Plex Home Theater on Ubuntu | Some quick feedback

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Hello there,

 

I have been using XBMC for quite some time. First I had an install on a Windows XP PC sitting in the corner of my living room and now I am running it on an Ubuntu 12.04 lts machine in that same corner.

 

I installed Plex Media Server yesterday, and I am very impressed. The web interface works perfect on iOS. It works pretty well on Android 4.2.2, which is what I have, but...

 

Here are some quick notes on Plex Media Server:

 

1. On iOS, playback starts on the native Quicktime player (Chrome browser).

2. On Android 4.2.2, the player starts on the web page and does not offer a fullscreen option (am using Chrome browser).

3. On several PCs I test on, the web interface works fine.

 

Not the same can be said for Plex Home Theater:

 

1. There are of course all the weird gripes about mixing and matching Video cards and sounds cards and how that just seems to really screw with the whole experience. This is Ubuntu based and is pretty easy to figure out. So you have some feedback: I have an Nvidia card with all the driver set up right, and a Soundblaster USB card with optical output going into my Sony Home Theater 5.1 sound system. As long as I set the sound system to analog, it plays back fine, if I choose coax/optical, it does not pretty weird stuff like fast playback of all MKVs, etc or hangs.

 

2. Even when I set it up fine vis-a-vis the video and sound card, when I stop a file, it just hangs there not allowing me to navigate. I solve that without rebooting by running a "killall plexhometheater" command.

 

3. There is only one skin with the basic install. I tried to trick it to use XBMC skins. They load up fine, but they do not read the folders that I have setup for my videos. Having said that, is there no skin manager for Plex Home Theater for Linux?

 

 

Just thought you guys should know. Keep up the good work!

 

Ahmed

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Some quick short responses.

PHT is far from a stable release and has big issues with the sound settings. I get very funny issues with no sound and double speed of playback with certain settings. (Same as you have I guess)

If you are using the latest PHT from the repo it is really unstable and more of an alpha then any of the previous releases.

There are some skins out there for PHT but they has to been added manually trough terminal or a file manager then you can change in the menu of PHT. (Will probably change when the whole skinning process is done).

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Hey Christian, thanks for sharing. Unstable alpha releases I have no problem with. In fact, call me twisted, but it sort of adds to the pleasure of tinkering. Comes with the territory :)

Meanwhile, can you share some download links for Plex Home Theater skins that work? Also, do I just drop them into the skins folder or do I need to edit some files or run some commands? Would buy you a beer if I was in Sweden, honest :)

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http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/61598-refocus-big-plex-ht-port-release/

Is one of them that "works". Just jump around in the skin forum and you will find some more that "works"

You place the skins in /home/username/.plexht/addons/

Then you can change to it from within the gui .

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Bump. I'm having trouble installing skins on Plex HT for Ubuntu. The "/home/username/.plexht/addons/" doesn't seem to exist, where do you go to install scripts?

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With the latest 1.0, it seems that most of the stuff is installed in /opt/plexhometheater directory. Not sure if you should install the skins there, but you might wanna have a look in the directory tree from there.


You probably could use some "sudo find / -name " command and see the different locations available.


By the way, did anyone of you got the sleep working on ubuntu from plex ?. It was quitting plex with pmc for me and sith the latest PHT it just seems to do nothing …

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