Official Plex App Now Available for New Apple TV

[chinito77]

I don't know, I was looking forward to Plex but Air Video HD offers a much better experience. I like it's clean and simple layout and how it handles subtitles. Yes it costs $4 and it doesn't have siri integration but it was well worth it. http://www.inmethod.com/airvideohd/index.html

Plex just feels too bloated and I don't like how to displays my files. I don't like the top shelf feature, how it recommends movies, or it can't display subtitles for certain movies and shows. I might be the wrong type of targeted user since I don't really watch/own American movies or tv series. Subtitles and .ts files need to play perfectly for me to give this another look.

I looked at the other alternatives on the app store and nothing else offers what I was hoping the Apple TV would do for video streaming except Plex and Air Video HD. I really do want to like Plex but I'll pass until it gains some Apple TV exclusive functions.

 

[Hendu98]

I've been using Plex for quite some time now. I started with using itunes to handle all of my movies, but I found Plex is much easier to manage.

• It handles fetching my meta data, which I can modify if I so choose (for example, cutting out genres I don't need listed)
  
• It handles streaming off of my home server, so I can leverage my linux server instead of running itunes on a mac or pc in the house. The server is already always running, and I'd rather not have a dedicated VM just for itunes.
  
• It transcodes to devices that need it for me, so I don't have to worry at all about video formats. My library is a giant mess of codecs.
  
• It allows me to stream outside of my home, so I don't have to pick and choose what movies to take with me before a business trip. I just open up the app and pick anything from my entire library.
• My in-laws have a device set up to stream from my library, using their own account. It remembers their spots they left off and lets them resume as desired separate from my viewings.

Probably my favorite feature:

• It lets me stop in the middle of a movie on one device, and pick up where I left off on any other device. If I was watching on my phone or ipad, I can simply select right from there to stream onto one of my other devices hooked to a tv.

When I get an ATV4, it will be because of Plex, but I will enjoy the other features as well. I just need to get past some birthdays and the holidays first! And I need to pick 32gb or 64gb.

 

[Crzyrio]

Plex does not modify metadata or files in any way does it?

No, it doesn't touch the actual files. Just reads the content.

 

[mmomega]

I've been using Plex for 6 years, started with an 09 Mac Mini connected to my TV to run Plex Media Center, since the AppleTV has been horrible at serving up your local content with a nice GUI, I really dislike the long list view of movies especially when you have over a thousand titles, this is a very very welcome addition.

 

[hipnetic]

As a couple of other folks have noted, lack of 24fps support is a problem for me. I switched back to TiVo within the last year and it's meeting all of my needs. Plex on TiVo supports 24fps. But I'm actually moving away from using Plex altogether and just buying my movies on VUDU these days (which also supports 24fps on my TiVo).

That said, for those of you who don't care about 24fps but who have been longing for Plex on your Apple TV, I hope you know that you could already do that with the older Apple TVs. Just find what you want to watch using the Plex app on your iPhone and then use AirPlay. The Apple TV will take over the stream and your iPhone will just become a remote control (same concept as a ChromeCast). The picture quality will be just as good as a native Plex app on the ATV.

 

[jimbobb24]

He's talking about shooting in 24 frames on a consumer video camera, not watching film back at its native resolution. God, don't confuse people anymore on this issue, they already don't get it!

This is so great. I thought only audiophiles could hear the vibrations in the ether and needed gold wiring. Now I find out videophiles can see them and need special frame rates. I always thought it was just me.

 

[elmateo487]

The whole reason I bought AppleTV was to access my media collection through my MacMini running HomeShare. If I wanted Plex, I would've just bought a Roku. I don't see what everyone is so happy about having Plex on the ATV when HomeShare is free and native across Apples platform.

Wow. This guy and the people who liked this comment don't know what plex is for....

Plex is a full workflow with trailers, music, descriptions, any format, you can stream across the Internet... Have user accounts.

