In my previous post in this series, I laid out my reasons for dropping my monthly cable subscription and my initial choice of the AppleTV as the instrument for maintaining a reasonable method for my viewing entertainment.
One of the main reasons behind the choice of the AppleTV was the fact that it supported 5.1 digital surround sound through the HDMI cable output. This made it a snap to connect the device to my Sony STR-DG820 receiver which was connected to my LCD television and 5.1 speaker setup. Another compelling reason for this choice was the simplicity with which I would be able to connect my iTunes library containing rips of all of my cd and dvd collection to my home entertainment system. Continue reading
A little over a year ago I joined a growing group of people that are eschewing the cable monopoly for their viewing entertainment. After many years of being a faithful, if sometimes unwilling, cable subscriber, I realized that there was no financial sense to subscribe to a channel lineup consisting of roughly 80 stations simply to enable my self to obtain the content from 8-10 of those stations.
Over the years I had slowly upgraded one piece at a time so that I had gone from a simple cable box to a home-built MythTV setup to a Tivo HD. Yet after all of these upgrades, I still felt that it was silly to be paying so much money to my local cable provider for so many stations that I never watched.
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Today while perusing the forums on the Plex website, I noticed someone inquiring as to how they would go about changing the file paths in Plex for one of the video sources without removing the source and adding it back from the new location.
The reason for wanting to do this is to ensure that your database entry tweaks, fanart settings, etc., are not lost, which is what would happen if you removed the source and it’s library entries.
One of the more interesting parts of the Plex project at the moment is the complete re-build of the database structure and how you work with it. The existing database structure is fairly poor in it’s design. There are a lot of cryptic field names, and it is easily corruptible. The current library system is a hold-over from the old XBMC code base.
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So several months ago I was in Atlanta visiting some friends (Hi, Justin!) and got hooked on his hackintosh Plex box. Now, I wanted to run it on a Mac Mini, instead of a hackintosh, but the application was great. Since then I have purchased the Mini and had a blast getting Plex working and tweaked to do what I want.
If any of you out there running Plex have noticed that there seems to be quite a few instances of Python running when you have Plex up, here’s why: each plugin that you have runs under it’s own instance of Python. Here’s what the development docs have to say:
Each media server plug-in runs in its’ own process, in a separate Python instance. This ensures that plug-ins can’t interfere with each other, or with the operation of the server.
So there you have it. Essentially, each plug-in is sandboxed from each other as well as PMS.
If you want to see this in action, just shell into (or open up Terminal) when running Plex and execute the following command:
ps -ef | grep Python | grep -v grep | grep "Plug-ins"
You should see one entry for each of the plug-ins that you have installed.
This weekend I spent a large chunk of time setting up Plex Media Center for OS X on my shiny new Mac Mini. When I left for work this morning, after two weeks off, I expected to get to the office and fire up iTunes to listen to my music from home using Simplify Media like normal.
Everything was working fine, if a bit slower than I expected, for the first hour or so, then unexpectedly Simplify Media simply quit working. Restarting the application didn’t help. Restarting iTunes didn’t help. Restarting the computer didn’t help. No matter what I did Simplify Media decided to be stuck in the initializing mode.
After toying with somethings on my iMac at home after work, I realized what was different in the setup than before Christmas break. The difference was that I am now running the Plex Media Server (PMS) component of Plex on the iMac to server the iTunes library up to the media center Mac Mini in the living room. After stopping PMS and restarting Simplify Media everything worked fine. With Simplify Media stopped and PMS restarted Plex was working fine.
After looking into the preferences of Simplify Media, I noticed the ability to turn off Simplify Media for the local network. After checking that box and restarting both PMS and Simplify Media everything is green again in the Simplify Media land.
I am not quite sure why they are conflicting. A comment in a post on elan’s Plex blog clued me into checking the Plex UPnP code to make sure it was disabled. I looked into that and I definitely have it disabled.
Update (2010-1-6) – According to the Simplify Media blog page, they are having network problems in their data center.