I just got done going through the website for Plex, and I am amazed that I haven't heard about this product til today! The feature set and UI looks impressive. I am more excited than I was 20 minutes ago to play with this!
OKay, I am back with my findings. Lemme start by saying...
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now that I have that out of the way, lemme just say that DLNA is the most intriguing but gawd-awfully frustrating thing to work with.
I installed Plex Media Server on my WHS2011 box, and first instincts are that this is a nice piece of software. Plex was originally designed as a way to serve directly to some dedicated devices like the Xbox360, PS3, Roku devices and their own Plex Media Center (PMC) software. The PMC software is very XBMC-esque and for most people is pretty impressive. For anyone already familiar with XBMC, I think you'll agree that XBMC is still nicer than PMC. Thats not to say that it cant improve, but for now, XBMC > PMC.
The DLNA features of Plex are very new and were JUST added to the most recent beta, and as it stands, there are still a lot of things that need to be worked out. For those of you sitting on the edge of your seats, my findings with the Hopper are:
No, I could not get either my Hopper or Joey to see Plex. This is no different than my experiences with Servvio, TVersity, or PlayOn. I do not have a HIC, so I am just crossing my fingers that a future update from Dish will make this functionality work for me. Until then, I will continue using my XBMC equipped home theater PC in my living room, and my Seagate Free Agent Theater+ (FAT+) in the bedroom.
So now I'll just talk about the Plex server software and how it compares to Serviio, which I chose over both TVersity and PlayOn.
Right now, Serviio wins because it simply works better than Plex. I will say though that Plex does have several more features than Serviio, plus it has a pretty nice WebGUI that allows you to manage your library with. I can definitely see potential for Plex to be a DLNA server of choice in the future.
Running both Serviio and Plex simultaneously, the only device that worked well with both was my Seagate FAT+. Even with that, playback with Plex was choppier than it was with Serviio. This could be something I could improve with the profiles, but thats another issue with Plex. Both Serviio and Plex require manual editing of XML files to adjust the profiles, there is a lot more default info in the Serviio file, along with more information on the forums for customizing Serviio.
So, profiles aside, Serviio works fine on my Xbox360 and my Sony Bravia 55EX710 TV. Plex was detected by the Xbox 360 and the library showed up, but the video display was corrupted. There was just a bunch of colorful blobs when viewing a movie using Plex. If I switched to Serviio, playback of the same exact file in the Xbox was perfect.
On the Bravia TV, only Serviio was detected. It did not see Plex at all.
And as mentioned earlier, neither the Hopper or my Joey could see either DLNA server.
Everything else aside, there is still one more nail in the coffin that is a deal breaker for me with Plex. Plex can only be run as an application in Windows. You MUST have an account logged in in order to run Plex. It does not have the capability to run as a service like Serviio, TVersity, and PlayOn all do. For those of you wanting to run these on a headless server like I am, this means you have to keep your Administrator account logged in at all times for Plex to work. There are threads on the Plex forums where people suggest trying some "Application as a service" programs such as SRVANY, but that does not work because Plex requires EXPLORER.EXE to be running. There were several workarounds on the forums that some people proposed such as installing EXPLORER as a service and a delayed start of Plex, or creating an secondary Plex user account that is always logged in, but I did not want to tackle either workaround. Considering, Plex still has a way to go with compatibility, I will just wait and see what future versions offer.
Again, Plex has a very intriguing feature set. For people who dont need DLNA features and want to run PMC, or are happy with the built in support for gaming consoles or the Roku, Plex is awesome. For a DLNA server, it has a way to go. I will definitely follow its progress and re-evaluate it later.
