Today going to talk about setting up Plex Media Center. See my previous post for setting up the Plex Media Server as you need that finished in order to connect the Media Center.
1. Download and install Plex Media Center here
2. Follow install instructions
3. Open up Plex Media Center
4. From main menu click left arrow to bring up settings
5. Select Preferences
6. Select region and language
7. Under screensaver set your desired settings
8. Under theme music you can choose to play tv theme music. This option will play the theme music whenever browsing tv shows and you click on tv show (neat feature)
9. Under Advanced you can select skin
10. Now go to the left where you see 4 icons and go to Playback
11. You can make changes to subtitles
12. I left music and photos alone because I am not using them
13. Under advanced video, select off for adjust refresh rate to match video, video render method as software and MAKE SURE allow hardware acceleration (DXVA2) is unchecked - this is to get HD Audio working
14. Now go back to far left and select System
15. Under myPlex, sign in to your account you created on server (this will make sure when you load media center your files automatically show up), make sure remote libraries is checked if using plex away from home
16. I enabled remote control sends keyboard presses under input devices
17. Under audio output, select Audio output as HDMI, check box next to which codecs your receiver/computer is capable of playing (in my case I selected them all). You can find out what your receiver supports by going to control panel and selecting Sound. Then select device and hit properties. Click supported formats and at bottom you will see the list.
18. Under power saving, I chose to put display to sleep at 10 min and timer to 15 minutes (timer suspends computer)
19. Software update lets you search for new updates to plex
20. Under Services you can enable HTTP, control plex from clients, UPnP, and Airplay
21. Under advanced, I chose display mode as Fullscreen #1 and use fullscreen rather than true fullscreen CHECKED (notice below it shows windowed because I was taking screen shots). You can also calibrate video to make sure it fits your tv screen properly. Scroll down and change audio output channels to what you have (I have 5.1). Under audio output device select WASAPI: HDMI...... and also the same for passthrough (notice mine is incorrect in screenshot below, must make sure its WASAPI for both. This will give you full HD playback with HD Audio (DTS, DTS Master....etc as long as your receiver supports it). If you find that video playback is really slow and stutters check sound settings. I would recommend following my entire guide when troubleshooting to fix as you must have same settings selected as I do.
22. Go back to far left and select Network
23. Under quality I set local video to direct play as well as remote video quality to direct play. You can change this option from each client you are using depending on network speeds. I have online video quality as 720p
24. Under media server you can manually set up ip address and port of server but this is unnecessary if you use plex's login functionality
25. DONE
26. Now go back to main menu and as along as Plex Media Server and your server is turned on it should automatically load your Movies/TV Shows that you set up under Plex Media Server in Part 6 (notice there will be slight delay for media center to find server when starting up)
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