
Plex on the New Apple TV - chkuendig
https://blog.plex.tv/2015/11/02/plex-on-the-new-apple-tv/
======
bobbles
Can someone with the app please let me know if you can just autoplay tv series
with this app?

Was annoying not being able to do that on the iOS app.

~~~
asd
Kind of. The only way to do this is by selecting a season and an option to
"Play Season X" appears, which forces you to watch the season from episode 1.
I think most Plex clients have had this for a while. What I would like (and
you too, probably) is to have an option to just autoplay the next episode from
whatever is "on deck" similar to Netflix.

~~~
fnordsensei
Yes, despite a lot of complaints about this behaviour, they seem unwilling to
go back to revert back to the days where it simply started playing from
whatever episode you had not seen.

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zyxley
This reminds me of how I wish Plex had a mode to actually manage media files
rather than just watching them. I hate manually organizing files, and iTunes
despite keeping very nice folder organization doesn't quite work for this
purpose (no Season 0 support, no option for years in movie filenames).

~~~
cavisne
Sick Beard will handle this for you (you can just not hook up a usenet client
if you dont need that bit)

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feld
SickBeard development has been dead for like a year. Have you noticed how
awful it has been at finding episodes?

SickRage is the fork that has lived on

~~~
joshschreuder
There's also Sonarr ([https://sonarr.tv/](https://sonarr.tv/)) which I really
like.

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Exuma
Can someone answer what is so special about Plex?

I have read the descriptions and it just seems very general, boring, and full
of buzzwords... "organize your media library", so what?

I mostly just watch Netflix, iTunes Movies/TV Shows ... is this going to help
me in any way do anything special?

~~~
bwilliams18
No.

It's not built for you at all.

It's built for torrenters (and usenetters) who download massive collections of
files, have them sit on local hard drives, and want easy ways to organize them
and play them back. and it does an amazing job of that.

~~~
josteink
> It's built for torrenters (and usenetters) who download massive collections
> of files

It's also nice for us who have had a physical media collection (video & music)
converted into a pure digital collection and want to be able easily to consume
that anywhere, anywhere and on any device with zero friction.

Especially local media-sync is useful for long trans-atlantic flights and
works much better (and space-efficiently) than just copying the full-fidelity
files to the device, which in the end may not be capable of playing them
properly at all.

Basically Plex is very good at completely eliminating issues regarding
playback format and compatibility and ensures whatever is in your library
always plays back correctly at whatever target-device you have.

I'm not going to deny that torrenters etc probably represent a big portion of
the Plex user-base, but I'd like to remind people that actually owning your
own media-collection is a still a thing, and I don't see any reason to make
software managing such collections a suspicious category to be in.

~~~
soylentcola
Yep. I used to be one of those guys with two 250-CD binders full of all sorts
of music. I went to the used CD bin weekly through high school and college
because they had deals with 3 discs for $10 so most weeks, I'd use my
paychecks to pay the bills and tip money for CDs. Later on, I amassed quite a
collection of DVDs as well.

Later on, I realized I was watching and listening to just about everything via
my computer or mp3 player so I began the process of ripping everything to my
RAID (now just a standalone NAS).

Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward so that's
just about as legally dubious as downloading unlicensed copies. I just figured
I didn't need the stacks of plastic circles laying around anymore and could
use the cash.

Either way, between rips and still occasionally buying mp3 albums on Amazon,
I've got a load of digital media and Plex is an excellent way to stream it all
to devices in my house. I use my phone or a laptop as the "remote" and the
Plex server streams to my Chromecast, Xbox, or other computers from the NAS.
It's a great setup. For people who want to use an Apple TV as their media
extender, it looks like they have the option to use Plex as well.

Honestly this is a bit of a surprise since I thought Apple typically wanted to
steer you toward iTunes for local media streaming but as someone who really
doesn't like iTunes and generally avoids it whenever possible, Plex support
makes Apple TV an actual option now.

~~~
josteink
> Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward

Personally I just threw them away because I was fed up with them taking
storage-space (which in my flat is limited).

This means I can't _prove_ ownership, but at least I don't feel like I'm
having some sort of moral dilemma around my digital collection.

