I've been running a plex media server on my ubuntu box for awhile - no issues there. I've never needed a desktop or window manager prior to my recent experiment to get Plex HT running on the machine. I download XFCE as it appears to be a fairly lightweight desktop environment. The app starts fine, but if I try to play something it simply closes the app.
Are there any known limitations on what GUI you need to use to run Plex HT on Ubuntu?
Most likely candidate for issues to me (as a total non-expert) :
You'll have it track it down manually, maybe try the 1.3.2 from ubuntu precise from the PPA download page. I dont know if the 1.3.2 from precise is the same as the 1.3.2 from trusty. Could even try the debian release.
I did eventually get this working. I had some fundamental underlying audio issues with my video card output, Pulseaudio and ALSA. Eventually, I just installed xubuntu desktop rather than trying to use the thinnest version of XFCE and got good results. The basic behavior of the app was successful.
I do have a slightly different issue now - wondering if anyone has seen something similar :
After I play certain movies, my keyboard becomes unresponsive. it doesn't matter if I use a hard wired keyboard or my wireless keyboard. The application is still generally running as the screensaver kicks in, but I'm pretty much stuck in the app. If I SSH in with another PC, kill the two processes for PlexHT, then I can quickly relaunch and it works as expected.
In case it's useful for anyone else :
When i first got everything working, DTS-MA, Dolby TrueHD were unusable. The video stuttered and I didn't get any sound. I could play everything with PCM, but I can easily tell the difference in my Home Theater room. I noticed that the default driver for my Radeon HD 6450 (Ubuntu native - not from ATI) only had 5.1 channels. I installed the ATI proprietary driver and viola! everything started to work. I was able to enable bitstream output for all formats in PlexHT and I got 7.1 channels on DTS-MA and TrueHD tracks.
