Today I’ve been playing with PMS (Plex Media Server) for Linux, and also Plex Mobile for Android. Both have been pretty disappointing!

The Linux server is closed-source and precompiled for vague platforms like 32-Bit Ubuntu 10.10, but happens to run with some work on 64-Bit, I got it working on 32-Bit 11.04 after some hacking.

It looks like a direct port of the Mac version though as there’s no init script and there are spaces and capital letters in filenames, which actually stops the server from starting (good QA there!)

Then it seems like too much hassle to point a Mac client to it, as you have to have the same NFS mountpoints or something odd, and you can’t manually select a server from the client, you have to rely on stupid ZeroConf/Avahi.

To my surprise though, I ran it in a VirtualBox VM and allocated 256Mb RAM to it and it worked fine – so why does PMS seem to bog down my 2Gb MacMini?

I thought I’d try the Android client. Well that’s the slowest app I’ve ever seen (and paid £3 for) and on Cyanogenmod it doesn’t even play video, only sound works – and no its not due to lack of Flash10!

The promised remote control functionality hasn’t been written yet, although you can see its a direct port of the iOS app as the remote icon is there, it just does nothing!

So once again it seems Plex is not serious about running client or server on non-Apple platforms.