I’m having a frustrating time trying to setup something that will work for me in my camper for when I’m on the road for long periods of time Sometimes the weather is miserable and you just want to relax and watch a movie.
I have 2 external drives that are 2TB’s each. They have roughly 1500 movies and around 120 TV series.
I have a Raspberry Pi 2 with a wireless adapter.
I have a 10 inch tablet I want to stream movies to.
The beauty of the Raspberry Pi in my situation is that it is very low power consumption which is the main reason I want to get it running. It’s also a tiny footprint in my camper which is an old VW. On the wall I have an old 10 inch tablet mounted and all it really does is act as an alarm clock, weather station and a place to watch movies.
I want to wirelessly stream media to the tablet from the Raspberry Pi2 and I’m not sure if this is even possible. I have tried Kodi but configuration as well as its content management systems are inferior to Plex IMO. For example, my movies are all sorted by genre folders. Plex allows me to easily add that as a source and everything under that genre folder is sorted and it’s done. In Kodi you have to create smart playlists and have a skin that allows custom home menus etc etc.
Suggestions on how to proceed or IF to proceed would be appreciated. Links to installation guides also. I’ve tried the HTPC installation guide and upon reboot nothing happens. I could never wrap my head around Linux. Thanks in advance.
I just installed PMS on my RPi2, I’m in the process to fill a 128 GB USB-memory stick with kids movies. This will be connected to a “hotel router” (or travel router if you wish) in the car (and in the hotel room if the WiFi isn’t good enough to stream from home) and will serve my sons iPad through WiFi.
All movies are converted to MP4 to avoid transcoding.
It will be field tested during a skiing trip in a few weeks and hopefully it will be enough for real-life testing during our SF trip in April.
I will probably do another run of converting the movies down to just stereo, no need to keep the 5.1 or DTS for the iPad…
I then went to my normal Plex machine and started copy the movies to the stick.
When finished I moved the stick to the RPI2, made a sudo chmod -R 777 on the mounted USB drive.
Thank you for the replies. I will take a look at both option and try the HTPC guide again. I’m also going to have to convert a lot of movies to MP4 and stereo. OK. I’m off again now that I’ve calmed down from pulling my hair out. Thanks.
Just an update. I finally got Plex running on the Pi2 but the little guy has trouble with some of the my larger files. Enter Plex Conversion. It’ll take a long time to convert all of my media over to mp4 but I can live with that. Once that’s done the Pi should be able to stream all of it to my devices. Plex Conversion will also save me a lot of space on my hard drives. I’m converting everything to 720 for android with AAC so when that’s all done I can delete the 1080 files and just use the smaller files.
I assume this tip is a bit overdue but anyway…
I was in the same situation as you converting/transcoding a LOT of material to suit a portable version and of course when I’m done I find this little nifty addon: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/115593/beta-plex-downloader-desktop-sync.
A LOT easier to mark and transcode movies.
Hey Old-T. So I messed around with this a bit but couldn’t quite get a handle on it. What exactly does it do? Does it allow you to select all non MP4 files for transcoding or does it download the file to your device if Plex can’t transcode on the fly?
I’m actually many many hours into transcoding everything and while it’s a royal pain in the ass it is freeing up a load of space on my external drives. I don’t have or want a large screen TV. I have my monitors and then a tablet and phone. No need for me to roll with 1080I HD versions of everything. Plex is cutting some files into half their original size. The only thing I wish it had was a way to filter all non MP4 files.
It’s just an easier way to “batch-transcode” lots of material.
I found it rather tedious doing it from inside of Plex
“Optimize/Custom/iOs/1.5 Mbps 480p” for every movie so if someone else would do the same it would same some time
Make sure your media does not need to be transcoded.
Regards @NedtheNerd: Finally managed to get the WiFi to work (at least by running sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf anyway. No success with autostart the interface yet)
Now the problem… (I might have missed some pre-reqs)
I connected my Asus pad to the new RPi2 wireless network, but when I start my Plex client I cannot find the Plex server on the RPi2.
If I connect the RPi2 to the network with the RJ45, I can see it.
Sorry not ignoring you, I’m away from home at the moment, will have a look when I get back next week, if you followed the guide and can see the access point and can connect to it, and PMS is installed correctly, i.e. you can connect using Plex Web (http://accesspointipaddress:32400) then offhand I can’t think what the problem is, are you sure PMS is running? Try ‘sudo service plexmediaserver restart’
@NedtheNerd
No worries, we won’t leave for SF for yet another weeks
I’m pretty sure Plex is running. If I connect the RPi to the network with RJ45, it pops up as an available server.
Is there a problem that I’m using the Android Plex app on my Asus pad instead of Rasplex on another RPi?
The goal of the setup is:
RPi <–> iPad in the car.
I’m almost done with the tedious way of doing it through Plex but it hasn’t been that bad. I search for and remove all files that are already mp4, except the large ones, and then transcode the files remaining. I’ve had a few headaches but for the most part it’s been fine. I added a feature request to filter by file type. That would have made this a lot easier to complete.
My hope is to get the Rpi to recognize my external wifi antenna which is a marine antenna that mounts on top of my bus when I’m in a campground with wifi. It’s got huge range. Then to use the Pi as both a hotspot/router for internet access among my devices as well as a plex server. Fingers crossed it all works out. Make for a nice little setup in the camper.
@Old-T said: @NedtheNerd
No worries, we won’t leave for SF for yet another weeks
I’m pretty sure Plex is running. If I connect the RPi to the network with RJ45, it pops up as an available server.
Is there a problem that I’m using the Android Plex app on my Asus pad instead of Rasplex on another RPi?
The goal of the setup is:
RPi ↔ iPad in the car.
// T
Now back from Easter break.
I’m not sure what your problem is, I have just followed my guide to create a new install and everything works as expected. Suggest retracing all the steps and checking the created/modified files to see if you missed anything.
There shouldn’t be a problem using the Android mobile client, but I don’t have any to test with (must buy one, as I have every other piece of hardware that Plex clients run on), but I have had 3 people in the car listening/watching on their iPads and iPhones. I also use it when away from home with no internet available to stream to another RPi with Rasplex connected to a TV. (I don’t have Plex Home enabled).
If you have another spare SD card, try running through the install again.
Yes another problem…
I don’t get the WiFi dongle to work after reboot. If I start it with “sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf” the network appears but not when the RPi rebooted.
(It’s a bit cumbersome to bring a monito just to be able to start the network )
