KODI VS PLEX: WHICH MEDIA CENTRE APP?
Hardware’s only half the story to a media PC. Dan Gardiner reveals what you need to consider when picking the best software for your media PC.
Which media centre software is best? We look at the ins and outs of the two most-popular options.
Online video streaming services may have taken Australia by storm over the last year, but they can still leave a lot of gaps when it comes to creating the perfect home-media experience. And being a PC mag, we unsurprisingly reckon a media PC is the best way to tie all your disparate media threads together.
We’ve discussed the hardware and reviewed pre-built PC options elsewhere in this issue, but the other key part of the equation is the software. So which apps should you use to power your home theatre box?
The answer to that question depends on your specific needs. There’s host of different approaches you can take, but this guide should help you sort out which one will work best for you. This feature will mostly revolve around our two favourites media apps — Kodi and Plex — but there are many, many alternatives, alongside add-ons and other alternatives made to cover a specific need.
As such, getting set up can be a little involved and will often require you to bolt together two or three different applications and/or install extra plugins to get everything perfect. The good news is that, once done, you shouldn’t have to tinker any further; all these apps are pretty much set-and-forget and will even automatically scan and identify new media as its added.
While Kodi and Plex share similar roots — both are based off Xbox Media Centre (XBMC), a decade-old media player application designed to turn an original Xbox into a device you could play downloaded media on — they do have some key differences. Kodi’s a community-built open source app with a heap of add-ons and customisation options while Plex is a commercial project that’s more focused on polish, ease-of-use and streaming to multiple devices. There are reasons to like both, although ultimately we’d suggest settling on one or the other, as much of their functionality does overlap.
At their heart, what both these apps provide is a TV-friendly front-end (also known as a ‘10-foot user interface’ — i.e. one that can be easily used from 10 feet away) for watching movies and TV from the comfort of your couch. That means simplified control schemes with similarly paired-back onscreen elements — at the back end, both Plex and Kodi have what’s known as scrapers that will go online and grab information (technical details, synopses, cast and crew credits, alongside images like covers, custom artwork and thumbnails) for all the media you add, making for a slick and clean front-end that’s visually appealing and easy to navigate.
KODI: THE FLEXIBLE OPEN-SOURCE OPTION
When we mentioned in our intro that both Plex and Kodi have their roots in XBMC, we we’re lying. Kodi is actually the new name for XBMC — it officially rebranded back at the end of 2014. Kodi’s main strengths are that it’s an open-source, all-in-one application that both catalogues your media and plays it back, and it has the strongest community support of any of these media centre apps. It’s also deliberately extensible, meaning there’s a heap of add-ons that can broaden Kodi’s abilities and many of these can be downloaded and installed from directly within the main interface.
There’s additional skins that can change the app’s look, video plugins that will let you watch the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and dozens of other services, and while there’s no native support for live-TV, it can act as a front-end for external PVR server apps, and a whole lot more besides.
It’s one of the few media centre apps that has disc playback built-in — DVDs (as well as DVD ISOs or just a disc’s VIDEO_TS folders) work perfectly including being able to browse menus. Blu-ray support is a little less developed at this point — it works, but only on non-protected discs, which excludes basically anything commercial. You can rig Kodi up so it passes off Blu-ray playback to a third-party app (like Cyberlink’s excellent PowerDVD) and then returns to the main Kodi interface when you’re done.
The main shortcoming of Kodi is that it’s not really designed to be a media server — it can’t share your media collection with other devices and the associated mobile apps are generally just remotes made to control your main device. You can grab Kodi for Windows, Mac and Linux at kodi.tv/download.
PLEX: THE MULTI-DEVICE HUB
Plex is a platform that basically consists of two parts: a server app, which indexes and catalogues all your media files, and client ‘player’ apps that architecture with built-in videorencoding (AKA transcoding) capabilities that makes it easy to stream (and optionally sync) content to other devices, including Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.
So if you want to watch your videos across multiple devices — something that’s more common in our smartphone age — it’s the simplest and most straightforward option. And Plex’s
creators have made a conscious effort to get players onto as many mainstream platforms as possible, meaning there are native apps not just for PC and Mac (and an unofficial client for Linux), but also on the major mobile platforms, media players and even some big-brand TVs.