My plex setup goes as such. Buy a movie... Any movie... Place into a folder on my computer (rip of a bargain dvd, or digital format). And everything else happens automagically. Tagged, cover, renamed and organized into folders. Ready to watch on any device, anywhere with a network connection. Not just Apple devices. OR I can just click a button on the device I want the movie to be, and bam, synced and converted to my device.

If you don't need anything complex, sure go for free home sharing. But wait there is more.... Plex is free. Everything I mentioned is free besides the device syncing.

Not to mention..... Why would you buy a Roku? When you can now have an Apple TV to AirPlay to, AND have plex.

 

[rdlink]

You mean like those Rokus and Fire TVs that had Amazon Prime and Plex all along?

Exactly. Those Rokus and Fire TVs that had Plex and Prime, but didn't have the iTunes Store and HBO Now. So once Prime shows up on the ATV it will have everything they have, and something they never will...

 

[Westside guy]

Glad to hear this is available... the only downside is that my large library is made up of a both iTunes purchased content and my own Handbrake encodes. Until I can serve everything from one interface, it won't pass the wife factor.

This is why I still have an iTunes 10.7 installation around - I can use Requiem to strip the DRM off my iTunes purchased stuff. All my digital purchases, DVD rips (from DVDs I've purchased), and BluRay rips (ditto) are all in the one library.

 

[Agent OrangeZ]

Forget Plex... I want Kodi on Apple TV!

 

[WilliamG]

Sad that ATV has no 24p currently, but 98% of my DVD collection is video source anyway, so that doesn't matter.

What does is that I really like ripping things as ISOs so I get the menus, but Plex doesn't support that. I've tried a few alternate (cheap) solutions and none were satisfactory thus far--full computer is more hassle and expense than I want to bother with, and while the WDTV supports this, in practice it's so buggy as to be completely unusable--it crashes or hangs playback of ISOs constantly.

I believe Kodi has ISO support, so fingers crossed that it will be released for ATV soon. VLC is the other possibility--it works great on the desktop for playback, it just lacks the media manager function.

...and yes, I know I could just make mp4s of everything and serve them from iTunes (or whatever), but I do rather enjoy having the menus for the special features and retro fun (for some of my really, really old DVDs). Also makes fiddling with subtitle and language options easier.

I don't think it makes anything easier. Sitting through menus and warnings etc. No thanks. With Plex on a Mac/PC etc it's one click into the movie, and then one button press on a keyboard or Harmony remote to toggle subtitles/audio streams etc.

I recognize it's different strokes/folks, but this is certainly my preference.

 

[loekf]

Forget Plex... I want Kodi on Apple TV!

Kodi or "MrMC" is coming, see

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238524&page=3

They are working on a stripped down version of Kodi to make it fit with the Appstore rules, so e.g. no addons and Python support.

Also no 1080p24 support, that's an ATV4 issue. So 24 fps is upconverted to 60 fps by frame doubling.

Appearently it will do DD decode, but no DTS decode (licensing at Apple), but bitstreaming works.

I'm curious how this will go. I've never seen the added value of metadata etc. of Plex incl. the transcoding. From what I know, Plex will transcode any x264 file, which makes no sense. The ATV has a more than capable hardware x264 decoder. Probably means on my NAS (Intel-based) a high bit-rate 10+ Mbps with Dolby TrueHD MKV via Plex is a no-go. Maybe via my iMac it works.

Nvidia Shield ATV can do 1080p24, because Nvidia backported a dynamic framerate API from Android 6.0 (N) to Android 5.0 (M). Together with Kodi 16.0 (alpha) that should work. Haven't tested myself. My Shield is still at Kodi 15.2.

IMHO, Apple is way too restrictive with their design choices. Likely the hardware can do it. Just a matter of (marketing) choices.

 

[Bevz]

Fantastic! Woke up to this news, just installed, brilliant, works and looks great! As a bonus, i now have BBC iPlayer on my TV through the Plex Channels I'm a happy bunny now

 

[monty77]

It does support Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 in addition to Dolby Digital 5.1

http://www.apple.com/tv/specs/

7.1 as in TrueHD? Or is that something different? My TrueHD tracks aren't playing, but great news if it's a bug.

