Holiday TV Setup
A month or so we started planning a long overdue family holiday, we perused many holiday rentals and discussed the various pros and cons of each, finally deciding.
The weeks passed and finally it was time to start packing. My better half had spent this time planning the essentials we needed to take for us and our daughter. I had spent this time putting together a portable infrastructure for watching some movies of an evening.
Yes, I admit — this sounds sad
Not the geeky part you understand. The part where I take a pile of media to watch while on holiday.
I’m happy enough that my days where holidays consisted of me being nocturnal for a couple of weeks are behind me, for now. (Four year olds can’t hack the pace anyway).
The Setup
Admittedly, I could save the media to my MacBook Pro and take that with me (along with a HDMI cable). I don’t really want to leave my MBP kicking around, plus its a PITA to control/pause stuff.
Plus, its not nearly as interesting.
Media and Storage
I use Plex for serving media in the house (and I’m a happy PlexPass subscriber). I make heavy use of its Cloud Sync functionality for watching content via my phone on my daily commute (it takes care of the conversion and transfer).
Using Plex, I synced a pile of content onto my oldie Samsung Galaxy S3 Tablet (it has a fast 64GB SD card in it).
Media: DONE.
Infrastructure
I didn’t expect there would be any internet where we’re staying (let alone wireless) so we’ll need to bring our own.
A bit of digging around in a ‘box of things and stuff’ uncovered an Apple Airport Express. I configured this with a wireless network which will serve addresses via DHCP.
Infrastructure: DONE.
Viewer
I had the choice of my MBP (discussed above), an Amazon Fire TV (too big), an Amazon Fire TV Stick and a Google Chromecast.
For portability (and a remote) I packed my Amazon Fire TV Stick. I chose this over the Google Chromecast because it deals with multiple wireless configurations better (and has a remote).
The Fire TV Stick would connect to the Apple Airport Express Wireless Access Point along with the Samsung Galaxy S3 Tablet.
Viewer: DONE.
Problems
(Unfortunately, not discovered until we got there).
No Internet
If the Fire TV can’t talk to the Amazon mothership, it won’t do much. Even for apps which don’t need any interaction with Amazon — I couldn’t even load the Plex app.
Workaround: Restart the Fire TV Stick, navigate to Apps and load up Plex before the Fire TV Stick realises it doesn’t have an internet connection.
S3 Tab / Fire TV Stick aren’t very powerful
We’d sat down to watch a movie but it started buffering quite badly. I expect this is due to the fact that the media was synced to the S3 Tab at a higher quality (Plex ‘medium’ setting) than the S3 Tab can deliver or Fire TV Stick can receive/play as the the Fire TV Stick isn’t powerful enough to transcode, it constantly buffers.
Workaround: Script!
Script
Plan: Using synced Plex data, regenerate the media files
Remember earlier when I said a MBP and a HDMI cable wasn’t as interesting? Well, that became the fallback (a HDMI cable was procured from the back of the TV in the rental).
I didn’t have the media files on my MBP though — they’re all on my S3 Tab in various chopped-up and unidentifiable manners.
Using the Android File Transfer App I copied the Plex Sync directory from the S3 Tab and then ran the script below. This will rename the files.
Copying the files
From the SD card, I identified the Plex directory and copied the data/com.plexapp.android/files/sync/*-com-plexapp-android/*/library directory to the MBP in its entirety.
Script!
This script was knocked up on an evening, its rough but functional.
