Face it, VLC provides higher quality video then the built in player.
There’s already a “PlexExternalPlayer - Allows you to use Plex to browse your media then play the files in your favorite media player (where the files are local).”
It’s open source.
Why can’t you just put that feature into Plex?
Myself, I don’t want to stream anything, I just like the beautiful library GUI with Metadata Plex gives me for my terabytes of local files.
Honestly, the only reason I signed up was to post this question that I’m sure has been asked thousands of times because the External Player Agent I mention won’t work on one of my PC’s while it works on the other flawlessly.
Try using Kodi + PexKodiConnect. Might give you the best of two worlds, without having to start an extra player in the foreground (not a beautiful experience in my opinion).
The external player option for the Android TV app is extremely necessary, just like the regular Android app has.
The Android TV Plex App allows very little playback customization and has several major shortcomings. For instance: the subtitles in direct play mode are ridiculously small, to the point of not being practical in certain viewing conditions. If you force transcoding then yes, they can be bigger, but why should I resort to that in order to make subtitles readable?
On the other hand, an external player can customize playback much more: using Kodi as player (my case with an regular Android Box using the standard Android app) I can set subtitle’s font & size, zoom levels, aspect ratios, brightness, codec selection, audio passthrough, etc.
Please, give the external player app option to the Andoid TV app so each one can do what they do best.
PS: I’ve tried PexKodiConnect and it improves the situation over connecting thru uPnP to a Plex server, but it’s still cumbersome and not very practical in comparison to the external player solution: in an Android box you just select and play a file in Plex, which jumps to Kodi, who plays the file and comes back to Plex on finish, where you set content’s view status. It’s the best of both worlds.
Nearly the end of 2019. Still no option to play extern in android tv mode. Sorry, VLC plays everthing (audio codec without passtrough) and also the passtrough works without issues on every codec (nvidia shield)
Thank you Plex Team ! We just paid you not enough. At lest you could fix your own android player.
