is hilariously awful.
There are dozens of mobile options for Plex, and even android TV options, but I was excited to centralize it all onto plex for my TV, lots of bugginess there right now.
That’s the sort information we should have had in the blog etc as this paragraph
Look. This effort is real, but if we’re honest it was conceived by a few passionate Plex Labs rats over scorpion bowls at Mama’s. For now, we’ve convinced the powers-that-be to let us run with it, but we know it’s far from done and we see it as a kind of internal Kickstarter-type project. If there’s interest and we see some subs, it’ll grow into the glorious pheasant we know it can be. But if you guys drop the ball, it’ll die on the vine like a stomped ass goomba.
Not only has upset a lot of people its also a very passive aggressive approach that is completely un needed and quite frankly by the looks of social media is also helping to put people off!
While I loved the idea at first after spending 15 hours trying to get things to work and jumping through hoops that I should not have to be jumping through and also seeing the many comments in a number of outlets, I can’t see this lasting more than a couple of months if not the next couple of weeks which is a shame.
Communication and image are key and both seemed to have be missed on this occasion.
I do really hope it works and expands cos it has so much potential, just in this instance it has unfortunately left a sour taste in my mouth.
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we’d love to provide it, but it depends on Parsec deciding to support the platform. it seems like there might be interest, but no timeframe or anything.
the problem with that is one of licensing and app store policies. for example, you could never ship something legal on iOS or tvOS, and many of the emulators don’t have licenses which permit shipping them inside commercial software.
we think streaming the games works around many of these issues. in the future, you could indeed imagine on some platforms which support it, the clients could choose to execute emulators directly instead of streaming, much like we have different players with varied capabilities for video and audio!
Parsec is a sophisticated platform for low-latency game streaming and peer-to-peer connections over lots of different network scenarios. Retroarch is awesome for playing on a single machine, or even over the network when every person can run the app, but as explained above, you can’t just run Retroarch on Apple devices, e.g. and their latency/performance is really awesome as they make use of hardware encoding and such.
i’ve filed the issue internally and we’re looking into it!
we certainly didn’t intend to anger anyone with what we intended to be humorous. if you sit back and think for a minute, this is how companies operate generally—they pursue profitable avenues and abandon unprofitable ones unless they fit a bigger picture. they focus their resources on the products and features which are the most fruitful. so we were just trying to say “hey, there’s a group of us really excited about this and let’s hope it’s successful 
” in retrospect of course we’d have phrased it differently, but i don’t think it’s fundamentally expressing anything which should be surprising or offensive.
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That’s cool, Thank you for taking the time to respond 
Thanks for the explanation, it would be good if you could look at replacing parsec with a free opensource alternative like Sunshine or https://open-stream.net/
A lot of that makes sense with Parsec being chosen. Thanks for the transparency, and great, thank you very much for checking into the scaling issue 
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thanks to all of you for being part of the conversation and the adventure!
Have you considered an option to do the emulation client-side and download the rom on launch? That would solve the parsec issue a lot of people have, but I think more importantly, a lot of old games designed to play on a CRT television had effectively no input lag, and required very fast reaction time to feel playable. Trying to play these games over a stream is bound to add a lot of input lag and make the experience very bad. When you combine that with the fact that a typical NES rom is the size of a text file, the download+local emulation model seems like a good fit.
i think i mentioned this on a different thread, but it’s something we’ve discussed. it would only work for a subset of platforms, so we wanted to make the streaming option work first (more universal, less hassle) but there’s nothing to preclude us for doing that sort of thing in the future. that having been said there are definitely complexities around it, e.g. not only needing to download ROMs, but save states, etc…
Local emulation would be perfect for single board computers like the Raspberry Pi 4 and Nvidia Nano. I know it’d take a lot of support from both the community and Plex for the open source version of Plex Media Player to make it worthwhile, but having a fully-contained front end for videos and video games that only needs a login and a synced controller to get going would be fantastic.
In other words, please save me from the usual Kodi/Retroarch setup mess every time I want to mess with some hobbiest SBC hardware.
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