Plex Arcade

https://www.plex.tv/blog/game-on-a-plex-blog-story/

by uptown • 5 years ago

58 73 5 years ago

I've been a big user of plex for a long time--and this seems like a very good direction for them to go in, especially the arcade console portion.

I'm curious though how this will work on all the different devices. One of the benefits of plex is that it's available on everything--iOS, roku, samsung TV, apple TV, you name it. However, most of those controls are not meant for arcade games.

If anyone from the plex team is reading this--I'd love to hear if there's any plans for controller integration or anything?

mikewhy2• 5 years ago

There's some more details here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/plex-arcade-faq/

Looks like it's built on Parsec + RetroArch.

afavour2• 5 years ago

Oh, Plex. Bless you for trying to move beyond your customer base that serves huge amounts of pirated video, I do hope you succeed (I say this sincerely as a lifetime pass holder).

An aside but I do find it darkly comic that we're now streaming retro games. The ROMs are at most a few MB big but this service will burn through that in seconds.

wincy• 5 years ago

Well that symmetric gigabit Google Fiber gave me isn’t gonna waste itself!

lukeman2• 5 years ago

My assumption based the note that Linux Plex servers won't work with Parsec is that the emulation & streaming is done on your local network.

Either way, I've yet to have a suitably positive experience streaming anything interactive on either LAN or WAN. I see the improvements that have been made and many friends swear by it, but it may just be that I'm too sensitive to input lag and even the rarest encode/decode hiccup.

telot1• 5 years ago

Which have you tried? I had similar problems as you with steamlink, but geforce experience+moonlight has been a godsend. Works incredibly well (if you have a Nvidia GPU)

nickthegreek• 5 years ago

Interesting concept, but I doubt it will go anywhere with the pricing structure for just Atari games and I guess it doesn't work with a plex client on your tv/streaming box besides appletv and maybe the new google tv.

mikewhy2• 5 years ago

They really should have linked the support page in the post.

just Atari games

Which platforms can be scanned in and show metadata in Plex?

We support showing metadata for a range of retro cartridge-based systems. Only games for the following platforms can be included in the Games library

Arcade

Atari (2600, 5200, 7800)

Sega (Genesis, Game Gear, Master System, 32X)

Nintendo (NES, Super NES, N64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance)

it doesn't work ... besides appletv and maybe the new google tv

Which player apps support Plex Arcade?

The following Plex client/player apps currently support accessing Plex Arcade:

Amazon Fire TV

Android (mobile)

Android TV

Apple TV

iOS

macOS (desktop) (Keyboard control only; no gamepad support)

Plex Web App (Chrome and Chromium based browsers only)*

Windows (desktop) (Keyboard control only; no gamepad support)

more app support coming soon!

pixxel• 5 years ago

I throughly recommend Jellyfin if you want a media server that doesn’t track your viewing habits and so on. I’ve been using for the past year or so.

https://jellyfin.org

mmastrac• 5 years ago

Can you elaborate on the tracking part? I am a Plex user but unaware of this.

I found this [1] but it appears to be that they were tracking only at a very generic level.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/5zrxtd/plex_the_compa...

callmeal• 5 years ago

Can you elaborate on the tracking part? I am a Plex user but unaware of this.

I got rid of plex once they made everything (including metadata lookups) go through their system. And you cannot run plex without it calling home and requiring an account.

colordrops• 5 years ago

How does this compare with others like Kodi and OSMC?

alanfranz2• 5 years ago

I'm using Emby; what's the difference with Jellyfin?

I dropped Plex because its quality was getting lower and lower, especially chromecast-wise.

afavour2• 5 years ago

Jellyfin is an open source fork of Emby, they went closed source a while ago.

When I tested it the Jellyfin server worked great. But the client apps were terrible in comparison to Plex.

ghostpepper• 5 years ago

Another one I am keeping an eye on is Olaris. It's still in alpha but the codebase is quite nice (go for the backend, react for the front).

https://gitlab.com/olaris/olaris-server/

dpeck• 5 years ago

Are there clients for AppleTV/iOS yet?

domy• 5 years ago

Infuse has support for Jellyfin.

hundchenkatze• 5 years ago

Here's the official one for ios, not tvos though. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618

radicaldreamer• 5 years ago

Plex doesn't track your viewing habits for personal media...

PaulHoule• 5 years ago

What gets me is how they never stop harassing me to use streaming services I don't want to use. That plus the server often being slow to seek has me looking for an alternative.

dom962• 5 years ago

Are there Samsung TV clients for it?

If not is there a workaround? I often wonder if I should attempt to flash my TV’s OS. Does someone have experience with this?

TedDoesntTalk3• 5 years ago

It's easier to attach an external computer via HDMI and use the TV as a dumb display. You can install Plex or whatever on the computer. Get a wireless keyboard/mouse combo from Logitech.

bsharitt• 5 years ago

I just want something to stream movies from my file server to my TV and mobile devices in a way that's simple enough for the wife and kids to use, but Plex just kept shoving every damn other thing in front of my face. I finally went full Jellyfin last year when the Roku and iOS apps got official launches. There's still a rough spot here or there, but they're getting fewer.

RHSeeger• 5 years ago

I use Kodi on my fire stick and it seems to work pretty well. It's setup to be able to play video and music from my media server.

vlunkr2• 5 years ago

Plex just kept shoving every damn other thing in front of my face

This is why I left Plex too. It shouldn't be hard to find your own content on a service that exists to play your own content.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 5 years ago

My favorite part of Plex is that it doesn't touch my files but can scan and organize, add missing metadata, album covers, etc. I have a lot of media so this is huge.

