Hey Jow Forumsuys. Looking to finally cut the cord completely and set up my own home theater/streaming. Recs for hardware and software? Is pic related worth the lifetime? Is there something free that lets me stream to all my devices (mostly apple shit.... I know....)? Looking for all in one, movies and music.
Oh, and what’s best encoding for movies? Music?
Also, recs for speakers.
Sorry for the long post and newbness.
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Emby is an alternative to Plex, at least looks at both before making a decision.
just use a share
Is there good free software to have music and video streaming from a linux home server ?
I'm setting up a server for this shit.
I would appreciate if I could set up various radios/playlist (play random music that are in a folder and that are from this genre of music), allow various people to connect their and stream music to their own machine.
For movies it would be the same.
Is there anything like this ? I know MPD can stream music, so I'm gonna look into it
What does Jow Forums use as a OTA antenna?
working to integrate that with dvr into my kodi setup
Hey thanks!
I spent the last half hour looking for the same thing, I was thinking about setting up Kodi with SFTP and Beets for music. The only alternatives I came across so far were Emby, Plex, Gerbera, and Streama.
also if you're looking into something to automate torrenting look into radarr, sonarr, and flexget
My problem with a lot of these is they are subscription based and/or I can’t stream to my crapple devices. I’m using VLC with a share off my router at the moment, and it kinda works other than getting music to stream to my tv (and hence to my better sounding sound bar).
My setup:
- Emby for the database and web interface/streaming.
- Sonarr and CouchPotato to automate downloading (private trackers only, tried to set up another instance with public and had problems with Indian/Russian dubbing, filters would mostly fix that). Didn't like Radarr because it only automatically searches for new releases automatically and nothing that is already out.
- Kodi with Emby add-on for all front ends. Customise the UI as you want, plenty of other addons/remote apps.
Using this I have a older computer acting as a media server/seedbox, a cheap domain for remote viewing, and it will run on almost anything. My lounge is running OpenELEC because I built a miniPC before I knew about android boxes (use LibreELEC if you go this route), and my bedroom has an Android box. I have 4-5 other people renting access to pay for my internet. Has transcoding if you are on WiFi/away from home. Granular permissions if you want other people to have limited accounts.
How the fuck you disable plex or emby transcoding option permanently?
I just want a good media server library and then play it on PC external media player through it.
My fucking piece of shit pentium PC can't handle encoding a 20gb of movie file.
just set it to original man calm down
You can't you idiot, web player doesn't support all kind of video/audio format.
That's why it always got transcoded when its happen.
Use emby.
Plex is shit spyware.
I have lifetime premium on both, they are literally the same except Plex is spyware and LESS open-source (emby used to open-source but recently closed down some of their code - probably because they want to harvest your fucking data too).
Anyways - go with EMBY + RPI OSMC alternatively if you are FORCED to use plex, go PLEX + OPENPHT.
>don't use this spyware
>just use this recently made spyware instead.
Use these dockers:
Binhex/arch-delugevpn
Binhex/arch-jackett
Binhex/arch-sonarr
Binhex/arch-radarr
emby/embyserver:latest
linuxserver/ddclient
centurylink/watchtower
install nginx locally and letsencrypt bot.
you're welcome.
then add this to crontab
echo "30 12 * * * root rsync -raz /dockers /media/media/Backup/Dockerconfigs/" >> /etc/crontab
echo "30 12 * * * root rsync -avh /dockers /media/media/Backup/Dockerconfigs/ --delete" >> /etc/crontab
echo "30 12 * * * root docker image prune -a -f" >> /etc/crontab
you're welcome.
>one requires an internet connection
just completely fucking block emby from calling home if you're paranoid, good luck doing that with plex and still being able to use it.
Emby so you can use madvr
Why would you need to buy a Plex subscription for home setup?
I'm running Plex server on the torrenting / media machine and watching everything with Infuse Pro 5 on Apple TV 4k.
If by "apple shit" includes Apple TV, I'd definitely recommend using Infuse 5 over the Plex app
This is pretty much what you want to do, except radarr is far superior to couchpotato.
If you're less tech savvy, plex with its wealth of available clients is the way to go.
If you like to tinker, emby back-end with kodi front-end is the most pleasing experience due to full customizability.
Some of us leave the house
You don't need a subscription to stream outside your network.
Beware, Emby app is shit on some phones. I can't lock my screen while playing music on Emby, it starts playing Merzbow noises. Reported it to the devs ages ago and it has never been fixed.
Sync offline media for planes and trains, silly
Their android app isn't really mature yet.
