2018 Mac Mini Review

Re:2018 Mac Mini Review by reaperducer on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @03:54PM (#18394819)

I used to use Plex, but went back to AppleTV/iTunes.

For some reason Plex wouldn't see half of my video library. I eventually tracked it down to Plex not liking the filenames of certain TV shows.

My TV shows are named Show Name - Episode Name.

Plex wanted them to be ShowName.s0x.e0x.

I'm not going to go through and rename all of my files. Plex should just work from the metadata like iTunes does. That's what metadata is for.

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Re:2018 Mac Mini Review by pfranz on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @06:45PM (#18395913)

I think it's a philosophical difference. iTunes is more database driven (which I really liked at the time for music). Let it control your filesystem, drop in your files and it'll load from metadata. Any changes will only modify iTunes' DB. Use iTunes to decide what to sync to devices.

A lot of people were super annoyed coming from WinAmp. They organized their library by filename and the metadata was often a mess. They also wanted to treat iPods as USB drive and drop files on there.

Plex is even different in that it only looks at the filename and pulls metadata from the Internet.

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Re:2018 Mac Mini Review by bstar77 on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @05:24PM (#18395457)

Not sure if you are aware of this, but you have to have your TV shows separate from your movies in Plex. When Plex scans files, it uses different logic for TV show and movie file name. I had a similar problem where I imported my TV shows as movies... some worked, but most didn't. After moving my shows out of my movies directory and re-importing them specifically as tv shows, everything detected perfectly.

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Re:2018 Mac Mini Review by reaperducer on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @05:30PM (#18395505)

Not sure if you are aware of this, but you have to have your TV shows separate from your movies in Plex.

Nope. Had no idea. And no idea why I should, since iTunes has no problem with it. I'm not going to spend six hours sorting 4GB of files because Plex can't read metadata that iTunes can.

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Re:2018 Mac Mini Review by photojosh on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @06:43PM (#18395904)

We've moved over to Plex from iTunes. The iTunes Media library folder is already sorted into separate Movies and TV Shows directories, so just added those to Plex separately.

We're running the Plex app on an AppleTV (4th gen, not 4K), and it all works really well. The only issue is that it loses connection to the server maybe once every month or two, but I think that's related to my really crappy modem.

edit: Plex server is running on the 2012 Mac mini "Server" edition. Quad-core, baby!

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