Plex has been the best $120 or so that I've ever spent and I'm not kidding. It's a load off to not worry about managing media and adding music to various devices all the time.

How well does jellyfish seamlessly do these things?

songshuu• 5 years ago

Plex seems to be winning in terms of ease-of-use, but aside from out of the box operation, what are the key differences between this and a kodi/retropie combo?

sumtechguy• 5 years ago

KODI and Plex share the same history of being XBMC at one point. Plex they focused on a single headend unit to do decode/re-encode of data and many simple devices running a client GUI. The head end controls the metadata. KODI on the other hand has stalled out on the headend bits but added in full on emulation via libretro a couple of years ago. So each KODI instances is complete thing. Unless you add in something like mariadb. In many ways Plex is 'better' (streaming, support), in many ways KODI is 'better' (better skinning, bluray ISO playback, etc). Ease of use is about equal between the two (again not surprising their shared history).

I would like to use Plex for streaming but it does not support my particular set of media use cases (ISO files). That may have changed but I gave up waiting years ago.

hsbauauvhabzb5• 5 years ago

I would also be quick to point out Plex’S streaming capabilities far outweigh that of Kodi - I have the plex app on my phone, my Samsung TV, and my web browser - all of which connect to a single plex backend running Linux w/ no X11 and work ‘good enough’.

Conversely, Xbmc requires X11, and last I checked (2016) didn’t do a great job at central server for storage and pretty much only ran on Linux/Windows thick client hosts.

myhf• 5 years ago

It sounds like this Parsec-based setup runs the emulator on the server, and streams the video. A kodi/retropie setup might load media/roms over the network, but would run the emulation on the client.

w-ll• 5 years ago

If y'all have Kodi setup, I highly recommend the Internet Archive Game Launcher

https://github.com/zach-morris/plugin.program.iagl

jcastro• 5 years ago

it is not available for servers running on Linux, NAS devices, or NVIDIA SHIELD

I hope this changes soon, I'm having a hard time figuring out how they launched with this. I know pulls aren't indicative of total users but: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/plex

apetresc• 5 years ago

Parsec (server) doesn't run on Linux, and neither do any of the other high-quality, low-latency streaming protocols out there. So either they re-invent a major piece of technology, or they ship without Linux support.

vlunkr2• 5 years ago

We’ve also partnered with the most hallowed name in retro games: Atari.

Hilarious.

Joking aside, it's cool that's they're actually doing this legitimately, but you can already buy Atari collections on every platform imaginable. That doesn't feel like much of a draw.

bluedays• 5 years ago

Welp, I look forward to repeatedly removing this from my pins.

holtalanm• 5 years ago

Interesting. I just started getting into using Parsec (which is apparently what Plex it partnering with for this). I was able to get it set up streaming from my gaming PC to a raspberry pi 2b (note, the only _officially_ supported rpi is the 3.0 or 3b, but the 2b actually works with it, while 4.0 support is in development), and was a little underwhelmed. Had to lock the fps to 30 or my rpi couldn't keep up, and had to run wired or the wireless network couldn't keep up. at 30 fps lock, the fps was _very_ noticeable, unfortunately.

I tried using a Windows 10 laptop (Ryzen 5 2500u) to see if it was any fault of the raspberry pi, and noticed the decoding time for the video went from 1.8ms on my rpi to like 14ms on my laptop, which was using the Vega gpu to perform the decoding. No bueno. Was able to turn the fps up to 60, and things seemed okay, but when I got into a good action game (Warhammer Vermintide 2), it was not a good experience. The latency on decoding was just causing too much of a dissonance between my input and the video output for it to be playable.

I will note that the video decoding was lightning fast on the raspberry pi, though. Makes me wonder if maybe the rpi 3.0/3b might perform better. I don't really want to buy one to find out (would rather wait and get a 4.0 once they release support for it).

In the end, I really couldn't get anything running to my liking. I'm sure it is fantastic for game streaming for some people, though.

newfeatureok• 5 years ago

I've been pretty skeptical on the whole game streaming thing until I installed moonlight and tried it out myself on my android device - it works surprisingly well on LAN.

I wonder if it's possible to play a local multiplayer game using this/parsec or moonlight. I'd love to set it up such that I could play something like Unreal Tournment split screen with two different people in two different locations streaming the same game to both devices and using our controllers are separate inputs on the same computer.

hanniabu5• 5 years ago

Stadia works unbelievably well. If you have any mainstream controller then you can try out Destiny and Bomberman on their free tier.

nickik• 5 years ago

They are doing all this stuff and still don't support audiobooks or syncing positions between clients. I would pay money just for those two extra features.

This feature is fine, but I would really like to have more control and deactivate features that they try to push on me.

I don't need news and I probably want need these games, and I don't like stuff just 'showing up' unasked.

Larrikin• 5 years ago

It seems like podcasts support has also regressed. The past two weeks it is a roll of the dice whether my morning podcasts will be there for me while I'm getting ready for the day or if they won't show up until well into the afternoon when I no longer have any interest in listening to them.

There's no way to force a refresh either.

geoah• 5 years ago

Was pretty excited about this when i first saw the post. There are a couple of major things missing though. Mainly Linux server support, ios remote client support, and a metric ton of platforms.

Getting started is also annoying as it seems you need to manually provide bioses and there don’t seem to be any good guides by the labs team. There seems to be a third party tool that does help. https://github.com/vanstinator/core-manager

Finally the supported gpus in arcade’s page seem to not be correct. My hackintosh is running a gt710 which is in the list but trying to play anything results in a parsec error 15000.

Plex Arcade

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