 

[monty77]

Hi, am I the only one unable to access that link?

Permission Problem
You don't have permission to do that.

Sorry, that forum might be plexpass subs only, here's the post I'm referring to:

"
I ran a few tests just to see what happens. In the ATV4 Settings my Audio was set to Dolby Surround but changing it auto didn't seem to change anything. Also, the handling of the file was pulled with PlexPy since the Activity pane in Plex always said Direct Play and it definitely was not always right.

1080p MP4 H.264/AVC file (High@L4 and 4456 Kbps) with AC3 5.1 (384 Kbps) - The video was played with Direct Play and Direct Stream for the audio
1080p MP4 H.264/AVC file (High@L4 and 5118 Kbps) with AC3 5.1 (384 Kbps) with CC subtitles enabled (embedded EIA-608) - The video was played with Direct Play and Direct Stream for the audio
1080p MP4 H.264/AVC file (High@L4.1 and 5030 Kbps) with AC3 5.1 (640 Kbps) - The video was played with Direct Play and Direct Stream for the audio
1080p MP4 H.264/AVC file (High@L4.1 and 5030 Kbps) with AC3 5.1 (640 Kbps) with subtitles enabled (embedded tx3g) - The video was played with Transcoded Video and Direct Stream for the audio
**720p results with MP4s were the same as 1080p

1080p MKV H.264/AVC file (High@L4.1 and 23902 Kbps) with DTS HD-MA 7.1 (5461 Kbps) - The video was played with Direct Stream (there was a little stuttering for some parts but generally pretty good) and the audio was transcoded to AC3 5.1
1080p MKV H.264/AVC file (High@L4.1 and 23902 Kbps) with DTS HD-MA 7.1 (5461 Kbps) with subtitles enabled (PSG) - The video was played with Transcoded Video and the audio was transcoded to AC3 5.1

720p MPG MPEG-TS (Main@High and 10.7 Mbps) with AC3 5 (384 Kbps) - The video was played with Transcoded Video and Direct Stream for the audio
1080p MPG MPEG-TS (Main@High) and 9168 Kbps) with AC3 5.1 - The video was played with Transcoded Video and Direct Stream for the audio
**for the MPEG-TS file it did not read the subtitles that were in the mpg container"

 

[breather]

Air Video HD is way better then Plex IMHO

 

[dannys1]

This is so great. I thought only audiophiles could hear the vibrations in the ether and needed gold wiring. Now I find out videophiles can see them and need special frame rates. I always thought it was just me.

Errr no, you've totally missunderstood the point - this isn't some audiophile nonsense, this is something my mum can see. Forget the video the guy posted, its talking about how buying a consumer camcorder that shoots at 24fps wont give you an instant "movie look" (as he says, its one of about 20 things put together that makes film look like film)

The problem i'm talking about is that film and cinematic TV shows (Breaking Bad, Fargo etc) are all shot at 24fps. The problem with this is PAL in the UK is 50hz and NTSC in the US is even worse at 60hz...multiples of our TV FPS which are 25 and 30 respectively. As you can see 24fps doens't divide equally into 25 or 30, (50/60) which means that to show it on our TVs they have to do some snazzy maths that involves introducing an extra frame every second to fill in the time. This is whats called Telecine Judder. Anyone can see it, its most noticeable on a slow pan shot from left to right or right to left when you can see the extra frame being introduced and the pan is not smooth - the TV needs to set to a multiple of 24hz to display this smoothly.

This isn't videophile nonsense which 4k and "expensive HDMI" cables are. (And yes I include 4k in that because there is way someone is seeing the difference between 1080p and 4k on a 40" tv) so dismissing it as something silly like that is only showing your ignorance.

 

[Crazy Badger]

So happy

I've been using Plex on my aTV for many years, but it's always been a painful process and often needed maintenance. From a jailbroken aTV2 running Firecore to a aTV3 pointing to PlexConnect and now a native App I can just download.

