Plex desktop and HTPC client

slaanesh Fedora, FFMpeg, Plex Media Server, RHEL, Uncategorized

Plex Desktop and HTPC clients are available again. Now Plex ships a precompiled QT 6 libraries with the private API enabled that allows for an easy packaging. The packages are available for EL9+ and Fedora on the x86_64 architecture only.

Just install the one you need via DNF. For the desktop application:

# dnf -y install PlexDesktop

For the HTPC application:

# dnf -y install plexHTPC

The packages come with every possible system library in use and can be installed in parallel. They both suggest all the VA-API drivers available in the multimedia repository.

Keep in mind that both sport MPV as the main player, so you can still customize the player options as you see fit. For example to force NVIDIA’s hardware decoding in both applications:

$ cat .local/share/plex/mpv.conf
hwdec=nvdec

The HTPC optional package that creates an auto starting “HTPC session” for set top box media players is not restored yet, I will add it in the next days.

The packages bundle QT 6 (for the web interface engine) with the private API enabled, FFMPeg with a progress API status reporting, a custom MPV and a CEC library in the HTPC client.

Why not using the official Flatpak installation directly? First of all I don’t like all the mounting and folder redirection of Flatpak, but also:

# flatpak install tv.plex.PlexDesktop tv.plex.PlexHTPC
Looking for matches…
Required runtime for tv.plex.PlexHTPC/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y

tv.plex.PlexHTPC permissions:
    ipc      network      pulseaudio      x11     devices     dbus access [1]

    [1] org.freedesktop.PowerManagement, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver

tv.plex.PlexDesktop permissions:
    ipc      network      pulseaudio      x11     devices     dbus access [1]

    [1] org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver


        ID                                                 Branch            Op       Remote        Download
 1.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                23.08             i        flathub       < 172.2 MB
 2.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                23.08-extra       i        flathub       < 172.2 MB
 3.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-555-58-02       1.4               i        flathub       < 305.0 MB
 4.     org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale                    23.08             i        flathub       < 360.2 MB (partial)
 5.     org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264                  2.2.0             i        flathub       < 944.3 kB
 6.     org.freedesktop.Platform                           23.08             i        flathub       < 227.5 MB
 7.     tv.plex.PlexHTPC                                   stable            i        flathub       < 150.9 MB
 8.     tv.plex.PlexDesktop                                stable            i        flathub       < 149.2 MB

Proceed with these changes to the system installation? [Y/n]:

That’s a whopping 1.5 GiB compressed download compared to the package footprint:

$ ls -1hs Plex*
106M PlexDesktop-1.96.0.177-3.fc40.x86_64.rpm
105M PlexHTPC-1.64.0.170-2.fc40.x86_64.rpm

That’s more than 7 times the size. Flatpak applications with duplicate libraries everywhere are not really my taste.

3 thoughts to “Plex desktop and HTPC client”

  1. Hello, thank you for maintaining this packages. I’m trying to install Plex on my fedora 41 and got this error messages:

    [5/5] PlexDesktop-0:1.102.0.230-1.fc41.x86_64 12% | 21.1 KiB/s | 13.0 MiB | 10m31s

    Downloading successful, but checksum doesn’t match. Calculated: cb411c5c203a729186e28d620eda
    Downloading successful, but checksum doesn’t match. Calculated: cb411c5c203a729186e28d620eda

    Thank you

    Reply

  2. Hello my friend, firstly I would like to thank you for your efforts in making Plex packages available and maintaining them for us, this is very valuable. If possible, I would like to know if you have plans to package Plexamp as well or instruct me so that I can contribute to this activity. I already have experience in packaging using RPM.

    Thanks in advance!

    Reply

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