Add-ons for Plex are known as Channels. While there aren’t as many available here as there are in Kodi, you can add a lot of functionality to the app such as adding dedicated interfaces for online streaming services like YouTube. (Although sadly, neither Kodi or Plex support Netflix or other commercial services.) Plex has some other fairly neat and unique tricks it can pull, too, like the ability to stream videos straight in your web browser, so you don’t even need to have a Plex ‘client’ player app installed.
The main caveat with Plex is that it’s subscription based; if you want its more advanced features, you’ll need to cough up a fee (US$5 per month or US$40 per annum), or pay the ratherhefty lifetime subscription price of US$150. However, you can unlock limited transcoding — although there’s no option to sync — by making a one-off purchase in the iOS and Android apps for the equivalent of US$4.99 (around AU$7–8).
As we’ve mentioned above, setting up Plex actually requires installing it in at least two places. You’ll need Plex Media Server on the PC that’ll serve as the central hub for sharing your media, as well as Plex Home Theatre (or the platform-specific Plex app) on any of your playback devices. You can actually have both these programs running on the same device so it’s both the media server and a player, but you will need to set up the server side first. You can find the installers for both server and player at plex.tv/downloads.
GET SET UP FASTER
After you’ve installed either of the above media centre apps, the next step is to point them at your media files. You can have your TV shows and movies
“Plex and Kodi don’t particularly care where your video files are, just what type of media they represent.”
stored in multiple folders across multiple locations; they can be on local hard drives, USB storage or shared over the network (from a NAS or other PC). Plex and Kodi don’t particularly care where your video files are, just what type of media (i.e. either movies or TV) they represent. We’d strongly recommend having all your movies in one master ‘Movies’ folder and all your television in one called ’ TV’ or ‘TV shows’ or something similar, as this means any new shows or films you add in future will get automatically picked up by Plex and Kodi.
NAMING CONVENTIONS
Kodi and Plex identify your videos based on trying to match their file names against community-built online databases of movies and TV shows, and they both follow the same styles when it comes to preferred file names. As such getting your file names in order should be the first thing you do, even before installing your selected media centre app.
For movies, the naming convention is fairly simple: Movie Name (Year) — for example, Citizen Kane (1941). If you have any subtitles, they’ll need to match the video file’s name too, so for our example flick, you might have two files Citizen Kane (1941).mkv and Citizen Kane (1941).srt.
For TV shows, the preferred convention is TV Show Name - 1x01 — so for example, Firefly — 1x01. The latter ‘episode number’ part of the file name is a little flexible — so instead of 1x01 it can also be s01e01 or just 101. You may wish to put specific seasons of shows in their own folders (so something like \Firefly\Season 1\ Firefly — 1x01.mkv), but its not actually required by Plex or Kodi as long as your filenames are in order.
If the latter’s sounding like an overly onerous job, there are actually a few software options out there that can sort out identifying and renaming your media collection; if you’ve got a large one that’s not very well organised, then they should be your first port of call before you even think about Kodi or Plex. These are our three favourite options: FileBot (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) — sourceforge.net/projects/ lebot tinyMediaManager (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) — www.tinymediamanager.org rebox.NET (available for Windows) — www.videohelp.com/software/ rebox.NET
POINTING TO YOUR MEDIA
In Kodi, all the settings are accessed through the main menu, while in Plex, you’ll need to get to them via the web interface.
In Kodi, adding videos is done via the main Videos menu item — select it and then click ‘Files > Add videos...’. Next, click Browse and navigate to your first TV or movies folder and click ‘OK’, then click ‘Add’. You’ll be prompted to select a what type of media is contained in this folder (either TV, movies or music videos) so use the arrow buttons to pick the appropriate type, then click ‘OK’. Kodi will then scan the folder’s content and download info and images pertaining to what it finds. While that’s happening, you can feel free to keep adding more sources until you’re satisfied.
