It’s been two years since “The latest geekiness” post and my setup has changed quite a bit, so let’s do an update. I’m going to break this into a few parts. First up is home theater and media.

I eventually got the HTPC back up using a power supply that didn’t fit the case. The RPi B+ worked as a Kodi client running OpenElec, but it just didn’t have enough power and ran into codec issues. The HTPC worked better, but there were still occasionally codec issues that I couldn’t figure out and this was after installing every codec I could find while running Debian Jessie with the Debian Multimedia back ports repository or Lubuntu 14.04. I could have tried KodiBuntu again but every time I have it breaks after I update it and there is no way I’m going to run an OS that I can’t update.

Late in the evening when sitting down to watch something with my wife is not the time to troubleshoot issues and it was definitely frustrating. She has also never gotten comfortable with Kodi’s menu. Add to that the fact that I had a hacked setup so that the HPTC and the RPi in the bedroom shared a database on the server. So yeah, it wasn’t the most stable setup and she gave me crap every time something went wrong.

New Years weekend we were visiting family and they had a new smart TV. When I was checking out the apps available for it, one I found was Plex. It had been a few years since I had looked into it so I decided to check it out again. The benefits were:

• It has a true client/server design.
• Client applications are available for PS3, Chromecast, Android, Roku, Smart TVs, etc.
• It’s menu is much simpler.
• It has the ability to transcode files so they will play in a format the client supports and will do that automatically.
• It watches folders and automatically adds new content to the library.

Of course there are disadvantages:

• While most of the application is open source, some parts, especially the client apps are not.
• The Android apps cost money.
• To take advantage of all of the features you have to pay a subscription or do a larger lump sum.
• It has fewer features than Kodi.
• Replacing the HTPC means not having a computer in the living room.
• It puts almost all of the load on the server, especially when transcoding.

I decided the pros outweighed the cons especially since the features we would be losing out on were things we didn’t use Kodi for anyway and the simpler interface would make life easier. The real clincher was that we could do all of our media consumption in the living room from the PS3 . This allowed us to eliminate a device from the media center, get rid of a remote, and never have to switch sources again. I have also found it plays everything I’ve tried to play on it from either the PS3 or Chromecast. The one glitch is a few files that I have to manually adjust the bit rate on, but I can fix that with a couple of clicks on the remote and it will play.

To help ensure the Plex media server had enough processing power and memory available for transcoding and the fact that it’s doesn’t have the most powerful CPU, I decided to kill the VMs, with the exception of the torrent server, I either wasn’t using them or Plex would be making them obsolete.

This freed up the now retired HTPC and the other RPi for other uses, like hosting the torrent server, but more on what I did with those in a later post.

I have been quite happy with Plex and recommend it if your situation is anything other than a single computer/RPi that you play your media from. I would recommend using Kodi if you have a standalone HTPC. If you have multiple devices accessing your media and you want them to share a library or if you want to avoid having an HTPC in addition to other smart media devices, go with Plex.