Plex - Media Center for OS X, and XBMC

[Beechwoods]

Following comments here by Malcolm / Gramofone regarding Plex on the Audiophile Output on OS X (http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=367) thread, I thought I'd give Plex a go (Plex/Nine). It looks nice. Very XBMC in look. It's pretty young as software goes, and a bit buggy, but I think it has promise.

http://www.plexapp.com/


http://plexapp.com/images/imgHomeMediaStream-w900.jpg (http://www.plexapp.com/)

The biggest issue I've had so far is that it's not recognising FLAC files. I've followed the instructions here and loaded the 'no tags' file scanner, but it doesn't find any files when I load up a location and scan it...

Any hints? If FLAC worked I think this could be a useful interface to my computer-based music collection. If not, I might have to spend some more time getting to know XBMC!

[keiths]

Plex is a fairly new mac-only branch of the XMBC code.

AFAIK it's main feature is that plug-ins are available from an 'app-store' style repository in contrast to the manual-install of plug-ins used in XBMC. However, the latest release of XBMC (10.0 - 'Dhama') addresses this and may well be a better bet until Plex is a bit more stable and mature.

I think XBMC is great (I use it on Linux rather than Mac).

[Beechwoods]

I tried XBMC, via the OS X app, and XBMC Live (which runs within a version of Ubuntu I think). It worked really well, to be honest, my only disappointment was that SHN (Shorten) files played back too slow, and stuttered. This was on the latest version of XBMC. Plex's ability to stream to an iPhone is quite attractive for when I'm out and about. I current use Zumocast for that task at the moment.

Have you got Shorten files working on your installation of XBMC? What hardware are you running it on? Here's an example Shorten file if you don't have any: http://www.archive.org/download/plumw2002-10-05.shnf/plumw2002-10-05t01.shn (from Archive.org).

[keiths]

Hi Nick,

I've not tried Shorten files (all mine are FLAC or ALAC), but will try one ASAP and let you know.

[Beechwoods]

Thanks Keith. I have a lot of old stuff in Shorten format and I don't want to have to transcode, simply for convenience, especially given I want to retain the original files intact. It's probably not a big deal to having Shorten playback for most people, I know :)

[keiths]

Ooh, XBMC didn't like that .shn file at all - crashed instantly on my Ubuntu 10.10 laptop.

I'll have more of a play (maybe transcode a few FLAC files to SHN and try those with a debug log set) and submit a bug report to team-XBMC when I get a chance.

[Beechwoods]

Blimey! My experience wasn't that dramatic :) Thanks for following this up. There are threads on the XBMC forum going back years that mention glitchy SHN playback, but it's still mentioned in the featureset, I assumed it must be working for someone, or have been working at some point!

Thanks Keith.

[keiths]

Looking through the bug tracker on the XBMC site, I notice there was a copyright issue with the code library that they were using to implement SHN, so they replaced that with a different library earlier this year. May it got broken then?

The dramatic crash on my laptop might be due to the modest amount of free memory - I only use the laptop installation of XBMC to test new skins, add-ins etc before I use them on my 'media' PC. I'll try it on there soon - in use at the moment!

[gramofone]

Following comments here by Malcolm / Gramofone regarding Plex on the Audiophile Output on OS X (http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=367) thread, I thought I'd give Plex a go (Plex/Nine). It looks nice. Very XBMC in look. It's pretty young as software goes, and a bit buggy, but I think it has promise.

http://www.plexapp.com/


http://plexapp.com/images/imgHomeMediaStream-w900.jpg (http://www.plexapp.com/)

The biggest issue I've had so far is that it's not recognising FLAC files. I've followed the instructions here and loaded the 'no tags' file scanner, but it doesn't find any files when I load up a location and scan it...

Any hints? If FLAC worked I think this could be a useful interface to my computer-based music collection. If not, I might have to spend some more time getting to know XBMC!

Nick,

Download your FLACS to your MAC Music folder. I have mine organised s.t. each album is a sub-folder in the Music folder. I can't remember if I had to configure Plex in any major way to look in the Music location. (As a purely MAC application, I would have thought it wouldn't need to be told specifically to look there!).

