Looking for small plex client

[cheezehead]

Using a couple of Roku 3's and a Roku 2 here. Simple remote, interface is solid, support for wired ethernet, and low power. Been picking up the 3's for around or under $60/each when the deals come up. Some of the Android-based sticks are a bit cheaper but an easy to use remote and simple nav makes it easy for guests to use as well. FWIW while I have issues with the wifi-direct remote's on the Roku 3, the feel of the remote is a bit better fitted for holding.

 

[whitey]

raspi w/ rasplex image flashed, $30-40 stellar performance/silky smooth Plex integration.

 

[cw823]

I have tried quite a few small clients and the best I've found yet is the Roku 2/3/4 wired into my network.

It has proven to be the best performing and most stable device out of Tivo, appeltv, android devices, etc. and I've even found I occasionally use the headphone jack on the remote to listen to shows and not bother anyone else in the house

Another vote here for Roku 2/3. Mine are primarily used for Plex, Netflix, and SlingTV

 

[vanfawx]

The Google Nexus Players are amazing at this as well. Unfortunately Google stopped making them.

 

[pricklypunter]

Quick update:

I have bought a new PI 3 kit, comes with a media center remote keyboard (bluetooth thingy with touchpad), a 3A supply, some cables and a samsung EVO 16GB memory card. It should be here in the next week or so. If there's interest, I'll do a wee unboxing, install and get up and running type thing

Here's the link: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - Starter, Media Center & Premium Kit WHT/CLR

I ordered the clear case just for the geek factor

I have also been looking at the various Mini MX type boxes (thanks @Keljian for the suggestion) that use the Amlogic S905 Arm Chip with the Mali 450 GPU and have come to the conclusion that the best option for these types of boxes is to find one that not only uses that chip, but that also has dual band wifi as well as wired 1gbps Ethernet, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of Flash on board expandable up to 32GB. I figure if I reach for at least that spec and some tweaking does eventually get me Linux booting on whatever one I go for, it will be useful for something, if the dedicated PlexTV idea doesn't pan out

My best contenders, in no particular order, so far are these:

This one: Mini MX Android 5.1 TV Box S905 Quad-core 16GB XBMC Dual Wifi Fully Loaded E6A8

This one: Beelink M18 TV Box Android 5.1 Amlogic Media Player -2G RAM 16G ROM

This one: Qbox Android 5.1 TV Box Amlogic S905 Quad 1000 LAN Wifi 2G/16G BT 4.0 KODI 16.0

Or this one: KIII Smart Android 5.1 S905 Quad Core TV Box 2GB/16GB 4K KODI Fully Loaded I8F6

I'm sure there's others that I have missed, and if there are any that look like a better deal, feel free to let me know. There are literally thousands of these things floating about, possibly some at better money too, but from what I can see there is not a light gap between them all spec wise and most likely are just copies of copies of copies of the original ref design board, something that the Chinese manufacturers are particularly well equipped to do

 

[Keljian]

I have been doing quite a bit of research into this for myself.

For me there would be three options re s905 boxes- from high to low cost:
1. The Wetek hub (or higher level products) - most expensive but the best support of the lot. The polish on this device seems better than most others.

2. The Odroid-c2 (would need to purchase a fair few add ons to get what you want) - the tinker toy, if you plan to run other things on it and want to tinker, this is the best bet.

3. The beelink mini mx (in my experience, works well) cheap and cheerful, plus has openelec support, and "just works" for me.

All are good buys, for different reasons.
You don't need 2gig of ram unless you are tinkering, and you don't need more than 8 gig of storage either. I cope fine with the beelink mx which isn't fully loaded (1/8) and it has dual band wifi, Bluetooth, usb, gigabit Ethernet etc. I just wanted a media player.

You can always add more space via flash card

 

[pricklypunter]

The new wetek play 2s looks really tempting from a preview I read, but I have no idea when it's going to be available. Either way, whatever I end up with, you can be sure I'll definitely be tinkering with it, ain't that the whole fun of it?

Having as much emmc/ ram as possible stuffed in there and as many of the other goodies as the chipset allows, while keeping the cost relatively comparable to that of the new rpi 3 kit is where I'm at in the justifying it to myself game

Oh, I meant to ask earlier @Keljian but forgot. I plan on using this on the 5gig wifi if I can, have you tried it, what's the performance like? Dropouts? Patchy reception? Or is it stable?

 

[Keljian]

Haven't tried the wireless, sorry. I generally don't trust wireless for streaming high def anything. That said, the box is in a bad place for wireless reception and I can test it for you in the coming days if you like.

