In my latest monthly sponsored Plex video, we take a look at using an interesting official Plexamp client designed for the Raspberry Pi.
They call it “headless” as it’s designed to work on a Raspberry Pi that can be booted up and set aside to drive audio into a speaker or audio system. Once configured the Pi player will appear in the casting players menu alongside Chromecast devices.
The big difference between using the headless Raspberry Pi player versus a Chromecast is that the audio is not compressed for output – meaning your Raspberry Pi can pull high quality FLAC audio directly from the server yet behave exactly like a Chromecast would.
And because Raspberry Pis support high quality digital to analog converters (or DACs) you can achieve some really nice audio output once you have everything set up properly.
The installation process is a little involved but not terribly difficult. Your Pi needs to be running a 64 bit operating system and have Node.JS 16 or higher installed. There are some good instructions on the official Plex forum post to get things started and I followed these instructions for getting Node.JS working.
In the video I step through an installation from the beginning so you can see each step executed visually.
While this is definitely an enthusiast use case it’s nice to see that Plex is still focusing on the types of things media nerds like us want to do with their personal media servers!