I use both plex and emby and plex's platform is far more mature.
I think it'll take another year or two for emby's offering to catch up and surpass plex.
There's a few things that emby does better. subtitle support and handling is FAR superior to plex.
If you're going to build your own home theater PC, you might look into fanless CPU coolers on a CPU with integrated graphics (to avoid the noise associated with graphics cards). I don't know if it'll work well for streaming without overheating, but it will be very very quiet.
>having to pay 100 dollars to copy and paste a file to your computer
there's on-the-fly transcoding too. It's all about convenience.
I bought plex-pass for $75 a good 5 years ago or so. I feel like it's been worth it.
If you're in that mindset to begin with, why use plex/emby at all? Why not just play the file directly?
Because its free.
it's convenience and prettiness. You can pay to have more convenience and earlier features. What's wrong with that? It's not exactly expensive, and if you think you'd have value in it and the service will continue to exist for years to come, the lifetime plex-pass isn't a bad value.
Thank you!
I’ve been running with XBMC/Kodi as my main HTPC client for years now, with a plex backend. I had always heard Emby was a poor man’s Plex but a lot of this thread seems to like it better. Main reasons to switch? I’m interested if it truly is better.
Different user, but that’s what keeps me from dropping the money, will it be around? Then again, shit always changes so....
I mean, I bought it 5 years ago. I think I've gotten more than enough value from it. I don't see plex going anywhere. It's in so many places now.
I also bought the emby lifetime as well. I think emby will eventually be the superior service. It has a better back-end, more direct support (GL getting real responses from issues on plex's forums), open source, perfect subtitle handling, and doesn't require an account to use all its services.
I don't see either of these services going away in the next 5 years. That's my 2 cents.
Why every single of these FOSS shit UI looks like something from PS3 era?
It's not really better yet. I think it will be eventually.
The backend is cleaner and, in my opinion, better. There's much better support on the forums for issues. Kodi integration is top tier. Subtitle support is leagues better for forced subtitles/moonspeak
Cons: Android app isn't as mature. Syncing is a new feature there for emby. I prefer plex's UI on the web cient (my opinion).
Once I feel that the android app has caught up with plex, I'll probably stop using plex.
I don't have automated downloading and go through my own VPN for remote viewing since I didn't want to expose Emby directly, but other than that my setup is pretty much identical to that. I use LibreELEC in the living room.
Too bad Emby uses a metric assload of RAM compared to Plex (2GB for my library on Emby vs 150MB for Plex)
Then use a normal container and format like AVC with mp4 you retarded nigger, what are you even doing? Don’t use meme formats
With the mobile apps you do. You can use the web version at any time for free but if you want apps on anything but set top boxes you have to pay.
Its not my fault radarr or sonarr decided to download the best available seed on some meme format.
Some people even seed things that not can't be detected by radarr or sonarr like using 5.0 compression.
What the point of automatic media server if I still need to convert them manually or skim trought thousands of low seeded files?
I honestly haven't even checked mine, I threw 12GB of leftover RAM in my server and I get about 2.4GB used with all my services running, Emby included. A significant chunk of that is the md stripe cache too.
>what’s the point
Its not the servers fault that the web player can’t play some meme format. I don’t use sonarr. Use Kodi or some shit as your front end to access your Plex library if it’s having trouble, why are you using the web player if you know that it’s limited?
Plex is just there to provide easy access, the web player is obviously limited because web browsers only play certain files natively. Use Kodi with PlexKodiConnect or something to play them natively.
The problem is from your lack of understanding, not the servers fault.
Paying for lifetime, or even at all, is only worth it if you plan to have a few accounts attached to your server or want an antenna to serve as a DVR. Otherwise, what they offer for free is all you need.
I mean I could be wrong, I really don’t know. I just remember installing Emby last year in a container on my Proxmox host and assigned it 2GB of RAM, and it was swapping already after 15 minutes after I pointed it to my library directories. Might have been just an initial buildup from indexing but I just deleted the container after that, it was insane.
>transcoding
Why would I have media in a format I can't open?
Or if you want the phone apps. FireTV/AppleTV apps are free, with Chromecast I’m pretty sure you have to use the web UI and cast from there or else it’s not free because you need the phone app to cast from normally without the WebUI.
Fucking Plex. Took me hours to figure out why all the shit in my shared folder was showing up under a different name or not at all.
Not him but mostly for bandwidth control, in my experience. If my Wi-Fi can’t handle a 4K rip that’s like 20GB being casted to a FireTV or something or if I’m playing over the Internet remotely from my server, I can transcode on the fly to a lower bandwidth file, like 4mbps 1080P or something.
