"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
10/29/2019 at 19:22 • Filed to: None
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"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
10/29/2019 at 19:22 • Filed to: None | 1
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Plex server is now running again. It seems that this latest release, whatever.1973, is not ready for prime time. I reinstalled an old version and it seems to be working again. Yeah, I still think WMC did a lot of basic things better, but that program is history and my bitching won’t bring it back. I just hope that the developers of Plex quit obsessing on the features and extras and just get the fucking basics right. I missed a day’s worth of TV, but chances are that the programs I missed I’ve already seen so it’s no big loss.
Nest thermostat is once again working. I totally reset it and now have the all-important key saved on my phone. Now it works with all of my phones and tablets as well as the Google Home setup and smart speakers. A lot of hassle for something that should be simple, and I think I we can all expect more of this kind of hassle in the future. Just like when Autoweek was told by MB to pull over and restart their C-class wagon to fix the transmission woes that they were experiencing, I think our future has been dictated by the classic Microsoft solution to problems rather than having products that undergo proper pre-release testing, quality control and support . Ahh, the good old days...
Now, if I can’t find that RAID 10 array for the old gaming peecee I’ll try reinstalling Windows 8 on that $20 notebook I recently bought. I’d rather smash my fingers with a mallet, but reinstalling (and upgrading) that crap is one of those frustrating tasks that needs to be done.
jminer
> Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
10/29/2019 at 20:06 |
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Plex has had a bad month of updates. With 1.17 they made a major change to the transcoding engine that broke a lot of stuff. I had to downgrade for a while but was able to upgrade to 1.18. I use a Nvidia gtx 1050 for hardware encoding which was fixed. A friend uses an AMD card and it’s still broke in latest release. He finally gave up and swapped his rx 580 out of Plex for his GTX 1070 to in his gaming rig to make it work again.
I agree that Plex is a bit buggy and wish they’d focus on stability more instead of new features but wholly disagree that Windows Media center was better. It never worked right and was a constant nightmare of codecs and drivers 99.9% of the time Plex just works and is a fantastic experience. Hell I'm in California now and streaming content from my home Plex server and it's awesome.
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Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
> jminer
10/29/2019 at 20:26 |
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Not that WMC was better, because it wasn’t, but it did the basics better IMHO. With WMC I could click on a recording and have it start almost instantly, whereas there is an annoying pause whilst waiting for Plex to start playback, and a double pause when watching live TV . This is with the same tuner card but on a much more powerful computer. Commercial skipping was also better in WMC, almost instantaneous and without delay, much like I experienced with TiVo. Plex can skip ahead quickly, if enough of the video is buffered, but exceed the buffer and it’s waiting time again. I’d like to be able to increase the buffer to eliminate this problem, but so far I haven’t found out how, and to be honest, I shouldn’t even have to do this myself . If an ancient TiVo box can do it, why can’t a powerful i7 PC with 16GB of RAM (or even the 1st gen i5 I used before) be able to do it better, especially when the only thing that this machine is doing is running Plex?
And looking at the list of recorded programs in Plex doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It shows the episode number but not the series, so it’s hard to tell which is the newer program. I also installed it on a secondary machine that is pretty much just a file server, and the sorting and displaying of the files is so incredibly bad it’s hilarious. For some reason Plex thinks I have tons of episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks as well as a bunch of Korean pop music, and I don’t have either of those things on the machine.
Combine the options and flexibility of Plex with the proper working basics of WMC and you might just have something. As it is, despite the amazing capabilities (I really liked being able to watch my recordings when I was stuck in the hospital for a week a few months back) Plex is a good, but compromised, platform that is let down by a lack of attention to polish and detail. They need to g et the basics working right first and then add the features. In the mean time we wait, and wade through buggy updates that should not have been released from beta testing.