Hi everyone,
I want to share with you the great experience I am having using Plex as a media server.
Until now I had always kept all my media libraries (photos, movies, music) organized by directories accessible in various ways. Frankly, I didn’t think I needed anything else. I tried Plex out of pure curiosity and discovered a lot of advantages versus very few disadvantages. I think I have gone too far already so I make a summary below hoping that it will be useful to other Syncloud users:
PRO’s:
- On music, movies and TV shows, Plex adds information on artists and productions and organizes the material by genre, year, artist, etc .;
- It can be configured in a few minutes: see the guide here, but basically you just need to know the address with port 32400 shown on that page and then proceed on your own;
- I haven’t had to change anything in my libraries on the disks: having different folders for different media (movies, music, photos) is the only requirement and I already had them;
- It is accessed with a web interface. This point also presents some perplexities as you will read below;
- Quite fast even on weak CPUs: I run it on Odroid HC4, it’s an entry level ARM. In the latest version the movies play very quickly and you can even jump from one point to another in the movie without waiting too long. In previous versions, on the other hand, the reaction speed was equal to that obtained by playing the films from Nextcloud (not very satisfactory);
- I use it on different devices and always via 4G network. A very interesting application for me is listening to all my music in the car without having to use annoying tricks like file caching to have them available offline, etc… This because the popular platforms (Gdrive, Dropbox) prevent you from playing music directly from folders. Plex solved it and frankly it seems like a liberation to me;
- you can share libraries with other people without having to pay for the purchase of the complete system (Plex pass). Although I managed to do it, this point is still not very clear to me
. - the photos can also be viewed in timeline style as on the most famous platforms. Well, this part is still slow at least on my little cpu
CON’s:
- The web interface is not optimized for mobile devices … you will need to zoom in and zoom out if you use it on a smartphone while it is already fine on a tablet;
- On mobile devices (I use Android) there is an official Plex app that offers an optimal interface but it is paid: after a minute of playing your personal libraries it stops. After all, they must have ways to finance themselves. As I said above, you can rely on Chrome or other browsers and everything remains free.
I think I’ve said it all. Ciao
Simone