Plex noob question

[pjpjpjpj]

I am basically aware of what plex is, and for the most part, I have no need for my uses, so I haven't bothered. However, I have have tried to do some streaming lately through other various Sage methods, and they are finally starting to feel a little clunky. I am therefore curious about Plex purely for the purpose of being able to stream stuff to tablets and phones remotely.

My question comes from the fact that the plex website is a little unclear regarding what you can and can't do, with and without a plex pass. Specifically, I don't care about the nice metadata, the nice organization, the art, etc. All I want is for it to be able to find and stream all of my media to Android devices; Sage recordings (OTA as MPEG2), DVD and BD rips as MKVs, and a smattering of various videos pulled from youtube and such for my kids.

So, can plex do this without a plex pass? Or only with a plex pass? Or only some of it regardless?

[reggie14]

I have Plex Pass, so I can't necessarily speak from first-hand experience, but I don't think you'll need Plex Pass.

The main things you need Plex Pass for are Plex (device) Sync and Cloud Sync. As long as you're OK always streaming files off your Plex server, you should be fine without Plex Pass.

New features come to Plex Pass subscribers earlier, but again, that shouldn't be a problem with your basic needs.

[pjpjpjpj]

How does plex do with streaming OTA recordings (1080i MPEG2), and high-bitrate MKV BD rips? Is it purely a matter of your server's horsepower and the settings you have on your mobile device?
(sorry, reggie, I suspect this isn't a question for you since you have the pass)

[Tomahawk51]

Maybe this will help:

I do not have PlexPass; the only money I ever laid on Plex has been a nominal fee for the iOS app.

I happen to have a Win7 PC acting as my SageTV server. I have installed the Plex Server application on this server, and configured it to point to my NAS that contains all my movie and music files. Consider it a next step in complexity, but I've also configured it further to recognize and expose the SageTV recordings as well (thanks to this forum).

I then play back that content elsewhere, directly on my phone on the Plex app (sometimes ChromeCasting that), or on a client application on my MacBook.

AFAIK Plex will figure out if the client can play the video directly or needs to transcode it. I know that playing media on my phone over LTE/3G results in a much lower quality stream anyway.

I will say that my experience isn't flawless. It could be my wifi as well, but I believe my aged Core2Duo machine (base performance) is just too wimpy for this.

[Taddeusz]

I am also a Plex Pass subscriber. I like being able to sync content to my iPad so I can view them at work without unnecessarily eating up bandwidth.

That being said, to really get a good experience from Plex you should have a quad core. My C2Q is fine transcoding Blu-ray rips to 1080p to my iPad when I'm in my house. Never skips a beat. That was not the case when the same machine was a slightly slower C2D. The best it could manage was a fairly low bitrate 720p if nothing else was happening on the machine like comskip. Since the processor was upgraded I've never had an issue.

MPEG2 is no problem for Plex, although there seem to be times when it doesn't deinterlace 1080i. Not sure why it doesn't always handle interlaced content gracefully.

[mikejaner]

I was not a Plex Pass subscriber for the first few months I had it. It does all the metadata, streaming and transcoding features for free. It works great running as a VM on my ESXi box. You can even share your library with friends, and everybody gets this for free.

The PlexPass gets you two major things, which got me to buy in.
1. Synced copies: You can sync a movie with your iPad and take it on a trip with no internet connection. Friends can sync from your library too btw.
2. Beta/Preview releases. These releases give you access to new features. For example the current early access release lets you use the new Plex App on the Xbox One.

[pjpjpjpj]

Can you see Sage recordings in plex without using the Sage plugin stuff, even if it just showed up with the native Sage file name (rather than pretty Metadata, season and episode name, etc.)?

[mikejaner]

Yes, you just get a big list of files.

[wayner]

If you don't care about the metadata, etc then there may be better solutions than Plex. In the iOS world there is AirVideo HD which just works from folders. There is probably something similar in the Android world. You run AirVideo server on your Sage server and then get the app for your phone/tablet?

