#rasplex

Back in January I wrote about the problems of trying to get streaming video to play back smoothly from Plex on our Apple TV, or XBox, or Fire TV, or pretty well anything, whilst I’d got around the problem by manually switching the Apple TV back and forth, it was still not really a satisfactory solution, and also didn’t solve the problem with any 24fps movie content. I also found that even well…

In the last post, we looked into setting up the Raspberry Pi in general, and what that entails. 

This article is gonna focus on setting it up as a Media Centre device.

I have lots of media (Music, Movies, TV Series, etc.) on my laptop and I've always wanted a stress free way to have that content available to me on all my devices, be it on my TV, iPad or Phone. 

The perfect solution for this came in the form of Plex Media Server. 

Plex Media Server

Plex Media Server is a free (but closed source) Media server application that indexes and organizes all kinds of media from Music to TV shows, Movies, Anime, etc. It also downloads Album art, Show banners and other metadata, even down to TV Show theme music. Plex media server is very easy to setup and is available to install on all major OSes. 

I run Ubuntu on my laptop, so naturally, that's where I installed my Plex Media server instance. After installation, Plex Media server runs as a background service which autostarts on booting the system. It has a web UI (pictured above) for managing your media collection. Its all really straightforward and easy to follow. I did have a little issue where some of my media wasn't being recognized, but after changing file permissions, I was able to fix that. 

The initial indexing of my vast media collection took a while and at the end, about 1gb of data, but it was definitely worth it. Once I had plex setup as a media server on my laptop, I could then move on to setting it up on the Raspberry Pi.

RasPlex

Plex doesn't have an official Home Theatre app for the Raspberry pi (or Linux), even though they have one for iOS, Android, Windows and OSX. 

Some fine folks over at RasPlex have fixed this though, by creating RasPlex which is based on OpenELEC, which is in turn based on XBMC, which the original Plex Home Theatre app is based on. So, they are all more or less the same. :D.

Installing RasPlex on the Raspberry Pi has been made quite easy by the RasPlex team. There are installers available for Windows, OSX and Linux. Once the Installers are downloaded, they can be used to download the latest version of RasPlex, and also flash it to a compatible 8gb SD card. Pop that SD card into the Raspberry Pi's slot and voila!, you have a working install of RasPlex.

As long as your Raspberry Pi is connected to the same network as your Plex media server, RasPlex should detect your media collection and allow you to play media directly on your TV. 

Issues

I ran into a major issue after setting up RasPlex on the Raspberry Pi. Although it worked just fine on the big TV in the sitting room while connected via HDMI, it refused to display a thing when connected via composite video to the smaller TV in the room. After a bit of googling, I discovered that RasPlex is configured to use HDMI only by default. I guess the developers assumed nobody would be using TVs without HDMI input in 2013. Thankfully, there's a workaround and it only involves editing a text file. I did have to do the edit on a windows machine though (something to do with those pesky file ownership and permissions issue), but apart from that hickup, it was a quick fix. 

Once that was done, the RasPlex displayed properly on the TV and once I got a "3.5mm audio jack to composite audio converter cable", I could also get audio into the TV. 

OpenELEC

OpenELEC is another Media Centre platform available on the Pi. RasPlex is built on OpenELEC, as evidenced by the OpenELEC splash screen that comes up when booting RasPlex.

However, if you want something as close to running generic XBMC on your Raspberry Pi, OpenELEC is the way to go. 

Installing OpenELEC, like most installations on the Raspberry Pi is as easy as flashing the image unto a memory card. There are instructions on how to do this for each platform on the OpenELEC wiki. I did this on my trusty Ubuntu laptop and it worked perfectly. 

Booting up OpenELEC on the Pi takes you to a generic XBMC UI. Its clean and uncluttered. 

Mr preferred solution, of the two, is RasPlex.

Controlling your Media Centre

Although the Raspberry Pi supports both USB Mouse and Keyboard, these are not ideal when dealing with a Media Centre platform. One would not like to get up to the TV in order to change the media playing. 

Thankfully, this is remedied by a host of Remote applications available for both iOS and Android.

For RasPlex, my favourite remote app is simply called "Plex Remote". Its a free app in the play store, and so long as your android device is connected to the same network as the Raspberry Pi, it detects your RasPlex instance immediately and allows you to control its UI and launch your media.

For OpenELEC, any plain old XBMC remote would work. There are several of them on the Play store, but I haven't tried out any since I did not decide on using OpenELEC in the long run, so I can't recommend one.

Miscellaneous

The solution above allowed me to elegantly stream my media collection from my laptop acting as the server the Raspberry Pi connected to my TV. However, at other times, I might want to stream the same content to my phone or tablet instead. 

Plex has awesome applications for both iOS and Android that do just that. Both applications cost $4.99 on their individual stores. They automatically connect to the Plex server and allow you to stream your content directly to your device. 

The centralized nature of the media ensures that you can do cool things like marking videos as "watched", filtering videos by genre, and even resuming from your last position across all devices.

So, I can start watching a movie on my phone, and later on, go over to the TV and continue from exactly where I stopped the last time. 

Plex Media server uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) to stream media across devices. Therefore, if for some reason, you don't have $4.99 to give the Plex developers, you use one of the free UPnP applications available on android. I can confirm that BubbleUPnP does recognize the Plex server and allows you to play your media, but you do lose some of the cooler features such as the resume feature highlighted above.

Its nice to be able to setup your home media centre using the Raspberry Pi, and stream your content from a central server to multiple devices. However, sometimes, your media might be on your phone or tablet. One might not be inclined to first copy it to your server, index it, and then stream it. 

After being constantly hounded by several people, I've finally gotten around to writing this post.

