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Plex & xbmc discussion

bedifferent said:
Hey man, first thanks for your work. I've donated quite a bit to your efforts.

Question: if you rip and encode a Blu-Ray to full quality, the AppleTV 2 should "accept" the mkv 1080P and decode to 720P. If this is true, I don't have to worry about "future proofing" encodes *meaning I don't have to encode the movie to 720P, and eventually [hopefully] there will be a device that can decode the full 2 million 1080P resolution*? As I have played full 1080P movies via ethernet to an attached HDD, then it should be playing it back at 720P, meaning I was wrong regarding the output [and will be speaking with the guy who claimed otherwise]. So yes, I do have massive egg on my face (sorry!) :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

Thanks again for everything!
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Ha. I love taking credit for all the work much smarter coders than I have done!

As for the 1080p thing, yes, correct. No need to re-encode all your movies to 720p. The ATV2 will handle at that for you, with one pretty massive exception. 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 aspect ratios should work fine on the ATV2 at 1080P. 16:9 at 1080P likely will fail. This means a bluray rip of the movie Serenity at 1080p will work, but a bluray rip of the tv show Firefly at 1080p probably won't.

Also, don't worry too much about the egg on your face. I had to help write about the release, and davilla had to explain the decode/output problem to me like 3 times before I had any idea what he was talking about. There's no denying that the ATV2 is a weird, finicky little device in many ways.
 
You do need to be running the Plex Media Server on your network to serve the files you want to watch with Plex, but in my experience it doesn't steal all of your resources making your machine unusable. XBMC on the other hand doesnt need a server and will play files locally, or indeed from a NAS, which is better for those who don't want to leave a second machine on all the time.

Prior versions of the Plex front end on ATV2 required everything to be transcoded which did take up some CPU power, but the bleeding edge versions stream compatible files (most files) so it is much less CPU intensive. There are however some bugs still to be ironed out - so I'd wait until the 1.0 release if you mind about these things.
 
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bedifferent said:
:) Sucks that Pioneer shut down their panel division and sold it out to Panasonic. Plasma's are still the best for cinema viewing, deep blacks and Pioneer panels were top notch. My friends in the industry all have Pioneer systems. Pioneer wasn't making enough of a profit (even my $8k system had little margin), so they decided to focus on their AVR's, Blu-Ray and computer accessory divisions.
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Yeah, I picked up a 9G 50" 111FD while the getting was good, and I'm thrilled knowing that the quality is there for many years.
 
Ive got plex on both apple tv and ipad, but i still find myself using airplay via the ipad to watch films, as the appletv restarts if the remote apps on my ipad and iphone happen to be connected to the apple tv.

Im hoping they'll bring a fix out soon, as its really annoying.

Another problem im having with plex is that some videos from my tv show folder just simply arent recognised by plex, and I cant figure out why
 
sim667 said:
Ive got plex on both apple tv and ipad, but i still find myself using airplay via the ipad to watch films, as the appletv restarts if the remote apps on my ipad and iphone happen to be connected to the apple tv.

Im hoping they'll bring a fix out soon, as its really annoying.

Another problem im having with plex is that some videos from my tv show folder just simply arent recognised by plex, and I cant figure out why
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You realize Apple's not going to be pressed to solve a problem that was likely introduced when you jailbroke your ATV2?
 
Plex re-encodes most files on the fly how on earth can they look better than the same file playing natively on the Apple TV through XBMC.

XBMC is superior in picture quality and audio.
 
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