Any recs for hardware?
Also, which is best filetype/encoding? Both movies and music.
Thanks!
Depends on your intended usage. For no transcoding, a literal potato server could handle Plex just fine. For just 1 or two streams being transcoded at the same time, a dual core CPU like an i3 is still probably fine. For more at the same time, you’ll just want more cores and more threads. It has no GPU encoding option.
For encoding, easiest for most is just x264 in an mkv for 1 file and subs together, but for me I don’t like my subs being inside the file in case they are out of sync, so I just put my movies in subdirectories and place the .srt with it, like
—Goodfellas (1990)
———Goodfellas (1990).mp4
———Goodfellas (1990).en.srt
Plex will designate a language name if you put “.en.” or “.fr” before the SRT extension. Otherwise it doesn’t know what it is and just says unknown.
Hmmm.... so it looks like Kodi is out just because it requires a jailbroken iOS device. Plex or Emby seem to be the top two for multi device support.
Oh, say, that's a good idea about separating the subs. See, this is why I like these threads. It seems like thats something simple I should've thought of.
Keep in mind Plex apps on iPhone require a plex pass to be paid for. Only the set-top box and console apps are free.
I always try to split MKVs back into their source content because half the rips I get have included subs inside that are like a second off and it bugs me to hell. Or they have severe spelling errors. And I can’t simply remove them from Plex, they are still listed as an optional sub and I only want 1 sub file that just works. Not to mention mp4 is compatible with basically anything like a PS3.
Anyone use Plex for their Chinese cartoons? How is your configuration?
Just werks for me, don’t really need to configure anything. Sometimes it has a bit of trouble picking up the native names of the show, but not often, and if it does you can just manually add the info and cover art.
What the hell do I do for the monogatori series for the folder structure?
plex has a free tier that works just fine for personal use.
subfolders with season numbers instead of titles
what sort of problems are you having with language specific shows? 1 out of 20 shows, i might have to manually match (due to name) or straight up label it myself.
This too, you’ll just have to name the seasons by release number and not by their titles like Bakemonotagari.
Loving Plex on my home server for all consoles and casting in the house, as well as outside my network, no VPN necessary. Running on an old Phenom II X4 with Windows 7 because fuck it, it can handle the overhead even when transcoding. Streams to friends' houses just fine, given a not-worthless upstream connection at my place. I recommend it, being free and quite heavily featured nowadays. Just make sure you're willing to put in the time to get your file naming correct.
I understand the "hate", this is Jow Forums afterall.
But I love plex cause it just works. No needed maintenance to get all the nice modern features.
The app works wonderfully on all the TVs in my house, and better than DLNA. Having 5 bedrooms, 3 of which get used for guests often, it's a real "nice to have".
My issue now is running out of space... I'm at 9.8 TB of movies / TV / Music. Will likely need to upgrade my storage this summer.
Only if you want to sync. I know that it’s a small percentage of users, but some use the Plex app on iPhone and stream it through Chromecast. Roundabout sure, but it does work with no need for Plex pass.
Did they change their policy? I use a friends plex pass, so I’m not up to speed. Before the plex pass it limited my playback to 1 minute on the phone app. Did they change that?
To be quite honest, I’m not sure. At the time it was as simple as plug and play for me. Didn’t want to drop cash on a robust plex client so I stuck with the iPhone plex app/chromecast combo. I never had any issues. Now if multiple people are trying to remote then I see how Plex would require the Pass.
>My issue now is running out of space
I fear the day this comes to me as well. I spent good time rebuilding my old main PC into the SFF case where the server now resides, up in a closet. My mirrored 6TB drives will fill up completely one day. Maybe by then, I'll have the cash to throw at converting to a fuckton of SSDs so I can get the ludicrous local file transfer speeds I crave.
OP, if you're still reading, this guy speaks truth. It's a meme to hate on Plex because it's easy and it works. What you choose depends on what you want out of your experience.
I tried minidlna but nothing works with it and I can't figure out why not.
Because it isn't a fucking transcoder.
No shit. But it should show up as a DLNA server on my devices and it doesnt. It does on a samsung TV but not a samsung blu ray player or a roku on the same network. They only recognize Windows computers which I never even set up DLNA on.
The videos are h264 and formatted to be compatible with roku and most players. It will play them from a USB stick, but it won't connect to my linux PC.