I agree with the concept of getting it stuffed full, but it depends on your use case

<mini tangent>
I was listening to a Tech Report Podcast and heard David Kanter say something that really struck a chord. Paraphrased "Performance is only relative to the application you are deploying in/running" - There is no point driving 32 gig of ram if you only need 2, you will just consume more power unnecessarily.

</mini tangent>

 

[pricklypunter]

Haven't tried the wireless, sorry. I generally don't trust wireless for streaming high def anything. That said, the box is in a bad place for wireless reception and I can test it for you in the coming days if you like.

I agree with the concept of getting it stuffed full, but it depends on your use case

<mini tangent>
I was listening to a Tech Report Podcast and heard David Kanter say something that really struck a chord. Paraphrased "Performance is only relative to the application you are deploying in/running" - There is no point driving 32 gig of ram if you only need 2, you will just consume more power unnecessarily.

</mini tangent>

If you get the chance to do a quick wifi test for me that would be much appreciated mate, cheers for that!
If it's working well for you, it might just save me running new cables everywhere. I really only have one area of the house that's a little spotty and I don't have any TV's there. I have a Ubiquiti 1200 AP on the middle floor and the coverage is excellent all round except for one wee spot upstairs.

I agree with David Kanter, but I'm planning on making full use of that 2GB of RAM more so if the TV thing doesn't go well. It's one of things, I don't know exactly what will become of the box, so I want to make sure I'll have at least some hardware available to push the boundaries of possibility with

 

[pricklypunter]

Ok, so here is the one I eventually went for: Tronsmart Vega S95 Telos Amlogic S905 Smart TV Box 4K 2G/16G KODI OTA SATA HDMI

It ticks the boxes for me as a general box to mess about with. The one thing I did eventually notice though, quite by accident I must admit as I fell for the marketing too, just about all the other boxes I looked at on ebay were trying to give the impression of supporting wireless ac, but just stopping short and calling it "dual band" instead. Some of the poorer listings even mention it in their "spec", but upon investigation they are using the same wireless chipset as the rest of them. The Tronsmart s95 Vega Telos is the only s905 based box I have found, after extensive searching, that actually has a wireless chipset that fully supports 802.3ac. So if wireless is important for your setup, I guess that's the one I would be recommending to anyone, at least until I find something better

 

[Keljian]

Sorry I have been sick (as has my family) so I have not yet had the time to test the wireless, guess it doesn't matter now.

 

[pricklypunter]

No problem bud, I figured you didn't get a chance to test it, and with a 20-30 day wait for the slow boat, I decided just to put my money where my mouth was We have all been down with the flu as well over the last couple of weeks, its been brutal, I spent last weekend in bed and I still don't feel any better

 

[Chuntzu]

I run i3 nucs (the version with the ir ports on the front, though I don't use them currently). I run kodi with plexbmc and now trying out kodiplexconnect. I got the nucs with ram for <$100 ea. I run them with windows 10 so I can launch xbox one streaming and steam streaming from kodi. I also use silicon dusts dvr which is really slick as well. I use xbox 360 controllers and have an app for Android called yetse that works great for control. I also have irule that I plan on integrating all this with but that's going to take some time. All in all its pretty darn good. Just wish plexbmc was still being worked on as I think it's better the plexkodiconnect.

 

[svt3391]

I am using Google Nexus Player.
The bluetooth voice enabled remote control is very handy.
This has replaced all cable boxes from the cable company. We use the HD Homerun add on for TV watching.
Every now and then Best Buy would still have them on sale for $49.99. I got two at that price, one at $39.99, and picked up the forth at Target for $25. I know there were people got it for $15.

 

[pricklypunter]

Guess what the postie brought me today...

I haven't had time to do much of anything with it all yet other than unpack it, but I will post up something later tonight hopefully, when I get a little free time to play. For now though, here's a couple of piccies of what arrived. I guess this is the forum equivalent of elevator music

 

[whitey]

HIGHLY suggest flashing that thing w/ latest rasplex and checking that out.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

I'd be wary of this PSU. Each of the two USB ports can supposedly output 15.6 W, but the entire unit is rated for only 10 W?

 

[T_Minus]

HIGHLY suggest flashing that thing w/ latest rasplex and checking that out.

What OS do you install it onto?

 

[pricklypunter]

So, here we go...

I get the little heatsinks on the rPi3, not that I really think they will do much, but they came with the kit and they look the part at least. Then I installed the board into its clear acrylic casing, which, as cheap as it's made, and it is, actually goes together surprisingly well and it's pretty well engineered with nice clean cutouts for all the ports etc. The important thing though is that the board has at least some protection against stupidity in the future

As has been mentioned a few times already, RasPlex is a smashing combination of programming and porting of Linux specifically tailored towards ARM based processors, but with a twist. It has been tweaked to include the full Plex Home Theatre in all its glory.

