Guys,
It's been a while since I was in the media streaming game - been running WSE2012 + Subsonic/Madsonic without any real technical issues. 2 annoyances, though:
- Subsonic is a much better music streamer than it is a video/movie streamer. Movie streaming quality is not great, and the player is pretty basic (doesn't allow skipping to arbitrary points in the stream, etc) - it feels like the product was built for music streaming, with video added on as an afterthought.
- The bigger thing, though, is that my family rarely uses Madsonic to consume media - music listening and movie watching has gone way down since I set up the server a year or so ago. I think that they don't like/aren't used to a] having to navigate to a website, and b] being required to sign in to said website.
So...here's my question. How viable is it to install Plex Media Server + an iTunes plugin on the server? I'd use Plex for streaming movies and the iTunes plugin to access our iTunes playlists (which is how everyone in the family is used to consuming music) - and I'd do it through the Plex Media player or Windows Media Center plugin via DLNA so that nobody needs to browse to a website when at home. I'd also set up the Plex web service so that I could access our media library from work.
Is this a viable solution? I'm not sure, as I seem to recall that iTunes has issues running on WSE2012 because it doesn't run as a service that starts on startup...but my memory is hazy here. And I'm not even sure that an iTunes "plugin" exists for Plex - I've been unable to find a good list of supported plugins on the web...and I don't know why that is.
If my idea isn't a viable one, is there a better solution out there? I'm okay with paying for a good, well-engineered, well-designed streaming product...