Do you do PLEX?

General Discussion
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Just thought I’d ask.

If so, do you like it enough to recommend it?

If not, do you ever wonder why not?

You’ll have to PLEX, excuse me, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Do you know that your tablo recordings can be saved off your tablo device automatically to your PLEX server?

Do you know PLEX players are include in or freely available for just about every media device you may already have?

Do you know just about any computer worth it’s salt will make a fine PLEX server?

And the best thing is, using PLEX your tablo will most likely do what you need it to, namely record content. That is really all it needs to do if you have your own PLEX server.

PS - I do not work for PLEX, just a satisfied PLEX customer.

-Rodger

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Plex is awesome!

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I do not Plex. Have thought about it, but I’m not one to save recordings long-term. More of a watch-n-delete kind of household. I do also watch some live TV, but not very frequently…

Is finding a recording and doing playback on any TV or tablet from Plex as easy as it is on Tablo? Is it yet another level of complexity to deal with for my non-tech wife?

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Plex is awesome! I Plex 1080p movies. I do not Plex my Tablo. I watch on my Roku 3 and Fire TV, then I delete at the end of the season.

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I have the lifetime Plex Pass. It is awesome.

I rip all of my TV shows from Tablo & only watch the shows in Plex. Roku Loves Plex. Everything just plays.

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PLEX through ROKU is about as easy to use as any other ROKU app, except it is your content, your choice, not some packaged content. Anything more then you do now, by definition would be “another level of complexity” I suppose. But from a user’s point of view, not much different then Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. It does require some minimal setup however, but again not hard to understand or do. If you have ever setup Microsoft’s Media Center in your PC, it is about that difficult to do. Where there would be more work is if you want to convert DVD/Blu-ray discs to online content. At that point it become a bit more challenging if you’ve never ripped a DVD or Blu-ray disc before. But, this would be done using other software and some of this software is very easy to use as well.

But, back to ripping tablo’s recorded content, it is really pretty simple using CycleJ’s Tablo Ripper. No harder then downloading 2 files, installing one and you can leave the other in your download folder if you wish as you will just be linking to it in Tablo Ripper. Not much harder then installing any other program in a PC to get it up and running. Tablo RIpper will find your tablo all by itself and present to you all the recordings available. All you have to do is decide if you wish to save all of your recordings, or just some of them. In either case fill in the path to FFMPEG (the file you left in your download directory) and select an output folder. This will be the folder you will later import into PLEX as one of your media folders. If you wish to selectively rip (convert) recordings, then you just select which ones, click a button and press another button to start the conversion process. Tablo Ripper does the rest. If you wish to rip all of the recordings, you simply press a button to start the background service and Tablo will do the rest, and continue to in the background. You can actually choose the time when this happens if you have a slower PC, maybe at night when everyone is asleep.

PLEX will automatically analyze the media content as it monitors the folders you specify. I will locate all pertinent metadata for TV Shows and Movies and will build very nice interface which will include cover art, descriptions, people, and more. All Media falls into one of five categories - Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos and Home Videos. Content to fill these categories can come from any file folders your choose, but it is easier to group them into folders given the same name as the categories. This way, you will always know where each type of content will be found or put into. You can add to your media a much or as little as you choose and there really isn’t any limit other then storage space that I am aware of. I currently have just about 900 VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray/3D Blu-Ray Movies, over 2800 TV Show episodes, and about 60 movies broadcast and recorded from Tablo. I have been building my movie library since the VHS days. I also have over 3000 hours of Home Movies, but I have yet to edit most and categorize them. I will be doing these someday I hope.

So this is PLEX and a bit of what I am doing with it. I have yet to decide if I want to put music, photos, or home video on PLEX. Right now most of what goes on PLEX comes from Tablo and it is fully automatic except when the schedule producer/broadcaster does not provide the correct metadata. There is some bit of this to fix ever few days, but no more then a few minutes effort a couple times a week.

I have always enjoyed working with media most all of my life. So, for me PLEX is a super useful tool that ties all of it together. One day, most of what I have in media will be one my PLEX servers. But, when that might be, I have really no idea.

-Rodger

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Plex is a terrific whole home (+ remote) media server. But you do lose the tablo fast forward thumbnails when you rip recordings, so consider adding MceBuddy to your post processing path. The default settings do a creditable job of removing commercials, resulting in a better viewing experience. No, I’m not affiliated with either Plex or MCEBuddy.

