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This took three years...thank you Jason!


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I -hate- Kodi with a passion. Something always breaks, scrapers go down. It doesn't play nice with my collection.

When Walmart owned Vudu and implemented disc to digital, I went on a cloud storage streak.

I don't have the time, money or patience to create my own media server. As it stands now, I have well over 100 movies that I own a license to stream through VuDu. At approximately 4GB+ per movie, data limitations add up quickly.

I have No-Intros of NES, SNES, Sega, and various other roms and emulators scattered around my content hard drive. All of my PC games are Steam/GOG and I usually only play PC ports of AAA console releases, which means I only play with a controller.

My workhorse is a Node 202 holding AMD hardware. The computer sits in my living room and is hooked up to my 60" tv.

So, controller or Harmony Remote control was the only option - I work on a computer all day and don't want to touch a keyboard or mouse unless I absolutely have to.

For three years, I screwed around with various front-ends to unify my stuff into one interface.

I never would have thought Microsoft would be the answer. When Edge became Chromium based and allowed integration of PWA's, I figured it was worth a shot.

Since BigBox will launch anything you throw at it, I web app'd every movie in my VuDu collection and created desktop shortcuts that I buried in a "Movies" folder.

i used Media Center Master to bulk scrape my shortcut files as videos and spent countless hours correcting all the foreign language posters and backgrounds.

I've still got about 40 movies to go and then I'll look into maybe swapping out the Aeon skin in Big Box into something else, but as it stands right now after three years of dickering around, I'm satisfied with the results and wanted to share with people that would appreciate it.

 

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Agree with the others, plex is way better for media consumption, I have a dedicated plex server with 2000+ movies and counting. Also a ton of tv content as well. It stays on 24hr a day 7 days a week with the exception of update days where I update windows and plex on all my devices. 
 

I wish there was a way to integrate plex into launchbox for the gaming side of things but it would also have to run on more Devices like iOS and smart TVs. 

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On 10/10/2021 at 8:33 PM, Visivopro said:

Agree with the others, plex is way better for media consumption, I have a dedicated plex server with 2000+ movies and counting. Also a ton of tv content as well. It stays on 24hr a day 7 days a week with the exception of update days where I update windows and plex on all my devices. 
 

I wish there was a way to integrate plex into launchbox for the gaming side of things but it would also have to run on more Devices like iOS and smart TVs. 

I'm mixed on the issue. I have added quite a few of my TV and movies to Launchbox... but is it easy or fun? No. No it is not. I'll also say that I still find myself gravitating towards Plex to actually browse my collection. The thing I do find annoying about Plex through is it almost always wants to transcode everything even when it doesn't need to. As a result when there is no internet connection present you'll sometimes be caught out not having a codec the service is trying to download on the fly. So Plex is a local server, your files that you want to play are local, but the codec has to come from an active internet connection... So then I find myself using Windows Explorer to find my file and play it anyway. It's not a common problem as I almost always have internet. But it is an annoying one. Its also a problem that is not present in Launchbox as that front end just creates a direct link to the file that opens in VLC. (or whatever you tell it to open in).

I look at Launchbox as a good backup launcher for that reason and I plan to continue to import my library into it.

That aside. You can launch the Plex App through Launchbox. If you pair that with something like reWASD you can set your controller up to remap to mouse and keyboard when the Plex executable is active. After a bit of tinkering I am sure you could achieve a pretty seamless experience with Plex acting like a component of Launchbox. I'll likely by trying this out myself in the near future.

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