And for v1.0 it looks pretty good too. Very much like the aTV4, there are some things missing, but the potential is there and I'm so pleased I picked one up from the start. I was expecting to see something after a few months, but to have SimpleX as a launch day option and the official Plex client less than a week later is brilliant.

So much misinformation about Plex in this thread, but comparing it to the Home Sharing experience is like comparing a 20 year old car to the same model bought today. Sure, they'll both play your media files on another machine, but one will be a much more pleasant experience

The key benefits of Plex for me are:

• no time spent re-encoding media - just copy it to the media folder
• metadata added to Plex library automatically, with posters, reviews, trailers, ratings, etc.
• similar interface across all my consumption devices, that a 3 year old can use (can also set individual accounts and tailor content to suit e.g. my 3 year old can't watch The Exorcist)
• flags to say what I've watched which can be used to split viewing across devices
• share my library (600+ films, 140+ tv shows, 20,000+ songs) with family and friends and access it remotely across any of my devices
• manage local device and cloud content through sync (only this requires PlexPass)

Clearly it's not a perfect solution for everyone, but after years of building a digital media library it's the best one I've found for my needs.

Hats off to the Plex Team

 

[hybra]

It would have been more interesting if there was an integrated Plex server app for ATV. This way we don't need to have the mac turned on while streaming from a network drive (think Time Capsule attached drive or NAS).

 

[theluggage]

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238524&page=3

They are working on a stripped down version of Kodi to make it fit with the Appstore rules, so e.g. no addons and Python support.

No addons could be a deal breaker. I suppose Plex has the edge there as the plugins go on the server, avoiding all the problems with plugis/scripting in the app store.

One reason I'd choose Kodi over Plex is the much better support for PVRs* (I use MythTV) - but a later post says that the MrMC fork will still have PVR support so there's still hope.

In a sense, though, having integrated front-ends like Plex or Kodi each with their own Movies/TV Shows/Music channels seems to be doing it wrong - wouldn't it make more sense to have separate Apps like "Plex Movies", "Plex TV Shows", "Plex Music", "PVR" etc. that you selected in the AppleTV front end (and integrated into Siri seardh)?

*Yes, there's a MythTV plugin for Plex that creates a Plex 'channel' containing all your recordings, which is great, but Kodi can also show the programme guide, schedule recordings and view Live TV.

 

[nebo1ss]

Can anyone explain the advantages of Plex vs what I do today... a fully tagged collection of movies I added to iTunes (iFlick 2 for the metadata) that streams to all my Apple TVs?

I

I'm just OCD and like my content a certain way. Worked very hard on my library and am proud of it and don't want to not use it.

Plex remote connects to your home server and gives you exactly the same metadata that you see on your home server the way you organise it.

 

[rhoydotp]

I don't see what everyone is so happy about having Plex on the ATV when HomeShare is free and native across Apples platform.

That's because PLEX can do so much more than HomeShare for a lot of people like Shared Library with friends as an example. More options for us that uses the other features. No harm done on you, no need to be up in arms about it.

 

[nebo1ss]

Gary, I wanted to add to your statement to help avoid confusion...

You DO NOT need to "subscribe" to Plex to be able to share your library with others, or to view others' shared libraries. You DO need to create a FREE Plex account.

Plex does offer a paid subscription service called Plex Pass. But that is for other added benefits and is not needed for sharing libraries.

We should also differentiate between sharing a library with a friend relative and remote access. I agree you do not need a plexpass for either of these capabilities.

With remote access i connect to my home server with either my phone or laptop from any wifi network while travelling. I can use a plex client or a browser to achieve this. With library sharing you can share any library Movies or TV shows for example with a friend who is also using Plex. The shared library is displayed on the sidebar of his Plex client.

 

[scapegoat81]

Can anyone with a Plex subscription confirm if you can use Parental Controls on screen with this ATV app ?

 

[808?]

I'll be waiting for the VLC Player app to arrive.