In Plex when you select Music you should see your list of album folders. Another folder in this list will be 'iTunes'. You have to drill-down one more level to see the contents of your iTunes library.

(Someone, somewhere mentioned I think that MAC is going to support FLAC in iTunes, but I don't know if this is true or not ... for me I was happy to store files these outside of iTunes - which incidentally I only use if I don't have a FLAC equivalent.)

The sound quality of Plex is on par with any of the other XBMC variants, if you do your conversion on your computer.

For YouTube video content, I prefer to play these natively.

[gramofone]

Ok, I recently downloaded V0.9 of Plex.

The first thing I noticed is that my FLAC music, which I hold in my Music folder, went off the menu.

Took me ages to figure out how to put it back on! ... Basically the Music option in V0.9 only references iTunes. However they have added a couple of Plug-In options. One of these is called Music Plug-Ins.

When you get in to this part of the application you will see iTunes thumbnail. You must press the letter C on your keyboard and a contextual menu will pop up. One of the options will be to Add a Source. You can use the Browse button to navigate to your Music folder (or where ever you keep your FLAC music).

Once selected select Add a couple of times and you are done.

Note however to access your FLACS you have to go to Music Plug-Ins and select them from there. They do not appear under the Music option, which now only displays iTunes material.
:mental:

[gramofone]

Forgot to mention ... I downloaded the Plex remote iPhone App.

If you have read some of my previous posts, you'll know I have been waxing lyrical about Remote HD that I currently use. I figured that the official Plex remote would show Remote HD how it was done ... at least with the Plex application.

Boy, I was wrong. :doh:

This is a piece of junk. An awkward looking remote layout with symbols on some of the virtual buttons that are not intuitive. Not only are some not intuitive, but it is not clear if they are doing anything at all - or it they are doing something, what it is they are actually doing.

Switching back to Remote HD was a breath of fresh air ...

There are a lot of remotes out there for controlling XBMC-based media players ... if anyone has had a good (or bad ) experience with one of the others I would be interested to read about it.

[Beechwoods]

I must admit that I've given up on XBMC and Plex for the Mac, and have now got Foobar 2000 running within Wine, which works perfectly. and supports all the formats I need from SHN, to FLAC, to APE. Foobar is not Media Centre software, but that a small price to pay for the flexibility and funcitonality it gives you.

Wine is a fantastic tool... it's basically a reverse engineered Windows, so you can run Windows apps without a Windows install. Great if you only have a couple of programs you want to use.

http://www.winehq.org/
http://www.foobar2000.org/

[gramofone]

Nick

Yes, I've heard that Wine is a good way to play Windows apps on the Mac... (and a good way to listen to music generally ! ...:))

Interesting choice you made returning to Foobar 2000, albeit on the Mac. Does it actually convert 24 bits? ...

Probably sounds better than Plex ... Plex is only interesting if you are doing your analogue conversion elsewhere.

Anyway, for now I am very happy with Plex ... note to myself: Check if they have improved their support of YouTube ... (YouTube, if you recall, worked much better natively than through Plex in the Beta release).

[Beechwoods]

I've not done any hardcore analysis on how 'straight' the bitpath is between Foobar and OSX. Wine has 'native' support for Core Audio as a 'driver' but my main concern thus far has been simple playback of files via my laptop on what is basically NAS drives connected to my Desktop. I will be playing further, but interestingly the latest update to Foobar2k recognises my USB DAC directly, from within Wine. It's interesting stuff, and while I would love to stick with native OSX music software, Cog - which plays everything - does not seem to handle sequential playback of tracks via old-style CUE files, which is how I have all my metadata organised, so I'm a bit stuck :)

[gramofone]

Actually, this is a shortcoming of the XBMC media centres as far as I can see. No support for Playlists - even pre-existing iTunes ones.

The software looks into the iTunes Music folder and pulls out by Album or by Artists etc. but doesn't seem to read or have access to the playlist meta-data.:mental:

This is a feature they should really implement in Plex/ XBMC. For demo purposes this is not an issue but - depending on your listen habits or style - could be a real drawback in the long term use.