But if you go with Plex I would recommend that you start looking at using more of the features of Plex to prepare yourself for a post-Sage world. Unlike many of the alternatives Plex has a client-server implementation and it has probably more clients than anything similar - Win, Mac, Linux, XB1, RPi, Roku, ATV, iPhone, Android, Win8, Chromecast, etc.

I first started using Plex a couple of years ago and I have installed the SageTV scraper or whatever and I have a Plex Pass. I only use it occasionally and I haven't gone through and fixed all of my metadata as a lot of it is not tagged properly. Using Plex in conjunction with Sage may cause me to have to go through and reorder my files into folders and rename files. Painful in the short term but probably has value long term by standardizing your folders. It appears that Sage7 is actually more advanced than Plex since it works solely off of metadata but Plex still depends on folder structure for libraries.

[reggie14]

I occasionally stream recorded TV shows from Plex, but not terribly often. Maybe I just don't do it enough to see problems, but I haven't noticed the deinterlacing issues experienced by
Taddeusz. The only problem I've had is that you can't stream files that are currently recording. Plex might see the file, but the transcoder won't go past the length of the file when you started playing it back.

Similarly, the Plex Scanner and BMT agent has generally worked pretty well for me. It struggles with some shows, like the Daily Show, that seem to have some variation in metadata from show-to-show. There are a handful of shows whose episodes end up getting split up into different groups. They're collected in a single group within Sage, but they somehow show up in different groups in Plex.

I'm not entirely sure what problems wayner is referring to with the "standardizing folders." Plex determines the metadata for Sage recordings by basically querying the Sage metedata (if you're using the Plex Scanner and BMT agent). For imported media, which (at least for me) is imported in Plex separate from Sage recordings, it determines things by filename. It basically ends up looking for the same naming conventions as all other media management programs, including Sage's BMT add-on.

I have a Core 2 Q6600 processor in my Sage/Plex server. It does OK, but as far as I can tell it barely keeps up with 1080p blu-ray rips when transcoding to something in a decent quality.

Practically speaking, you'll almost always be transcoding in real-time, unless you're streaming to a PC client. Plex won't stream mpeg2, even to most devices that support it, unless you force it to (there's different ways to do that, I'll note, but I don't recommend it for a variety of reasons). Blu-rays rips generally have bit rates that are too high to stream as well (again, unless you force it, which I don't recommend). The only things of mine that aren't transcoded are certain Handbrake-encoded videos.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I'm not entirely sure what problems wayner is referring to with the "standardizing folders." Plex determines the metadata for Sage recordings by basically querying the Sage metedata (if you're using the Plex Scanner and BMT agent). For imported media, which (at least for me) is imported in Plex separate from Sage recordings, it determines things by filename. It basically ends up looking for the same naming conventions as all other media management programs, including Sage's BMT add-on.

What I mean by the comment about folders is that when you set up a Library in Plex it is based on a folder. You can't create a Library called Kids Movies and having a criteria of all files in a folder where Genre=Children. With Sage, at least with the Diamond UI, you can filter using pretty much any Metdata field that you want.

In Sage7 with Diamond I have set up my Menu structure so that there is a Kids subsection to TV that is filtered by Genre and a Kids subsection to Movies also filtered by Genre. You don't have to worry what folders the files are in as long as all of your relevant folders with video folders are included in this view in Sage7/Diamond.

So to get things to work properly in Plex I will need to create specific folders for Kids TV, Kids Movies, Movies and TV. I will then need to create Separate libraries for each of those four and point them at the correct folders.

In fact I haven't looked at this too closely but I am guessing that using the Sage Plex scanner will group your Sage recorded movies and TV shows in the same library in Plex since they are in the same folder, which is your Sage Recorded TV folder.

