Thinking about a Plex client on Balena

Thinking out loud for a brainstorming. Plex is a popular package for IoT tinkers. I’m considering a Plex client run on Balena. In short you would plug the raspberry pi in to your TV via the hdmi ports and it would display the Plex client running on Balena. Login to the Plex server could be via environment variables on boot. Then to cast you can use the official Plex apps for your phone which allows you to cast to nearby devices on the same network, which could be the Balena device.

A Balena GUI example here GitHub - balenablocks/xserver: A simple X11 server block

Would be interested to hear any thoughts on design.

@nucleardreamer would be interested to hear of any image rendering issues you can foresee?

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@andrewnhem or @phil-d-wilson – Are either of you Plex users by chance? I recall someone mentioning, but can’t remember who! Maybe @klutchell? :grin:

Hello, which Plex client are you considering? RasPlex looks popular but has not been updated in a while. You would either need to containerize the client or find one that already has a container image available to use with balena. I think the balena platform would be better as a Plex server rather than a client. (Plex provides a native server image on Docker Hub.)

Like RasPlex but as you say, it hasn’t been updated in a while. Plex provides a Linux client and would probably experiment with that. It isn’t designed for it, but could work in that you can cast to your nearby Plex clients from the Plex iPhone and android app.

I imagine RasPlex has largely become redundant because of the cheap streaming devices you can get now like ChromeCast for almost the same cost as the raspberry pi.

Food for thought though, may take a look at it at some point. Will see if anyone thinks they would be interested in it.

I can see something like this being really nice for the balena-sound project too. Would be really nice to just cast to the main pi instead of having to connect to it via bluetooth

@sniff122, I’m not sure I follow what you mean, could you elaborate a bit?

If you are referring to a RasPlex equivalent that was discussed above, I think I have largely thrown that idea out, just because it is so cheap to pick up Roku or Google Chrome hardware these days to do the same think and with no maintenance required by the user. I have however, still been thinking about adding a Plex Server setup to Balena Hub for quick deployment and management on RPIs and other hardware :thinking:.

In case interested in a Plex server equivalent, there is a build posted here to play with: balenaHub: an easier way to find and publish fleets, apps, and blocks for edge devices