Instructional blog posts on getting a Raspberry Pi to do just about anything imaginable are a dime-a-dozen on the internet. That means, a lot of the stuff I'm writing in this post are not new, and are stuff I also learned from reading blog posts and wikis. I however am bringing a uniquely Nigerian perspective, and this might be useful to others trying to accomplish something similar in a similar environment.

Now, without much ado, lets get into it.

What exactly is a Raspberry Pi?

According to the guys that made it,

"The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard".

 It was originally designed for the educational purposes, especially for kids, but its uses have ballooned over the years and now, it can be found doing stuff like running Home Theatre software, controlling robots, home automation/ surveillance systems, etc.

I was originally interested in the Raspberry Pi just as a device for experimentation, and the extremely cheap price of $35 made it even more appealing. I bought this pack from Amazon and got the Pi along with a clear case, HDMI cable, Micro USB power pack and an 8gb SD card preloaded with some Pi software for Noobs. 

I got it sent to Nigeria through Shippyme.

Setting up

Setting up the Raspberry Pi is relatively easy to do, even more so if you have Linux experience (as I do), but still fairly easy if you don't. The Raspberry Pi folks officially recommend a variant of Debian Linux called Raspbian. Since that was one of the preloaded OSes that came with my SD Card, I loaded it up first to see how things ran. If you don't go the route of getting the pack, you would have to install Raspbian yourself. The setup process is relatively painless but the download would set you back 500+ Mb.

Raspbian is a full featured debian distribution with all its binaries recompiled against the ARM architecture which the Pi's CPU has. It comes with a modern Desktop environment and has all the important bits of any OS. Overall, its pretty boring. Of course, there are things that can be done to spice up Raspbian and add some extra features, but I didn't linger on Raspbian to try any of them out. 

The Raspberry Pi is essentially a Computer board. Therefore, in order to use it, accessories such as a Keyboard, Mouse and even power supply have to be added externally. The Pi possesses two full USB ports for the peripherals, as well as a HDMI port for Digital Video/Audio output, Composite video and 3.5mm audio jack for Analogue output. The Pi doesn't have a Wireless receiver, but it does have an RJ45 Ethernet port for all your networking needs. This turned out to be a bit of a limitation for me, but I was able to overcome it later with a bit of spending.

Issues

The only major issue I had while setting up my Pi was the fact that I use a MiFi device to connect to the internet. The device broadcasts a wireless network, and doesn't have an Ethernet port. Since the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a wireless card, this posed a bit of a problem as regards getting the Pi connected to the internet.

I eventually overcame this by getting a fairly cheap Wireless Access point (TP-Link WA701ND) which has one Ethernet port as well as broadcasting a wireless network. The device doesn't have a SIM Slot though, so it can't be used to replace my MiFi. 

I setup the TP-Link access point as a Wireless repeater to the network propagated from the MiFi. This essentially made the access point connected to the same network as MiFi, and meant that any device connected to the Access point via LAN (in this case, the Pi) also got connected to the same network originating from the MiFi. This fixed my issue with getting the Pi online.

Using the Raspberry Pi.

Once you have everything setup the way you like, its time to actually use the device to get some work done (or not, depending on what you want). In my case, I was interested in using the Pi as a Home Theatre PC. This meant Raspbian wasn't a good fit for me. Luckily, there are two excellent solutions available for the Pi in this field, both based on XBMC. OpenELEC and RasPlex.

Heb vorig jaar als hobby een Raspberry Pi gekocht. De reden was dat ik onze inmiddels 12 jaar oude beeldbuisch iets 'smarter' wilde maken en ik er vooralsnog geen duur apparaat voor wil kopen. Geen hippe Harman Kardon BlueRay media center dus, maar een 'cheap-ass' apparaat, waar ik zelf het e.e.a. aan moet prutsen. En ook nog geen nieuwe TV. En ik pruts graag :)

Een Raspberry Pi (RPi) is het geworden, na een korte zoektocht op Tweakers. Voor ongeveer EUR41,- plus wat toebehoren een complete mini-PC! Zowel via HDMI als analoog aan te sluiten en inmiddels diverse Linux distributies verkrijgbaar om het apparaat aan de praat te krijgen.

Dat is dan de volgende uitdaging: welk OS moet er op? Eerst maar eens begonnen met Raspbian om het ding eens uit te proberen. Monitor met dvi aansluiting naar beneden, converter er tussen, SD kaartje prepareren en gaan! Werkte prima! Vervolgens OpenElec geprobeerd, vanwege het feit dat daar XBMC bij in zit, en ik dus een kant-en-klaar media center heb zonder zelf iets in elkaar te moeten knutselen. Dat kreeg ik niet werkend, geen beeld, wat waarschijnlijk met de conversie van HDMI naar dvi te maken had. Na wat verder zoeken kwam ik RaspBMC tegen, een afgeleide van Debian mét XMBC. Dat werkte uiteindelijk prima! Vervolgens de RPi via de analoge aansluitingen aan de TV gehangen, XBMC Remote op de telefoon geïnstalleerd en ik kon behoorlijk acceptabel films kijken :)

Gaandeweg krijg je toch wat meer eisen, zo is de analoge aansluiting niet optimaal, zeker niet als de films ook kwalitatief niet alles zijn. Enige optie is een nieuwe TV, met HDMI... Daarnaast blijkt het ook handiger om 1 centrale plek te hebben waar de media center software zijn database heeft met gegevens, zodat deze op elke plek toegankelijk is, maar vooral ook hetzelfde is. Ik kijk nu met interesse naar RasPlex, hopend dat ze Plex media Server ook geschikt maken voor een RPi...