Installing Plexmediaserver on Xbian / Raspberry Pi 2

[UPDATE] Now instructions are fit for Debian Jessie.

I have been running Kodi on my Raspberry Pi 2 for some time as my primary home media center. Previously I used a normal PC in fancy casing, but since I moved all my files to NAS it made no sense to run full blown PC and waste electricity.

After looking at several alternatives I found Xbian to best suit my needs. Especially with running brfs and possibility to roll-back changes via snapshots.

Next I wanted to explore plexmediaserver and I have found out that there is a repository with latest packages.

First I presume you already have latest Xbian installed, then you need to do the following:

apt-get update && apt-get install -y --force-yes apt-transport-https -y
wget -O - https://dev2day.de/pms/dev2day-pms.gpg.key | apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dev2day.de/pms/ jessie main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pms.list
apt-get update
apt-get install -y plexmediaserver

After this is done you can access your Plexmediaserver web GUI by accessing this address in your browser:

http://[YOUR-IP-ADDRESS]:32400/web/

After a day of testing I was not happy with Plex, especially because it was clunky and got my Rpi 2 stuck twice in a day. This never happened with my current setup. After all I do not need trans-coding abilities since I can stream my videos together with external subtitles by using great Android app called Yatse.

It would take too long to write all the good features of this app, but it is worth buying and supporting the author. Check it out on Google Play:

Yatse, the XBMC / Kodi Remote 

If you are unhappy with plexmediaserver like I was you can uninstall it via:

apt-get remove --purge plexmediaserver

And to be completely sure that you have purged your system do also the following:

# remove apt source for plexmediaserver
rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pms.list
# delete apt repository key from the list
apt-key del DC9666A8
# remove remaining files
rm /var/cache/apt/archives/plexmediaserver_*jessie_armhf.deb
rm /var/log/upstart/plexmediaserver.log

Even though Plex did not make the cut, it’s still fun if you want to try and install.

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