Mi Box with Plex and external storage

by LickinToad

My parent's have a really bad internet connection, so bad we actually cancelled it a few months back and just use a WiFi dongle that uses a mobile data connection. As there's a data limit, streaming video is a 'no no' as they would power through their plan in hours.

I have a plex server at my place, and the plan is to save a bunch of videos to a external hard drive and have a Mi Box or similar at my parents house to let them browse through the files on the external hard drive and play them fairly effortlessly.

My question is that I'm wondering if the Mi Box along with Plex can be used to browse local items on an external hard drive, and if so, is it fairly easy to use (if my parents have to go through a bunch of steps just to get access to a video then they probably won't use it).

I'm hoping they can just open the Plex app (or something similar) and just see a bunch of videos as I would on my mobile, all categorised with meta data etc.

Is this possible please? If not, can you help me suggest an alternative.

Thanks

dexbg

You are better off using Kodi for this, browsing local media.

Plex will need a server.

realslizzard

I don't know why people are so hell bent on using Plex for local media storage.

It's terrible for large libraries and tries to transcode Hald your files before sending it. It will also use data trying to scrape all the content on the drive. Also it won't work on the mi box as a server anyways.

Like others have said MX Player or VLC will do the job. VLC has a decent way of browing local media but I hate the orange layout so I can't use it. MX Player can do it but you have to hit the refresh button to see changes and if you have a large library like me scanning everything can take forever (Plex takes even longer so that's totally out)

Fantastins

Use Kodi or spmc, it's close to Plex in functionality and appearance but does not require a server. Metadata will be tricky, there may be stand alone apps that will pull it and organize on the usb drive. If not, you can probably setup Kodi on your system with Internet then force a metadata update with the data saved to the folders the videos live in on the usb. That should work but isn't easy to explain. Worst comes to worst they will see file names and no extra metadata. If they have any internet it should automatically populate too, metadata don't need much if you limit artwork.

You can also install something like auto-start to automatically load up Kodi or which ever app you choose for playback, so it just loads that at each boot and gets past the leanback launcher which may be confusing for them.

BiggussDikkuss

Just use simple video playback Apps like Archos Video Player or MX Player or VLC.