Plex streaming audio only & possible Alexa

General Discussions
1

HI there hoping someone can help, and hope this is in the right place. I’m really using Plex as audio only at the moment to stream my flac collection. I have it on a mac mini running plex server. I can listen in my living room through my samsung tv on my hifi, which goes out digitally to a dac and then amp. Happy with that set up but would rather not have to use the TV.

Devices I also have: iphone, apple tv3, ipad, nowtv box.

What’s the simplest audio only way to stream from plex, and in an ideal world using alexa. So I can walk in to the room and say ‘alexa play the rolling stones’ like I can in other rooms using spotify. But if not just a way that doesn’t involve turning on the TV would be good. Do I need some additional kind of streamer with a digital out or…Any ideas?

Thanks!

3

Thanks for that. I had come across that as an option. The Rasberry Pi I think I could handle. But how hard was the touchscreen set up? I’m not much of a soldering kind of guy :slight_smile:

4

I use three Raspberry Pie with RasPlex in my home (one in the living room, one in the sleeping room and one in the childs room) for audio only streaming. I don’t need any touchscreen or monitor for the devices, i use an iPad and a Smartphone to start and stop the music or audiobooks. This works very well for me.

6

@trumpy81 thanks. Did you use a specific one? And could I ask what cases you used to house the RPI/DAC and Screen? Are they separate or…?

7

@compoti said:
I use three Raspberry Pie with RasPlex in my home (one in the living room, one in the sleeping room and one in the childs room) for audio only streaming. I don’t need any touchscreen or monitor for the devices, i use an iPad and a Smartphone to start and stop the music or audiobooks. This works very well for me.

Thanks for this. How are you outputting from the RPI if I can ask? Ideally i’d like to go optical out to my DAC but wondering if this is possible

9

@sinewavves said:
Thanks for this. How are you outputting from the RPI if I can ask?

I use the headphone jack on every RPI.
The RPI in the sleeping room has a headphone extension cable with a volume control. In the night i must use inear-headphones, because my wife don’t like audiobooks :slight_smile:
The device in the childs room is connected to a little active speaker and in the living room is a samsung soundbar with an AUX connection.

10

Thanks for the info both of you, really cool to see the possibilities.

11

I recently setup a Pi3 using PMP Embedded version and the official 7" Raspberry Pi touchscreen in a very nice bamboo frame/case kit from Eleduino (available on Amazon). It was brilliantly easy to setup, particularly because the frame can be oriented so you don’t have to reconfigure the Pi3 OS to rotate the screen…

My question, however, is backlight control in PMP.

I have found, and tested, the internal OS commands that will manually turn off and on the backlight (or dim the backlight), but I have been having some frustration with implementing a simple backlight sleep function that would turn off the backlight after 10 or 15 minutes, but re-activate the backlight on a touch.

There are some phython scripts I have seen that do some of this, but I am concerned about sloppy programming and scripts that are constantly looping to test conditions in possibly not such an efficient manner.

So, has anyone been able to find a simple way to use PMP screen saver function to eventually save the backlight, and then handle the touch or remote requests to turn it back on?

Thanks in advance.

pm

PS. I am using this player as primarily an audio player in our living space, designed to be kid, wife and guest friendly. My server is iMac Mini with my content running on a local NAS.