Got Plex Server and Raspberry Pi?
Got Plex Server and Raspberry Pi? You need rasplex. This is a plex playback distro designed to be installed into a Raspberry Pi v2 or later. While it can work on v1 Pis, playback is known to stutter on the older hardware. You need to connect to a Plex Server (the server runs on a different machine).
In the normal Raspberry Pi method, we just shove an image onto an SDHC card 4G+ and that is it. Put the card into your Pi, answer a few questions about your network and Plex Server.
It isn’t perfect. I find the remote inputs slow or ignored. Don’t like all the feedback screen overlays that block subtitles (pressing push brings up this screen so the subtitles cannot be read) and the lack of Folder View for all media. They spend too much screen room on being pretty, but not functional. For home movies that begin with the same long name, but just change the last part for the different parts, the filenames are useless. They cannot be seen.
There are many shows I don’t retain – just want to dump into a single directory and watch. Don’t get me started about the lack of m3u playlist support for video files either. Also, the pixel ratio seems off a little, but that could have been a few odd-sized videos.
Also miss all the addons that Kodi provides. Plex channels are poor in comparison. For example, the SyFy channel only shows clips through plex, whereas the Kodi addon will stream complete shows from syfy.com. This isn’t accessing illegal content, just shows available on the website.
Still, if you have lots of media stored inside your Plex server, this is the easiest way to access it from a silent Raspberry Pi. Playback is good and easy.
I would never have looked for this if PlexBMC was working well. Sometime in the last few months, it stopped working well. It usually works enough to start playing 1 video, but the addon crashes before the video ends. Playback is still handled by Kodi, so it finishes fine. And for playing lots of videos (not official media from studios), Kodi is still the best player I know.
