We haven't had a new release of Plex Media Player Embedded for a while since the good old days of October 2017 and version 1.3.11.. I imagine it's official release is just around the corner, but I really wanted to try out the 2.x series for a project I'm working on. ( I had trouble using the Plex Companion API in 1.3.11. ) Any excuse for the new shiny :-)
How I did it:
Step 1. I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 16.04 Server in a VM and fully update/upgrade it.
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now
Step 2. Clone plexinc/LibreELEC.tv and checkout dist-master
git clone https://github.com/plexinc/LibreELEC.tv plex-LibreELEC.tv
cd plex-LibreELEC.tv
git checkout dist-master
Step 3. Have a read of PlexBuild.
Step 4. Add the i386 architecture, clean up the cache and install optional and recommended packages.
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt cleanup
sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential wget bc gawk gperf zip unzip lzop xsltproc openjdk-9-jre-headless libncurses5-dev texi2html libexpat1 gcc-multilib libexpat1-dev:i386 libfreetype6-dev:i386 libexpat1-dev libfreetype6-dev fontconfig:i386
If you jump the gun and try build command too early you'll no doubt get this:
/usr/include/c++/5/iosfwd:38:28: fatal error: bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory
Step 5. Install g++-multilib
sudo apt install g++-multilib
If you yet again, leap to early, you might come across an ffmpeg compile error:
BUILD ffmpeg-plex (target) Unknown option "--disable-ffserver".
This is because ffserver seems to have been removed from ffmpeg...
Step 6. Find any mention of this just in case and remove it.. I did it manually and I'm too lazy to give you a one liner!
grep -rnwl . -e '--disable-ffserver'
Step 7. Showtime!
DISTRO=PlexMediaPlayer PROJECT=RPi2 ARCH=arm PMP_REPO=plex-media-player PMP_BRANCH=master make image
Step 8. Go have fun for 10-12 hours, your time may vary.
Step 9. Realise you've actually ended up with 2.7.0.1, woohoo! It's in ./target/
Get it out of the VM and burn it to an SD card, slap it in a RasPi and enjoy :-)
LiveTV works great, movies and episodes, etc. not had chance to test much because I got distracted once Anchorman got going!
A massive thanks to @LongChair and the rest of the Plex team for getting this working Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
