You need:

• Qt 5.6 alpha
• cmake 3.1 or newer
• ninja is recommended for building

Special Qt requirements:

• On Windows, you must apply qt-patches/0003-Always-enable-viewport-stuff.patch for correct window scaling. The patches in qt-patches/qt-5.6-alpha/ fix some stability issues.

• On OSX, you should apply qt-patches/0002-qtbase-Don-t-show-the-menu-bar-at-all-in-lion-style-fullscr.patch to improve the user experience in fullscreen.

• You can try to use Qt 5.5, but then you also need to apply the following patches:

  • qt-patches/0001-qtwebengine-Add-a-backgroundColor-property.patch
  • qt-patches/0004-qtwebengine-transparency-window-creation.patch

  Without them, video playback will not work.

Get dependencies:

• scripts/fetch-binaries.py -p darwin-x86_64

If you're happy just building from the command line then run CMake for the ninja build tool:

• mkdir build ; cd build
• cmake -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DQTROOT=/path/to/qt -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=output ..

Build (ninja):

• ninja

Make a distributable package:

• ninja install (be patient, it's slow)

Or if you prefer working in Xcode, run CMake for the xcode build):

• mkdir build ; cd build
• cmake -GXcode -DQTROOT=/path/to/qt ..

You'll want to grab one of the Qt 5.6.0 alpha packages from http://download.qt.io/development_releases/qt/5.6/5.6.0-alpha/single/ and unpack it locally. On Fedora, even with a working development environment set up, the following packages were necessary to successfully build Qt (and QtWebEngine):

sudo dnf install libxcb libxcb-devel libXrender libXrender-devel xcb-util-wm xcb-util-wm-devel xcb-util xcb-util-devel xcb-util-image xcb-util-image-devel xcb-util-keysyms xcb-util-keysyms-devel libcap-devel snappy-devel libsrtp-devel nss-devel pciutils-devel gperf

(The majority of the packages on this list came from http://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/plugins/platforms/xcb/README, but everything after xcb-util-keysyms-devel was trial-and-error in attempts build QtWebEngine; this list of packages may not be complete, but hopefully it provides a useful starting point.)

Once you've unpacked the Qt 5.6.0 alpha package:

• cd qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.6.0-alpha
• ./configure -confirm-license -opensource
• make
• sudo make install
• cd qtwebengine
• qmake
• make
• sudo make install

That should do it for Qt. It's worth noting that, on a Core i7-950 with 24GB of RAM, this took more than three hours to build.

mpv is a bit easier to build than Qt, and compiles much faster.

Before you attempt to build mpv, make sure you have either ffmpeg 2.4.0 (and related development packages) or libav11 (and related devel packages) installed.

• git clone git://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
• cd mpv
• ./bootstrap.py
• ./waf configure --enable-libmpv-shared
• ./waf build
• sudo ./waf install

Assuming that everything else has installed correctly, building Plex Media Player should now be fairly straightforward:

• git clone git://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player
• cd plex-media-player
• mkdir build
• cd build
• cmake -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DQTROOT=/usr/local/Qt-5.6.0 -DMPV_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/include/mpv -DMPV_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libmpv.so.1 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=output ..
• ninja-build

Once ninja-build completes successfully, you should have a usable ./src/plexmediaplayer binary. Run it and test it out! If it works as you expect, you should be able to run sudo install ./src/plexmediaplayer ./src/pmphelper /usr/local/bin so that the program is usable from anywhere on the system.

Plex Media Player is licensed under GPL v2. See the LICENSE file. Licenses of dependencies are summarized under resources/misc/licenses.txt. This file can also be printed at runtime when using the --licenses option.