SSDs for caching, otherwise you're going to be paying alot more for little data while you could've spent that money on one of those insane 12TB drives
Turn on the file serving shit and set the root device I know some devices won't see just a plain multimedia server.
Maybe you could use the app with the chromecast for free then. I tried playing it directly on the phone app alone and it require a pass or else it would display a message that it would stop playback after 1 minute.
I don't know what you mean. I don't think minidlna has the ability to do any of that. It's not a UPnP server and I don't know much about that. Maybe I'll look into that.
But I've never had a positive experience getting proprietary shit networking. If I could just see an error message...
plex sucks ass for anime because of the file names
does emby have any problems with anime filenames
Is surround sound still a thing? I really don't know, I think most people buy a sound bar these days.
Should I go through the trouble of wiring up speakers? I've been out of the loop.
OP here. Still reading. Seriously considering just dropping the money for lifetime.
Probably right. Now that I think of it, I never used the app through the phone only. Always a go between.
You've got a few options to make it work very nicely. One is to use a different scanner and metadata agent, there are some that work against MAL's database which is usually closer to what filenames are. Another is to just write a few lines of bash or whatever and rename files to be SxxEyy based on the series. I do the later.
I end up with a script in each of my ongoing series directories that when run changes filenames to the correct thing and run that every time something finishes downloading.
I'm very much considering moving to a different setup once I get more storage space where I separate download directories from viewing directories, linking in files from download to the structure and filenames plex expects while still keeping the originals for seeding.
I just need to account for things like music files where I'd want to just copy the files over because I mess with tags pretty much always and also series where I need to remux with fixes to subtitles.
no, I don't use metadata. It just won't update in the library unless you name it "Movieepisode1season4.mkv" etc
Emby and Plex are proprietary shitware. Use something modern and free, like Streama.
Sorry I was unclear. Plex expects something like this:
Library Folder/Show Name/blah blah blah SXXEYY blah blah blah.mkv
As long as the files are in a directory with the expected title and as long as they've got that SXXEYY pattern in there somewhere things will work. It's trivial to write a script to move and rename files accordingly after downloading. You can even have your script ask plex to rescan the library so you don't have to do that from the UI or wait for a scheduled rescan.
Setup filebot to automatically rename
>I don’t use metadata
ouch
Does it have apps for my phone and for my set-top box? Or just a web interface?
I created a monogatari collection and sort it by air date. (Excuse how far behind I am, waiting for decent subs.)
Collections are fucking great. So is having the studio tag actually have the studio and not the network it aired on (thanks tvdb). Needed to swap everything so that it fills out the studio tag with the actual studio and not the producer/network it aired on and now I get useful suggestions in plex.
oops, didn't reread that after edits
i don't save videos after i've watched it on my tv
So what are you using Plex for?
transcoding videos from my server to my tv
I've got a sound bar with satellites upstairs and an old school 5.1 downstairs with the projector. People still do surround, and it's always getting crazier. It's just not normie-friendly, so getting to hear about it isn't so commonplace.
I've hemmed and hawed over it for a long time now. If you think you want it, but want to just try Plex itself for a while, they normally have lifetime sales over the winter holidays. That should give you some time to consider, and even try alternatives if you're displeased for some reason.
Faggots that complain about Plex and anime don't know how to rename files. Literally just follow thetvdb.com and you'll have no trouble.
This is how I got mine:
Serviio DNLA Server 1.6 Pro (Thanks Torrent)
- Handles all media streaming w/transcoding and can view media over the internet in Youtube like manner. Streams over Ethernet to two WD TV Lives I got in the house. Has built in profiles for various devices that tell it "hey this device can't support x format outta the box so I must transcode it into something that it does support" They got a free version but it lacks the internet based playback option. A cool thing is that the display gui used with both internet viewing and tv viewing is the same. You can keep track/resume playback of media over both local and internet based content. So say I watch only part of video via internet. Go home and watch other part without having to restart from beginning. It runs as a service from the start so no having to keep being logged in or resorting to 3rd party hacks (as with Plex) in order to get the same result. Automatically adds new files to it's media library so you don't gotta do anything really. Ain't bloated as fuck as with other such media dnla options. Can manage large media collections with out issue (handles my 5TB video/music collection no problem). Started out with the 1.4 release back in 2012 under Server 2k3 (later WHS 2011)
Openpht with laptop + hdmi connected to tv. server is on my desktop but one day in the future i want to build a NAS for it. Using a Rii i8 (mouse+keyboard controller) is comfy. Using wakeup by keyboard means i can forever keep my laptop lid down forever as a plex client.