[mikewhy]

> you need to pay for the service

No, you don't. Source: I've had an account for years and am not paying anything.

> it's a PIA to setup and configure.

You add folders to a TV and Movies collection once. With Kodi, you're doing it N times, where N is the number of Kodi installs in your house.

> Once configured, don't plan on using the computer you setup the Media server on as it is always busy/ bogged down scanning files and transcoding video

As others have stated, this is not the case. My Plex server is an old Core2Duo MacBook Pro that also runs virtual machines.

[bubbabojangles]

>No, you don't. Source: I've had an account for years and am not paying anything.

From https://www.plex.tv/blog/well-do-it-live/ Remember, Plex Live TV and DVR is a Plex Pass only feature, and is immediately available for Plex Pass users. You can find out more info about Plex Live TV and DVR here as well.

>You add folders to a TV and Movies collection once. With Kodi, you're doing it N times, where N is the number of Kodi installs in your house.

Never had any success in Plex detecting all my content properly. It's a luck of the draw if you want your content tagged appropriately. I use a MySQL database to store my media library, all I need to do is point Kodi in that direction and everything is synchronized.

> As others have stated, this is not the case. My Plex server is an old Core2Duo MacBook Pro that also runs virtual machines.

You all must have a small media library

[mikewhy]

> Remember, Plex Live TV and DVR is a Plex Pass only feature

Apologies, but it didn't seem like you were talking about that single feature when you said "you need to pay for the service".

> all I need to do is point Kodi in that direction

Which is great, but again, with Plex you don't even need to point. It just finds the server on the network.

> Never had any success in Plex detecting all my content properly

That's definitely annoying. But I built a Plex Channel for my downloads, and it names files according to what Plex expects.

> You all must have a small media library

~4TB of networked storage, but yeah, maybe that's small?

[feld]

PlexPass server features are generally just beta release features and not locked to your user account. If you had the URL to the installer for the PlexPass version (which requires no authentication to download), you could have access to this feature without paying them.

But be a good person and pay for PlexPass.

[wcummings]

Plex can expose a DLNA server (easiest way to set one up on Linux IMO), which you can stream from Kodi. Best of both worlds.