PLEX : Problem with VIDEO_TS playback

I have been 'encouraging' the Plex team to address this issue.

Plex Media Server stores a file path defining the location of the media, in this case the media is a VIDEO_TS folder (but this problem also affects .ISO files). Being that in this case the Plex Media Server is running on the ReadyNAS itself, this file path will be a Unix style file path since the ReadyNAS runs a version of Linux.

If you connect to the Plex Media Server running on the ReadyNAS from a Mac running the Plex.app then even if the Mac has mounted the ReadyNAS as a network volume the file path will be different and hence the file will not be found. In this case Plex is designed to switch to streaming the media. Currently Plex Media Server cannot stream VIDEO_TS or .ISO media.

The Plex team are working on being able to stream this type of media to a Mac client, and in theory the approach they are planning to use should also work with the PleXMBC plugin for XBMC. This approach should work because both the Mac and XBMC already have the ability to play DVD type media (with menus) as used in VIDEO_TS and .ISO media. However this approach will still not work with iOS clients i.e. iPhone, iPad etc., as these have never had and still don't know how to play DVDs. I get the impression they are unlikely to ever add support to iOS clients to handle this and they recommend extracting the DVD main title to an MKV file.

I had myself suggested a different approach but it still would not have helped for iOS clients. My suggestion was that since Plex Media Server now exists on a variety of different operating systems (Linux, Mac and Windows), each of which uses different file path formats, that they should add the ability to use network URLs like smb://username:password@server/share/folder/filename something that XBMC still supports and Plex used to support. This network URL format is the same no matter what operating system you are running.