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joshstrange
Well I was worried Plex was going to push that god-awful xbox one interface
they just ruined PHT (Now Plex Media Player) with. I'll hold out on my RasPlex
2 with PHT for now until some of my friends pick up the new AppleTV but both
Simplex and Plex's official app look nice.

PlexConnect was amazing for what it did and how it did it but was pretty buggy
(no doubt not the fault of the creators) and constantly restarting it was a
PITA. RasPlex is the best out there right now IMHO (direct play's everything I
have) but I'd be happy to go back to AppleTV. I do really miss AirPlay and my
family shared photostream as screensaver.

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ps4fanboy
Time will tell if Apple let them integrate with Universal Search API.

~~~
chrisbolt
Tim Cook says it will be open, but did not say when:
[http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/03/tim-cook-apple-tv-universal-
se...](http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/03/tim-cook-apple-tv-universal-search/)

~~~
ceejayoz
[https://www.quora.com/Will-FaceTime-ever-be-opened-as-a-
stan...](https://www.quora.com/Will-FaceTime-ever-be-opened-as-a-standard-as-
promised)

~~~
X-Istence
This might be different in that Apple controls the entire thing end to end.
Whereas FaceTime they got sued and that may be why FaceTime never become an
open standard.

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dewski
Simplex had the advantage of being on the store day 1, had Plex had their app
on the store day one I'm not sure I would've downloaded Simplex.

Nice to see this on the App Store.

~~~
rconti
Day 1? You mean Friday 10/30? I think that was the official "launch" date. I
ordered my ATV4 in the middle of last week (and was surprised to see they
weren't out yet), and it arrives tomorrow.

I'm gonna call Plex close enough to "day 1".

~~~
prawn
Especially given that discovery on actual day one was so poor (no categories,
no charts, limited features) that anything not featured was going to struggle
a bit. Our app was written up a couple of times alongside Simplex but missed
out on a feature despite getting an artwork request and only had a few dozen
sales.

~~~
robgough
There was only one app showing up in search for the word plex. I'm sure that
helped too.

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phren0logy
Any news on what containers and codecs don't require transcoding? The new
Apple TV ought to be pretty capable.

~~~
Veratyr
You mean hardware supported codecs? According to the specs page [0] it's
pretty much the same as an iPhone. Standard H.264 <= 60fps 1080p, regular
MPEG-4, HE-AAC. The usual MP4 containers. Most of Apple's audio codecs. The
most interesting thing is the HEVC support [1] but I'm not sure how useful
that will be given the patent situation. There are also rumours [2] that the
A8 can deal with 4K.

If you mean software decoding, I'm not sure what you have in mind. The more
interesting codecs (VP9, Thor, Daala) are too complex to decode in software on
such a low power embedded chip.

[0]: [https://www.apple.com/tv/specs/](https://www.apple.com/tv/specs/) [1]:
[http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-
New...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/Apple-
Supports-H.265-But-So-Far-Only-in-FaceTime-on-an-iPhone-6-100392.aspx) [2]:
[http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-66-plus-a8-chip-capable-
of-4...](http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-66-plus-a8-chip-capable-of-4k-video-
playback-22356949/)

~~~
phren0logy
I was referring to software, as I figured the Apple embedded chips have gotten
fairly beefy over the past few years and might be up to the task of software
decoding. Thanks for the detailed response.

~~~
TD-Linux
They absolutely can. My Sony Xperia Z3 (benchmarks worse than the new Apple
chips) can play 1080p VP9 fine with software decoding.

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matthewmcg
Just installed it and it works great. I had already downloaded the iOS
version, so it just appeared under the "Purchased" section on the tvOS App
Store.

~~~
tharoldeus
Does it have support for local (or remote) Plex Media Servers? I presently use
PlexConnect via a DNS override. Does this obviate all of the present
shenanigans?

~~~
matthewmcg
I'm using a Mac mini on my LAN as the server. I don't have the Plex Pass so I
haven't tried using a remote server.

The native app is much faster and more reliable than using PlexConnect to
replace the Trailers app on the old ATV.

