I'm a long time XBMC user and have quite the media library (4.5T).
Recently I stumbled across Plex and really like it. One of the things I've always disliked about XBMC is that it isn't very spouse friendly -- I always have to be around to get XBMC pointed at the right place so my wife can browse the media library. If I'm not around, she is better off just leaving xbmc shut down. This is where Plex really shines, as most of the technical monkey wrenching is done on the server and you just point the client at it and you are up and watching videos.
I setup PMS on healthy server and it is running great. I did my initial testing with the Plex plugin for XBMC and everything is working flawlessly.
This last week I purchased a 512MB Rasberry Pi with 16GB Level 10 SD card and installed the latest stable rasplex on it. I also purchased a Roku 3 and installed the Plex client/channel on that.
I have to say, the Roku 3 unit has a much cleaner interface and is just easier to use than the Rasplex unit. The Rasplex unit blows the Roku unit out of the water in terms of the flashy interface with all the fan art and what not. However the navigation to the movie library is almost clunky when compared to the Roku 3. For example, when you navigate to the Movie menu item in the Rasplex unit, it shows recently added movies in the panel to the right, which is kind of confusing to a novice user as it looks like that is all the movies you have available to you. You have to select the Movie menu item to dial into the movie selection. This kind of thing can be found all through the Rasplex UI. With Roku, you just client the Plex icon, then movies and bam you have your menu to select All Movies, By Rating, By Year, etc.
On my hardware, there is no noticeable difference in video quality once you start watching a movie on either the Roku or the Rasplex client, so it really comes down to the navigation in the UI. I know I'm being a little nit picky here, but it seems one of the goals of Plex clients is to be really easy to use. To this end, are you guys working to polish the interface a little more? I don't think it would take a huge effort, but just little things like the recently added movies comment I made above.
I REALLY like what you guys are doing, so please to take this as any slam on Rasplex. I'm excited to see where you guys take this amazing app.
Install the latest Dev release of rasplex on github. There is a big difference in terms of UI speed. I have both as well and switch between them often.
I have both and while I actually prefer the "wow" factor of the rasplex UI, i eventually settled for the "lite" roku as its much quicker and with the remote that comes with roku, simply "easier to use". I generally use rasplex for when I have people over as it does tend to impress people, but when its just me and the wife (or just the wife) then its the roku for sheer practicality.
I ventured into rasplex and xbmpc but it is so sluggish when compared to the Roku's responsiveness that I ditched the raspberry pi. Also found the whole setup is too geeky for me and not really targetted for an end user but for unix professionals - even packaged solutions needed unix skills to troubleshoot and get to work.
So for me Roku with RARflixTest Plex channel has been the way to go - even replacing the Samsung Plex app as my normal way of having Plex for the Samsung Smart TV
I ventured into rasplex and xbmpc but it is so sluggish when compared to the Roku's responsiveness that I ditched the raspberry pi. Also found the whole setup is too geeky for me and not really targetted for an end user but for unix professionals - even packaged solutions needed unix skills to troubleshoot and get to work.
So for me Roku with RARflixTest Plex channel has been the way to go - even replacing the Samsung Plex app as my normal way of having Plex for the Samsung Smart TV
I think you will find the next stable release of rasplex much much better than previous versions.
I think you will find the next stable release of rasplex much much better than previous versions.
I thought the issue was the power of the Raspberry Pi. My pi is just mothballed - so will give it another go if there is any evidence that it is better than a Roku with RARflix in functionality, speed and UI
I ventured into rasplex and xbmpc but it is so sluggish when compared to the Roku's responsiveness that I ditched the raspberry pi. Also found the whole setup is too geeky for me and not really targetted for an end user but for unix professionals - even packaged solutions needed unix skills to troubleshoot and get to work.
So for me Roku with RARflixTest Plex channel has been the way to go - even replacing the Samsung Plex app as my normal way of having Plex for the Samsung Smart TV
I feel the same way, coming from using a 2011 MacMini as my Server/Client. I experimented with the Pi when Rasplex came around months ago. It was so sluggish and crash prone I threw the Pi in a drawer and it stayed there till yesterday!
Do your self a favor and try the latest beta (0.9.1.15 I believe?) I was amazed as to how responsive it was and how smooth the GUI had become! It still has some small quirks but once they get it stable it will blow the clunky Roku GUI out of the water. ;)
I feel the same way, coming from using a 2011 MacMini as my Server/Client. I experimented with the Pi when Rasplex came around months ago. It was so sluggish and crash prone I threw the Pi in a drawer and it stayed there till yesterday!
Do your self a favor and try the latest beta (0.9.1.15 I believe?) I was amazed as to how responsive it was and how smooth the GUI had become! It still has some small quirks but once they get it stable it will blow the clunky Roku GUI out of the water. ;)
i just got my Raspberry PI 512 MB some days ago and installed the last Rasplex 0.3.1. With this version the GUI is not really fast, which version do you mean is the faster one?
Is this version 9.9.15, which i can choose from the installation GUI?
I wasn't able to find a version history where also beta versions were listed.
Speeding up the UI is always a priority of ours, but the raspberry pi has limitations.
I'm confident that some day (hopefully soon), we'll be able to see the same smooth experience of PHT on raspberry pi that we do on say, a macbook. There will always be some latency, but the recent experimental builds have made a lot of progress.
Currently, our *main* priority is stability. What good is a fast UI that crashes?
Just closing the loop a bit on this thread - for anyone who might be interested.
Problem(s) when compared to running a Plex Client on my Mac Mini (2011) on med-largish library (~200 Movies & ~150 TV Shows)
a. Menu item transitions for both Movies and TV Shows sluggish
b. Moving from Main Menu into All Movies/TV Shows sections very slow (~15 secs)
1. Tried a variety of overclocking configurations with negligible perceived performance improvements (for me anyway)
2. Mounting /storage on USB drive had one of the biggest impacts to Menu items transitions - seems much smoother
3. Tried Refocus and Amber skins. Settled on Amber. Menu item transitions seem to be even more smoother. As much as I like the default Plex skin in 9.9.16 - it "feels" heavy.
4. Tried different versions including current, 9.9.15, 9.9.16. Settled on 9.9.16 - as it appears to have some sort of caching solution - and generally seems slicker/smoother
Nothing that I tried had any significant impact to problem B. Not sure whether this is a hardware limitation or can be coded around. But have noted that "top" shows PHT process consuming ~90% CPU at all times. And my understanding is that XML parsing is CPU intensive.
Specs:
Raspberry Pi Model B
SD Card Class 10
Wired Ethernet
Apple Charger Power Supply (cos it was lying around and seems to work okay)
USB 3.0 Seagate External Drive (cos it was lying around)
Bottom line, it's good enough for day to day use for me with USB and Amber. I don't move from TV Shows to Movies and vice versa that often.
Also I just watched the latest episode of Sherlock in 1080p - flawless.
