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I would guess the majority of users follow less than legal methods of obtaining their media, which is what I hear it handles well. It is unfortunate that they d

by lojack 11y ago

I would guess the majority of users follow less than legal methods of obtaining their media, which is what I hear it handles well. It is unfortunate that they don't support this though.

thomnottom 11y ago
I'm not sure why ISO vs other containers would be a matter of legal methods. I've ripped plenty of my DVDs and never thought for once to keep them in an ISO. Using MKVs allows me to compress the size and still keep extra audio tracks, subtitles, and chapters.
- patja 11y ago
  Sometimes the extras, trailers, etc. on the disc are interesting, but not interesting enough to go through separately processing them just to make a media player happy. I'd rather stick the disc in, rip and have a perfect simulation of physical media when using my media player. My Dune player does a great job at this.
  - thomnottom 11y ago
    Even for that, can't you just rip the disk to files (as a VIDEO_TS directory)? I believe Plex handles that, but I could be wrong. Not trying to be a dick, just always interested in how other people handle media and what works best for them. I am VERY familiar with software not interested in dealing with the particular way that I store things.
    - patja 11y ago
      They don't support any media that is sequestered behind a menu system, so no video_ts or bdmv folders: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201426506-Why-are-ISO-VIDEO-TS-and-other-Disk-Image-Formats-Not-Supported- https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201426506-Why-are-...
gh02t 11y ago
Actually, it's really not good at handling that sort of thing in my experience. The Plex server doesn't really browse the filesystem, it scans folders for media files and then parses the names. If you follow their naming scheme with your files it does a great job pulling in metadata and such, but if not it doesn't do so great. You can subsequently choose to view files by "folder", which doesn't actually browse the filesystem directly but instead looks at the database to see where the file came from originally. My experience trying several times since Plex came out (most recently last year) is that this is extremely unreliable and wonky. It'd always mis-recognize files or they'd be completely missing even though they were on disk. They outright do not support directly browsing files AFAIK. So in other words, if your files are reasonably well organized and named following one of the conventions recognized by Plex then it does a pretty amazing job organizing and scraping. On the other hand, if you just have random files that are scattered about or organized by folder or perhaps named differently then Kodi works a whole lot better because it just lets you drill through files on disk (it has a library too, which is functionally about the same as Plex and suffers from similar drawbacks). On the other hand, Plex has way better device support and while you can get transcoding to/from devices in Kodi, Plex is a lot better at it most of the time.

by lojack 11y ago

I would guess the majority of users follow less than legal methods of obtaining their media, which is what I hear it handles well. It is unfortunate that they don't support this though.

thomnottom 11y ago

I'm not sure why ISO vs other containers would be a matter of legal methods. I've ripped plenty of my DVDs and never thought for once to keep them in an ISO. Using MKVs allows me to compress the size and still keep extra audio tracks, subtitles, and chapters.

patja 11y ago
Sometimes the extras, trailers, etc. on the disc are interesting, but not interesting enough to go through separately processing them just to make a media player happy. I'd rather stick the disc in, rip and have a perfect simulation of physical media when using my media player. My Dune player does a great job at this.
- thomnottom 11y ago
  Even for that, can't you just rip the disk to files (as a VIDEO_TS directory)? I believe Plex handles that, but I could be wrong. Not trying to be a dick, just always interested in how other people handle media and what works best for them. I am VERY familiar with software not interested in dealing with the particular way that I store things.
  - patja 11y ago
    They don't support any media that is sequestered behind a menu system, so no video_ts or bdmv folders: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201426506-Why-are-ISO-VIDEO-TS-and-other-Disk-Image-Formats-Not-Supported- https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201426506-Why-are-...

gh02t 11y ago

Actually, it's really not good at handling that sort of thing in my experience. The Plex server doesn't really browse the filesystem, it scans folders for media files and then parses the names. If you follow their naming scheme with your files it does a great job pulling in metadata and such, but if not it doesn't do so great. You can subsequently choose to view files by "folder", which doesn't actually browse the filesystem directly but instead looks at the database to see where the file came from originally. My experience trying several times since Plex came out (most recently last year) is that this is extremely unreliable and wonky. It'd always mis-recognize files or they'd be completely missing even though they were on disk. They outright do not support directly browsing files AFAIK. So in other words, if your files are reasonably well organized and named following one of the conventions recognized by Plex then it does a pretty amazing job organizing and scraping. On the other hand, if you just have random files that are scattered about or organized by folder or perhaps named differently then Kodi works a whole lot better because it just lets you drill through files on disk (it has a library too, which is functionally about the same as Plex and suffers from similar drawbacks). On the other hand, Plex has way better device support and while you can get transcoding to/from devices in Kodi, Plex is a lot better at it most of the time.