[FreeNAS 9 Plugin] - Media Browser

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Source
https://github.com/josh4trunks/freenas-plugins

Thanks
Credit to woodsb02 and Luke from the Media Browser forums for porting this application to FreeBSD!

 

[saurav]

I just installed it. Haven't fully configured it yet, but noticed a minor issue: the name of the jail is "customplugin_1". Shouldn't it be "mediabrowser_1" or something?

Does MB require read+write access to the media, or is read-only access sufficient?

 

[Jailer]

What does media browser offer that PLex doesn't?

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

the "custom" name is cause it isnt from the official repo. this can be mitigated by creating the plugin jail first. also this won't be an issue once the plugin is added officially.

im guessing read only like plex should be enough.

@Jailer
it's open source and doesn't have a membership model. other than that, I just learned about it recently and don't yet have much experience with it.

 

[Jailer]

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to knock the product, but I don't see why the freenas developers would add this plugin when there is already a functioning plugin that does everything this one does.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

choice, MediaBrowser is up and coming and looks like a good open-source alternative that has many of plex's paid features for free.

No FreeNAS developers had anything to do with it, just me and two guys from the MB forums.

 

[Jailer]

For full disclosure I'll have to admit that I'm a recent (last few months) discoverer and user of Plex and I love it. I'll have to check out MB to see what it offers over Plex because it admittedly would be a hard sell to get me to switch.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out a bit and see what it has to offer.

 

[saurav]

@Jailer
For me, Plex doeesn't work very well. I am only interested in the DLNA capabilities. I can't stream FLAC files (mp3 works fine) with Plex to my blu-ray player, which can play FLAC files. And I know it can do so over DLNA because it worked when I was using miniDLNA earlier. I have tried to get a custom profile to work without success, which Plex loads and associates with my player's requests, but doesn't honor the directplay settings.

I also have issues with viewing Photos using Plex. It doesn't give me the option to browse pictures "By Folder". I can only do "By Camera", or "By Year", etc. It takes too long to just load the set of thumbnails, and I have to browse through hundreds of them to see the ones I'm interested in.

Video works ok with Plex, in that I can at least play whatever I could earlier when I was using miniDLNA. On the plus side, updating Plex's index after adding new media without having to rescan the entire library or having to restart it, is wonderful.

I just tried DLNA from MB over my Samsung TV. It couldn't play the FLAC files (which it can't, anyway). However, the Blu-ray player was able to play the FLACs, which is a big plus for me. Only that, the blu-ray player listed the FLACs as mp3 (it lists them as FLAC when connected to Plex). So if MB was transcoding FLAC to mp3, they should have played on the Samsung TV too?

On the negative side with MB, now I don't get the option to browse my music "By Folder" :-(. That was an option with Plex.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

@Jailer
For me, Plex doeesn't work very well. I am only interested in the DLNA capabilities. I can't stream FLAC files (mp3 works fine) with Plex to my blu-ray player, which can play FLAC files. And I know it can do so over DLNA because it worked when I was using miniDLNA earlier. I have tried to get a custom profile to work without success, which Plex loads and associates with my player's requests, but doesn't honor the directplay settings.

I also have issues with viewing Photos using Plex. It doesn't give me the option to browse pictures "By Folder". I can only do "By Camera", or "By Year", etc. It takes too long to just load the set of thumbnails, and I have to browse through hundreds of them to see the ones I'm interested in.

Video works ok with Plex, in that I can at least play whatever I could earlier when I was using miniDLNA. On the plus side, updating Plex's index after adding new media without having to rescan the entire library or having to restart it, is wonderful.

I just tried DLNA from MB over my Samsung TV. It couldn't play the FLAC files (which it can't, anyway). However, the Blu-ray player was able to play the FLACs, which is a big plus for me. Only that, the blu-ray player listed the FLACs as mp3 (it lists them as FLAC when connected to Plex). So if MB was transcoding FLAC to mp3, they should have played on the Samsung TV too?

On the negative side with MB, now I don't get the option to browse my music "By Folder" :-(. That was an option with Plex.

thanks for the tests. as for getting your specific configurations working, they may be able to help on the MB forums.

 

[mjws00]

Very cool option. Didn't get a chance to check the plugin yet, but I will. Thanks for putting this together.

 

[driver7]

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to knock the product, but I don't see why the freenas developers would add this plugin when there is already a functioning plugin that does everything this one does.

Very arrogant thing to say without doing any research, Plex has many obvious and glaring inadequacies that are partially or fully supported in MB. Do the leg work before you make bold declarations based on zero information as you had admitted. I currently use both and I would love to move my MB Server over to my Freenas box, may ditch Plex completely when this gets stable.

 

[Scharbag]

This is a totally awesome plugin. I have tried Plex and I prefer Mediabrowser. Personal preference and I really appreciate the hard work and effort that went into making this plugin a reality!! Having the option to choose is always appreciated.

This makes things faster for me as I currently run Mediabrowser in a VM in FreeNAS using VirtualBox. Side by side, the plugin is much faster and reduces the latency to the clients too. Awesome job.

Cheers,

 

[Arco]

Hi everyone,
Hope someone can help me with my little problem. I install FreeNas 9.2.1.8 x86 on an old PC and it work very well. But when i'm trying to install Plex media plugin I have errors. First, Plex media isn't in the list og plugin into Freenas, I need to download it "http://www.freenas.org/downloads/plugins/9/x32/". He's creating is own Jail but I can't start the service.

Is it related to 32 bit?

does Media browser will be the same issue?


Thanks
Arco

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

@Arco
yes, 32bit is not supported by most plugins. I think there was a plan to eventually discontinue support for 32bit freenas all together.

 

[cyberjock]

@Arco
yes, 32bit is not supported by most plugins. I think there was a plan to eventually discontinue support for 32bit freenas all together.

Correct. There is no longer going to be any 32-bit FreeNAS releases. There hasn't been any alpha or beta releases of 9.3 that are 32-bit. ;)

 

[Hisma]

posted this in the mb3 forum, going to cross-post here to get a bit more exposure. hopefully someone can help me troubleshoot this.

I am using a windows client. My server is the freenas plugin with locally mounted storage pointing to my library.



These screenshots should explain everything.



Here is what the external player configuration looks like. I would imagine it is very common for windows users of mb3 client to utilize mpc-hc as an external player, as it is the most powerful video player available for windows.

See how the app requires a direct path to the media as an argument.



This is what happens when you try to play a video file:

the {PATH} argument results in the local unix-based path, which windows does not recognize. I can play with the path argument to point to the media more directly, but because the folder structure is "/" in unix, it will never work.



Not sure how this can easily be fixed.



This also impacts the xbmc plugin xbmb3c, as it also appears to use direct paths to the media. Huge bummer.

 

[Hisma]

also, changes to media libraries do not auto update. You must either manually update the library, or restart the server.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Luke in the other forum mentioned path substitution.

Im not an expert but i believe, basically what you are doing is trying to "directly play" the media instead of using MB's DLNA. to do this you have to have another sharing protocol available for the direct play client. since you are using windows you probably would also setup CIFS and set your path substitute to get the share name ("\\media").

Finally
* I don't think the issue is with forward/backslashes.
* your path isn't in quotes so your media player is seeing it as a flag.

 

[Hisma]

thanks for the response.

Direct-playing files is required for certain functionality to work. xbmc uses direct path to play files (for using the xbmb3c plugin), as does using mpc-hc as an external player.

Even with adding quotes to the path so it sees it as a continuous string, it still does not work correctly.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I agree. if I used MB I would probably setup direct play.

did you try to setup path substitution on MB?+CIFS on freenas?