Note that on Sage I have lots of TV shows that weren't recorded by Sage, or at least not by the current Sage server. So these are imported TV shows. I don't believe that the Plex-Sage Scanner sends metadata from Sage to Plex about these shows - I think, but I am not 100% sure, that it only sends Metdata for TV shows or Movies that were recorded originally by that SageTV server. It also appears that Plex does not use .properties files. So to get this into Plex I will need ot name them in the Plex naming structure of Seinfeld - S03E04. That isn't as hard as it seems as I have some SJQ/Groovy code that can do that automatically thanks to Slugger.

In my opinion the metadata handling and library/view creation in Sage is more sophisticated and flexible than what is in Plex, especially with tools like BMT, SJQ and access to the Sage API to directly access the metadata. Plex should really add metadata filtering to its library creation process.

In terms of transcoding - lots of my files are MP4 - all of the kids TV shows that I record, most of them from the HD-PVR in H.264 .ts format, are transcoded to MP4 using Handbrake. These seem to play fine in my iPads and other clients like the XB1 but I haven't done any systematic testing.

I don't remember mentioning any interlacing issues with Plex.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by wayner

What I mean by the comment about folders is that when you set up a Library in Plex it is based on a folder. You can't create a Library called Kids Movies and having a criteria of all files in a folder where Genre=Children. With Sage, at least with the Diamond UI, you can filter using pretty much any Metdata field that you want.

Ahh, got it. You're right. At least with the old Plex Scanner and BMT agent, which is the only thing that I use. All recorded TV shows appear in one library. All recorded movies appear in another.

You might be able to do more of what you want with the Phoenix Channel Plugin for Plex. I haven't tried it. I really don't end up using it much.

Originally Posted by wayner

In my opinion the metadata handling and library/view creation in Sage is more sophisticated and flexible than what is in Plex, especially with tools like BMT, SJQ and access to the Sage API to directly access the metadata. Plex should really add metadata filtering to its library creation process.

Well, within a library you can filter based on genre and other metadata.

I'd actually suggest going the other way. I don't like having to have separate libraries. I wish I could combine them. While you can add multiple folders to a library, I don't think you can use different scanners and agents for different folders.

It would be nice to have some "shortcuts" to specific user-defined filters, sort of like the different Phoenix views.

Originally Posted by wayner

In terms of transcoding - lots of my files are MP4 - all of the kids TV shows that I record, most of them from the HD-PVR in H.264 .ts format, are transcoded to MP4 using Handbrake. These seem to play fine in my iPads and other clients like the XB1 but I haven't done any systematic testing.

Generally, H.264/aac support on any Plex-streaming device is pretty good, as long as you stay below blu-ray bit rates. While you might end up remuxing on-the-fly, you shouldn't need to transcode Handbrake encodes.

[pjpjpjpj]

Do you HAVE to have the year in the movie title for Plex? Their FAQs say you should name your movies like that [i.e., "title (year).xxx"], but will it still figure it out if none of your movies have older versions with the same title from another year?

I really don't want to go through all of my movies and rename them...

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

Do you HAVE to have the year in the movie title for Plex? Their FAQs say you should name your movies like that [i.e., "title (year).xxx"], but will it still figure it out if none of your movies have older versions with the same title from another year?

I really don't want to go through all of my movies and rename them...

No, you don't need to rename them, but there's a higher chance that Plex will mismatch a movie. You can fix them manually from the Plex web interface, so it's not that bad (unless its a large number).

[lotusvball]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Similarly, the Plex Scanner and BMT agent has generally worked pretty well for me. It struggles with some shows, like the Daily Show, that seem to have some variation in metadata from show-to-show. There are a handful of shows whose episodes end up getting split up into different groups. They're collected in a single group within Sage, but they somehow show up in different groups in Plex.

Can anyone help with this. I have Shows that no matter what I do they are put into different folders in Plex. ie. Pure Genius, The Good Place.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by lotusvball

Can anyone help with this. I have Shows that no matter what I do they are put into different folders in Plex. ie. Pure Genius, The Good Place.

The only option you would have is to let plex get it's own metadata and not use the sagetv scanners. You'd have to ensure the season episode number was in the filename.