My goal here was to find some inexpensive and reasonably reliable hardware that does nothing else but run the full Plex client software and integrate with the TV in some way so that I don't need to juggle remote hand controls. I am not concerned about any other aspect, at least not at this stage, like playing games, loading up Netflix etc. I have other devices that do that well enough when the need arises. But I do hate having to wade through dross like the opera browser/ sony app store/ find the plex client, load it up etc all before I can watch or listen to my favourite media, not to mention when the stoopid thing crashes for no apparent reason or just fails to find the plex server repeatedly forcing you to start over.

Now to be fair here, I haven't tried out any other software platform so I can't say how well PlexHT on the rPi3 vs any other solution is, but I will no doubt experiment in time. For now though, I can honestly say, this was, without doubt, about the most painless Linux install I have ever performed, even better, it does exactly what I was hoping for

So getting started, there are a couple of ways to get your RasPlex up and running. You can download the Rasplex compressed image.gz file directly from the GitHub repository, and use dd in Linux or Win32DiskImager in Windows etc to copy the image to the SD card or you can go to the Rasplex web site and download one of their "installers". Just choose which one you need, based on whatever O/S you are going to write the image to the SD card with. I grabbed both the image file and a copy of Win32DiskImager, intending to write the SD card from Windows, before I found out that the RasPlex installer would do it all for me.

The installer is so simple to use it doesn't really need any in-depth explanation at all. Just run it and you'll see what I mean, everything is abundantly obvious. It downloads your file, extracts it and writes it to the SD card, what could be simpler than that? A few moments is all it takes and you're ready to fire up your wee slice of Pi

Now, I did get confused initially (being an old fart has it's drawbacks) when firing this thing up for the first time. I tried to use the TV hand control, but for whatever reason, it wasn't working as I expected it to. I then tried to pair the little Wireless keyboard that I got in the package. After about 10 minutes of faffing about, thinking I can't really be this stupid, can I? It then clicks with me. The TV I'm testing with, although "smart" is the dumbest thing on the planet, in fact I'm still wondering why I bought it. One of its many talents is that it doesn't support CEF. Having smacked my forehead I then realise that in addition to that, the little keyboard is actually "Wireless", not Bluetooth as I had mistakenly assumed. Although, having read a few stories of Bluetooth woes, I'm glad I have been saved the headache of trying to make it work reliably.

Hunting around for another 5 mins thinking I must have been shipped the wrong keyboard, I finally find the wireless dongle. It is hidden inside the keyboard battery box beside the lithium battery pack. There's a little molded storage holder for it in there, for when you plug the keyboard in via the mini-USB port instead. Doh! Easy when you know where to look. Of course, there's no mention of this secret squirrel hiding place anywhere in the manual or on the box. One other thing whilst I'm talking about the keyboard, it feels like a cheap calculator in the hand. Its got a little flex to it and the buttons are really soft and rubbery, in saying that though, it gets the job done. The track pad is actually a reasonable size, maybe three fingers width wide by two vertical. For one finger moving a mouse pointer about, it's prolly reasonable if your track speed is set accordingly. I haven't as yet tried out the gyro's in it, and to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't really know where to start with doing so as I'm not a gamer.

The instant I plugged in the dongle, the keyboard sprang into life, allowing me to navigate my way through the set-up wizard, most of which I just ignored. After tweaking a couple of things and switching on pre-caching, which took about another 5 mins to get all the metadata down, I was presented with the PlexHT menu. Navigating the menus is flawless and fast. A few more system settings and preferences adjusted and it's just as good as I was hoping for. I moved the rPi3 down to the main TV and jacked in. Instant solid wifi connection, CEF works fine and the TV remote works perfectly. In fact, I would go as far as to say, it's equally as responsive as the normal TV menus are, which are already pretty slick on that TV. In all, it's impressive and I couldn't be happier with the results so far

First boot up, the storage volumes are being created etc.

After it expands the storage volumes, it auto reboots and launches into the initial set-up wizard.

I answer a few simple questions and set-up pre-caching, which felt like it took ages, but it was really only a few mins.

As soon as it was done, I clicked next and up popped my familiar PlexHT menu, which I can't show here, sorry. I have played with it for a fair while tonight and it has been amazingly stable. I take my hat off to the developers, they have really done themselves proud with this I reckon

 

[pricklypunter]

I'd be wary of this PSU. Each of the two USB ports can supposedly output 15.6 W, but the entire unit is rated for only 10 W?

Yea, I noticed that right off the bat too. The only thing running on it is the Pi, it's pulling 1.3A and the supply is cool to the touch. To be honest, it's not put together any better than about 99% of all the phone chargers I have seen of late, including the genuwine ones, so I'm not desperately concerned