PlexConnect Installation on Apple TV3

I have a few Apple TV3 at home. I am still keeping them in the vain hope of a jailbreak on them soon.. A jailbreak to allow me to play XBMC on a 1080p Apple TV 3. That day still seemed amazingly far 🙂

Took one of the Apple TV3 and updated the firmware (from 5.0 to 6.0.3). A waste as it is hard to find older Apple TV3 with older firmware now (usually Jailbreak works on older firmware). I did this because I wanted to try PlexConnect.

PlexConnect is a workaround to use Plex on Apple TV3. Plex is not an application offered by Apple TV3 so you cannot install it as a front end client to the PMS (Plex Media Server). PlexConnect make use of some clever technical methods to overcome it. For me, the most important is still for the PlexConnect to pull the media from the PMS sitting in the Synology NAS, and not any Mac or PC. So it is with much happiness when I found that it is (now.. not so in the past) much easier to set up PlexConnect in a Synology NAS !

It took me just half an hour to get it working. Impressed. So here I am sharing the steps 🙂

Please use this wonderful forum post to help you. It is the source of my set up. Super smooth.

Step 1 : If you not done so, add SYNOLOGY COMMUNITY packages to your DSM Package Centre.

Step 2 : Install the Python from the Synology Community. Important. It must be from this particular package and not the official one.

Step 3 : Download the PlexConnect for Synology from the forum link. I downloaded the DSM 4.3 version.

Step 4 : Install the package using the Synology Package Centre. Use MANUAL INSTALL and point it to the package you downloaded (to your Mac or PC)

Step 5 : When installing, it will ask for two information. You need these 2. The first one is the IP address of your Synology NAS (now for everyone’s sake, please set up your NAS with a static IP address. That way, it will never change. So make sure your NAS is on a STATIC IP). I am using 192.168.1.88 as an example of the IP address of my NAS. The second one is the DNS of your ISP (at least according to the screen. I saw many other DNS information quoted around in the forum but I decided to just follow the menu. It worked for me). TO find out the DNS of your ISP in your APPLE TV, open AppleTV’s ‘Settings’ app. Select ‘General’ and select ‘Network’. and find it under NETWORK. I am showing you mine masked

In APPLE TV :
In the SET UP :

And you are done ! 🙂

Now the next set of work is on your Apple TV3

Step 6 : Open AppleTV’s ‘Settings’ app. Select ‘General’ and select ‘Network’. Change the DNS of your APPLE TV3 to point to the IP address of your NAS. For my EXAMPLE, that would 192.168.1.88

Step 7 : A little weird so read carefully. Select ‘General’ and now only highlight ‘Send Data To Apple’ and

press ‘Play’ on the remote.

. You should see this screen:

Replace whatever in the URL with this URL http://trailers.apple.com/trailers.cer. Enjoy the typing 🙂 🙂 🙂

That’s all. Simple ?

Now go to the TRAILERS app on your APPLE TV3 home screen. Looks like this. Click on it.

SURPRISE ! Your Plex Media Library is now on APPLE TV 3 🙂

And nice interface.. APPLE TV interface 🙂

Playing 720p version of the THOR:DARK WORLD.. I dont really see what the fuss is all about. HA HA

If you are like, have a lot of DTS files, then you need to make these 2 settings. One in Plex Media Server and one in Apple TV

DTS ‘converted’ to Dolby Digital

Unfortunately, the surprise is the 1080p files are still struggling to play on a 1080p Apple TV3. The transcoding is causing some buffering issues every couple of seconds. No such an issue with the same files on the same network with a Roku 3. Playing around with the transcoding format does not seemed to solve it (only by lowering the transcoding quality to the lowest 480p, then the buffering stops) .. Sigh.. Need to research and will update here if any good progress…

UPDATE : Found the cause of the buffering. The use of EXTERNAL SUBTITLES. All my movies has .SRT files in their folder. I set up Plex to read SRT files as the subtitles. If I tell PlexConnect in Apple TV3 not to use the subtitles (i.e. no subtitles), there is almost zero buffering. I am even able to set my transcoding at the highest level. I read that the use of subtitles in Plex = transcoding into a new video stream.. no choice then..

Will this replace my XBMC.. er.. I doubt so 🙂