The process for Plex is very similar. Immediately after installing the server app, you’ll be taken to the web interface (it’s usually found at 127.0.0.1:32400) and the first screen you’ll see has a big ‘Add library’ button;
“What we’re showing with the Rift is at that minimum baseline for giving a good VR experience.”
up again when they stop. But clever visual chicanery and reduced rendering ceilings aside, the fact still remains that you’ll need an extremely powerful PC to run any of this properly — a minimum specification that, according to Nvidia, only 1% of PCs currently in use can meet, the company estimating that the average PC will require a “sevenfold increase in raw performance” to run top-tier VR. Mobile-based devices such as GearVR and Google Cardboard might provide cheaper alternatives, but they lack the comfort, positional tracking and processing heft that a full Oculus setup provides. To a company attempting to catalyse a VR revolution, you’d expect that Nvidia’s estimate would be an unnerving statistic, but Luckey isn’t perturbed.
“Rift is an early-adopter product, but that’s still a huge market — there are lots of devices that never leave the high-end PC gaming market and still sell millions of units,” he says. “And there are at least a few million [GTX] 970s out there, let alone competitors’ cards or Titans. Those are just the people that have it today — in six months or a year, it’s going to be a very different figure. And if you look two years from now, the low-to-mid-range cards will be beating a 970. So that number’s going to increase really rapidly.
“What we’re showing with the Rift is about at that minimum baseline for giving a good VR experience, and that’s one of the reasons you see a lot of VR headsets all being pretty similar when it comes to specifications. It’s the best that can be done today and it’s right around that bare-minimum experience — it’s only recently the technology’s become possible to provide good consumer VR. But if you look two or three years into the future, that minimum bar isn’t going to change. Yes, the best-looking games are going to go up in power and require the best graphics cards for the best fidelity. But even in five years from now, you’ll still be able to run a good VR experience, one that runs at 90fps or higher, in stereo 3D with good graphics, on
970-level graphics which, by then, so many computers are going to have.”
As bare-minimum experiences go, few are as enchanting. The aforementioned sense of presence that engulfs us as we play through a number of Oculus Rift games leaves a lasting impression. But just as striking is the breadth of game styles and perspectives on show. First-person efforts are well represented, of course, but we also try tower defence and realtime strategy games, isometric kart battlers and brawlers, thirdperson adventures and platformers, a head-controlled spin on bullet hell, and even a couple of projects that don’t neatly fit into any existing genre definitions. Crucially, all feel like smart fits for VR.
“We’re at this unique point in history where we’re starting over with everything that we’ve done before in game development,” says Anna Sweet, Oculus head of developer strategy and former senior business development manager at Valve. “We have all these games that we’re shipping to players, and developers are redefining [existing] genres and creating new ones that we’ve never thought of before. In the future, when we look back at the moment that VR really took off and got to customers for the first time, these are the developers who [we’ll think of as] making the Pongs or the amazing NES titles that we all remember. They’re the creators who are writing that history. And it’s super fun to be a part of that.”
One aspect that this first wave of titles will lack is Oculus’s Touch controllers — due for release later this year — and it’s telling that the games that stray the farthest from traditional genre labels benefit most from their inclusion. Does Luckey worry at all about potentially fracturing Rift’s market before it’s even established?
“You have to remember that people have been developing VR games for gamepad for over three years now,” he says. “I think if we had bundled Touch controllers with the Rift, you’d have a much stronger case for saying, ‘Aren’t you fracturing the marketplace by bundling motion controllers after years of development for this other input device?’ I don’t want to seem biased, but I want to point out that it’s more like motion controllers are fragmenting the huge content base that’s existed, rather than the other way around. And in our best practices guide, for years we’ve been telling people how to develop for gamepads. They’re relying on every person that buys a Rift being able to play their game with the hardware that’s included. And a lot of genres just don’t benefit from motion controls at all. They’re very beneficial to certain genres, but they’re not a universal input tool. We’re able to include the gamepad because almost all of the games made for the Rift support it, and it wasn’t a huge cost to add. Adding Touch would’ve significantly raised the cost of the Rift.”
Even without Touch controllers, Rift remains a convincing case for VR’s eventual widespread adoption. That it’s just the first step towards that future does nothing to undermine the profound effect of stepping into a game and forgetting yourself. But Luckey isn’t ready to celebrate the company’s monumental achievement just yet. “There’s more pressure than there’s ever been,” he says. “I mean, especially when you’re early on, it’s important to support developers and ship our devkits, but it isn’t until you make a solid commitment to shipping your final product that the pressure really starts to crank up.”