Home Theater solutions for traveling?

March 22, 2018 11:06 AM

Help me make my Plex home media system work for vacations and business travel.

It's easy enough to sync media from my Plex servers to my iPhone and iPad for taking to the gym and watching on the small screen, but how can I get that connected to the HDMI input on a hotel's TV? I have Apple TVs, Raspberry Pi3s with Kodi, and I'm not opposed to getting any of the $50 sticks (Chromecast / Fire stick / Roku) if it's necessary and easier. Or is it as simple as syncing the media I'd like to take along to an iDevice and airplaying it from the Plex app to an Apple TV that is otherwise not connected to the hotel's wireless network? (I mean, I assume getting any random device hooked up to hotel WiFi is more of a pain that it's worth if it's not a device the hotel normally expects to connect to their WiFi.)

I'm sort of hoping the solution is easier than throwing a bunch of shows and movies at Handbrake to transcode into a portable format and mucking around with that.

posted by Kyol to Technology (9 answers total)

If your smartphone supports MHL, you can get a cable with an HDMI plug on the end and just plug it into the TV. It's getting less common on phones lately, but last I saw HDMI output in some form or fashion is still common among tablets, including some of the cheap ones the cell carriers often give you if you're willing to add it to your mobile account. (It's $10 a month on at&t if you have a Mobile Share plan or whatever they are calling it these days. If you don't actually need it to have mobile data independent of your phone, you can get them cheaper elsewhere, especially the WiFi-only ones)

Chromecast or anything else without a web browser is not an option since they can't log in to the WiFi network. However, an Android TV box such as the Xiaomi Mi Box should work since you can sideload Chrome so you can hit whatever button you need to on the landing page to get Internet access. The Shield TV is a far better box, but for your use it won't matter, so there's no sense in spending an extra $170ish on it.

Alternatively, if you have a sufficiently large data plan you could turn your phone into a hotspot (or use a dedicated hotspot device) and use anything that can connect to your Plex server that has an HDMI port. Some devices have a "privacy" or "port isolation" setting that would have to be turned off for a Chromecast to work, but any device that doesn't rely on accepting unsolicited packets from another device to work should be fine with no fiddling.

I'd verify that an Apple TV can do Airplay without connecting to a WiFi network before considering that option. Android devices that support WiDi can do it, but last I checked there weren't any iOS devices that could do it, though they may well have their own protocol.

Obviously, the simplest option is to copy the files to your laptop and plug it into the TV, but then you don't get access to your whole library. ;)
posted by wierdo at 11:46 AM on March 22, 2018

Response by poster: Well, and I should clarify that while I could probably expose my PMS to the outside world with reasonable expectations of a useful service given my 1gig uplink at home, I'm not currently doing it because general security and general lack of a need to add additional exposure.

Mostly I'm hoping for a pre-canned, generally easy solution. If that's pre-sync all the media you'd consider watching to Plex on my phone and airplaying to the AppleTV (It Just Works! (tm)), great. If that's a feature I haven't seen in Kodi on my Pi, I'm OK with preloading a bunch of media on a USB stick there too. If iOS Plex can chromecast to a Chrome stick that isn't on a wireless network? Okiedoke, I can go get one from Best Buy easily enough.

If it's still at the point where it's easiest to hook a laptop up to the TV.. Ugh. OK.
posted by Kyol at 12:42 PM on March 22, 2018

Since you don't want to expose Plex to the Internet, you're stuck carrying media with you in some form or fashion unless you are willing to set up a VPN server.

If whatever you're running on your Pi automounts USB sticks, all you need is a stick or two or three and the Pi. It should show up in the files view automatically when you plug it in. That's far easier than dealing with hotel wireless on devices lacking a web browser. That said, it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to set up a Pi to VPN back home so you can access your library with Kodi securely.

If it's easier to sync to Plex on your phone, that's also a good option since you then get the choice of airplay to an ATV or just plugging the phone directly into the TV with Apple's $40 adapter.

Personally, I'd probably either just expose Plex to the Internet and use my phone to access the remote Plex server and play stuff on the TV with an adapter or set up a VPN for Kodi if I felt like carrying a Pi. I was over carrying media around before there were smartphones, though, so I suspect my tolerance for tinkering is far greater than normal. I spent a couple of days figuring out how to make Darwin Media Server work right so I could stream Looney Toons to my Nokia 6200, after all. (And it usually worked as long as I had good reception!)
posted by wierdo at 3:10 PM on March 22, 2018

Best answer: Throw the MP4s on an SD card and use an HDMI compact media player with remote?
posted by eschatfische at 3:10 PM on March 22, 2018

What I do for this purpose is carry a copy of my files with me on my laptop, using VLC to play them and an HDMI cable to plug the laptop into the TV. I think you could do the exact same thing with an iPhone or iPad using the Infuse player. However I don't have much experience with the iDevice HDMI adapters. The nice thing about VLC or Infuse is you won't need to transcode your video, they both play pretty much any format.

In addition I think you could do this with your Plex server, but you will definitely need a publically accessible PMS to connect to. Then run the Plex client on a laptop or iDevice.

I would not try to make this work with a ChromeCast / Apple TV / FireTV kind of device you bring to a hotel. In every case step 1 is getting that device online. That's difficult even on a well behaved WiFi network and can be literally impossible with a restrictive hotel network.
posted by Nelson at 4:48 PM on March 22, 2018

Best answer: Hotel WiFi is usually slow and unreliable, so I would focus on offline solutions. If you can carry a device with an HDMI output (just about every iDevice should be able to do this with an adapter), then you should be able to sync media the same way you do for small-screen viewing currently and view it on the TV with the adapter (and an HDMI cable).
posted by Aleyn at 6:13 PM on March 22, 2018

Response by poster: Ah hah, I didn't realize there was a Lightning to HDMI adaptor. I was sort of hung up in the cast/airplay thinking that I didn't look for a hard wired solution from a portable device I'm already familiar with.
posted by Kyol at 8:02 AM on March 23, 2018

Just FYI regarding your concern about exposing your Plex server to the outside world: You can enable Remote Access on the server and when you log into your account from another device you are able to stream content remotely. I do this now but I have 1 Gig fiber internet on both ends so the hotel internet connection will definitely be the bottleneck but you can also control the bitrate at which remote streams get delivered so you could stream a smaller amount of data to your hotel device.

Here's the first DuckDuckGo link with instructions: How to Enable (and Troubleshoot) Remote Access to Your Plex Media Server

DDG search: turn on remote access plex
posted by eatcake at 9:02 AM on March 23, 2018

Response by poster: So I completely failed to see how hard it would be to get an AppleTV to join the usual interstitial "I accept the terms & conditions" WiFi login, but the Lighting to HDMI adaptor worked pretty well. The TV I used had some frame pacing issues coming off my iPad while watching Valerian from Amazon prime, but the TV in the other room in the suite played the whole Australian GP without a problem, so I'm blaming the TV in the hotel's bedroom. (I was out in the sticks and suspect I was the only person using any significant portion of the hotel's bandwidth. That can be so variable though, I know.)

Still, it took far longer to sync the media to my iPad than I had expected, so eschatfische's suggestion upthread is probably the best plan without prior knowledge about the hotel's WiFi coverage and capabilities.

Thanks!
posted by Kyol at 11:11 AM on March 26, 2018