Try it. You’ll like it.

PS, And get the donate version. It’s not quick, but better than the freebie.

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This approach hilights the two different philosophies concerning Tablo (or any other DVR):

  1. Use the DVR as an all-in-one media hub to schedule, record, store and view from one device. This is the simplest approach but puts all one’s eggs in one basket (total reliance on one device).

  2. Use the DVR as simply a scheduling and recording medium. Leave the rest of the functionality to other pieces of software and devices.

In most cases, one device doesn’t do the best job on all the functions so the second approach parcels out the functionality to those media best at doing specific (not all) jobs.

I’m assuming that any one of my PCs has superior resources to the DVR in terms of CPU power, memory and storage. Therefore I let those PCs do 70% of the work.

My experience in IT has been NEVER to count on one device, one program, one medium. Build in redundency, distribute processing functionality, use the best tools for specific jobs.

If I could, I would have bought a DVR that does JUST ONE THING: show a guide\schedule on my Rokus and record - in a small box. It would have no other software on it to contend for resources. It would have an absolute minimum of code and functionality (less code, less errors, less complexity, bare bones OS). After that the responsibility would be for the user to offload the recordings and do whatever he wanted with them. In fact I would have been happy if the Tablo appeared to the Roku as a network storage device for the Roku Media Player to play the recordings (using the Roku Media Player as a viewing engine).

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Plex = Awesomeness

We have a Plex media server + Tablo + SlingTV with the Roku environment. I couldn’t be happier after ditching cable.

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Wish I would have bought one when they were cheaper. Suppose I’ll buy one next time mine comes due.

-Rodger

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One of the reasons the distributed approach works for us is that we seldom if ever watch a show the same evening it is recorded. We tend to watch recordings a few days after. So there is the intervening time between recording and viewing for processing, cataloging, etc.

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Like you Marjamar, I spent six full years ripping all my CDs, VHS tapes, Cassettes, LPs, DVDs and Blurays to MP4s and MP3s to make them instantly available on a server. Every evening after work, I’d do 2 or 3 CDs or DVDs.

One day my wife looked at our cabinets full of shelves containing CDs and DVDs and asked why do we need them here any longer. I replied, “Well what else is going to fill the empty spaces?”

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Great, I asked the same question, and she said “knickknacks.”

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This reminds me of the “Friends” episode where someone asks someone who doesn’t have a TV which way they face when sitting in the living room. However all the album and CD covers make for a nice display even if they don’t serve a function any longer. Some of those old LP album covers were lovely.

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<3 Plex. Between Plex & Tablo, I am in heaven.

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I used it for awhile and wasn’t in love. It wasn’t an issue with the product per se, just wasn’t ideal for the way we watch TV at my house. Now that I have a Roku, I might spin it back up for movies and such. If the Tablo/Roku isn’t addressed soon, I might start using TabloRipper.

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Do you know that the Samsung Plex Tablo app doesn’t work at all since Tablo 2.2.6? I used to think Plex was pretty cool. Tablo was my primary reason for using Plex. I wish it was supported.

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Misread you were talking about Samsung’s Blu-ray player I’d imagine. Your right, it doesn’t work. I does work using Chrome or other browsers however.

-Rodger

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I used to use Plex all the time when we used Windows Media Center as a DVR. Because we could only watch WMC content on the TV the server was connected to or on a TV with an Xbox used as a WMC Extender, I used to send all my recordings through MCEBuddy then had them dropped into my Plex library where I could watch from any computer or tablet. Note that I could not watch live TV through Plex with WMC (although you can watch live TV through Plex with the Tablo channel).

Having switched to Tablo, I haven’t needed to bother with Plex for most things. I can view my Tablo content on any TV or device. The only time I still need Plex is when I want to sync a video to my tablet for offline viewing, so I can watch in my car waiting to pick up my kids and such, when I do not have access to Internet. Then I use TabloRipper to extract the video to my Plex library and use Plex to sync the video to my tablet for offline viewing. That works great for me. I could also use Plex to sync content to the cloud for viewing anywhere should I have the need.

I love Plex, but it now is usually an unnecessary step for all but offline viewing for me, given my Tablo has been working great. Also, when I use TabloRipper to extract my videos to my Plex library, somehow, the closed captions get lost. This never happened with WMC files. I rely heavily on closed captions, so the direct Tablo experience is better for me in most cases. I do like having another option for viewing my content as a backup in case the usual method fails for some reason.

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