PM4K / PlexMod for Kodi (18, 19, 20, 21, 22+)

They aren’t obligated to do anything. It’s a labor of love for them. If they want to pack up and go home it’s their right.
It’s all open source. Anyone that wants to can fork it and pick right back up.

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They didn’t need to delete the forums though. It could have been left read-only.

There are many many people that contributed to that and is a gold mine of information that is now inaccessible. Things like install guides, best device threads, informational threads like the P7 FEL thread… all gone.

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Yea, that I can agree with. I wonder what it costs to host those forums.
Glad I’m pretty happy with the current state of my Ugoos. As long as Plex keeps working I’m happy.

It still sucks for everyone else - the Forum was a HUGE source of info.

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EXACTLY

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Hello there.
Darn about CoreElec. Good community.
I am curious about why do most users prefer use PM4K to view their movies?
Thx

Because it’s by far IMO the best interface. I despise Kodi skins.

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That’s basically my point of view. I can make a Kodi skin look good, but it seems like it takes a full weekend. This is just install and go.

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Well there is only 1x other choice for Plex+Kodi, which is PlexKodiConnect.

I have tried both and prefer PM4K for its speed, stability, and interface for my larger Plex library.

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Could I get a bit of assurance on path mapping?

I went to each media category in PM4K (Movies, etc.) and selected the “Map path” option, then chose the path of an added “Kodi source” smb share in CoreELEC.

Playing media, “Show Stream Info” changed from “Mode: directplay, lan (verified), http” to “Mode: directplay, lan (verified), mapped (smb)”

1.) Am I good to go, or do I need to do something with path_mapping.json as well?

2.) Is this the best option to path map a USB drive plugged into a Raspberry Pi which is using OpenMediaVault and a Docker container as the Plex server on a local network? Mainly just serving direct play to an UGOOS AM6B+/PM4K and LG G4.

Thanks for any help.

Very true . Is the speed similar to the SMB share?

If you’re currently having problems with CoreELEC and miss the forum, maybe the CoreELEC Wiki or AVS Forum will help you?

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I hope the issue with the CoreELEC team is temporary and hasn’t been triggered by the barrage of DV posts they’ve endured. Some of it has not been as appreciative or collaborative as we are on this forum.

You’re good to go.
Edit: You might want to adjust your chunk sizes (up) in Kodi.

I’d argue using NFSv4 shares is the ultimate way to go, but they’re much harder to set up. No one has really checked performance of HTTP vs. SMB vs. NFS lately, though. In theory NFSv4>SMB>HTTP, but even that claim might not be true anymore.

Going from HTTP to SMB means piping through a different service essentially, SMB has its own overhead and implications, just as HTTP does. Someone’d need to test the benefits of SMB over HTTP. In theory NFS is better suited for this kind of streaming-big-chunks work and with kernel support it should be a no-brainer.

Personally, I’d prefer SMB over HTTP, but I can’t prove it in terms of performance.

If your raspi has kernel support for NFS, I’d have a look at that.

In any case: Make sure this drive is formatted as ext4 or something similar. If it’s non-kernel NTFS, but NTFS-3G, the raspi will be choking heavily. Kernel-based NTFS is fine.

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I had both SMB and NFS chunk sizes increased to 1MB previously following a setup guide. Seems to be working well.

It does have NFS support, and in the end it does look like this was the right way to go with my setup over HTTP and SMB.

It wasn’t too challenging getting NFS shares set up on the Pi/OMV side, and then seen by Kodi/PM4K. Getting those shares seen by MacOS and then to automount on startup was a lot tougher, but I think I got it squared away.

I recently moved off Windows to Mac, so I wasn’t really thinking about taking SMB and NTFS out of the chain.

1.) Access, seeking and folder navigation is definitely a lot snappier on MacOS with NFS. Quite happy with this.

2.) Folder navigation to point to shares in Kodi/PM4K seemed a bit faster with NFS as well. Access and seeking are great for media playback. I didn’t really spend enough time with both to speak definitively, but I’m guessing the initial spin-up to get a file playing is a bit better with NFS in my scenario.

3.) At a glance, it seems to be a bit less process intensive on the Pi/OMV side of things after disabling SMB.

This is probably the last piece of the chain that could be better, as they’re NTFS drives and I don’t have the swap room at the moment to convert them to ext4. I haven’t had any problems with high bitrate media outright choking out over the years, so I guess it’s at least ‘fine’ for now, but not ideal.

Thanks for taking the time to help!

You don’t have to. With a modern kernel, you can just mount using mount -t ntfs3 instead of ntfs or ntfs-3g (the former is a symlink to the latter), if your kernel supports it. Then it’s blazing fast.

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Going back to the CoreElec teams decision to (at least for now) pull down the forums and “think about the future of the project.” I hope one of the things they reconsider is their insistance on not taking any donations or anything for the project. It doesn’t have to become a commercial project, but it sure seems like they have a team that is stretched pretty thin and that people working on the project get burned out pretty often. If they could even just take in a little money for the project that might help stabilize things a bit.

Anyway, its all up to them of course. They can run the project any way they want, or not run it at all, if they so choose. But I would have liked to be able to support them directly, and it might have helped them keep more of a team going if they could pay even a small amount to developers, or even just have more of a cushion to cover costs of things like the forums and websites etc.

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All signs point to ntfs3 being in the kernel of recent iterations of OMV, but they do not use it. Couldn’t get a remount to play nicely with the frontend and had to mount from there.

Interesting experiment though, and got me to update to the latest version of OMV at least. :grinning:

I’ll likely migrate everything to ext4 here sooner or later.

From what I have heard it was caused by the CPM builds really. People were coming to the CoreELEC forum seeking help for issues that were not CoreELEC issues but found to be issues specific to the CPM build, which was not theirs.

Everything is down it’s not just the forums. No one can install or update.

A dev last night on reddit, confirmed they are NOT planning on shutting down. So hopefully this just ends soon.

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