PLEX 1.1 : King of iOS media players

[gospel9]

Just read a nice review at MacStories:

http://www.macstories.net/reviews/plex-releases-major-1-1-update-the-king-of-ios-media-players/

If you’re serious about your media library, you’ve probably heard of Plex: dubbed as the “solution for local and online media”, Plex is a fantastic multi-platform media center that runs on Macs and Windows PCs and has great iOS and Android clients. Once installed on your desktop machine (which becomes a “server”) Plex can fetch music, movies and TV shows stored on your computer or anywhere else on an external hard drive, organize them properly into categories by adding the correct metadata, and handle streaming to the clients (such as the iPhone or iPad apps) with live conversion of unsupported video formats. All your media can also be played locally on a computer without the need of a mobile client thanks to the desktop Plex app, which is highly customizable: you can add your own themes, install plugins (like Spotify) and connect to online content providers such as the CNN, Vimeo, Cnet TV, Youtube, Apple Movie Trailers and many others. If that’s not enough for you, Plex can also enable you to connect to your media library remotely via WiFi or 3G with a global hostname, through the iOS apps....

Quote from Plex Developer:

For this reason, we’ve introduced a feature called Direct Streaming, As you might know, the current standard for web video is H.264 (regardless of how Google tries to undermine it); this codec happens to be the most common inside an MKV file, and also the most commonly supported on mobile devices. Android and iOS devices support decoding H.264 in hardware directly.

What you might not know is that the iOS devices (especially the latest generation, including the ATV2) have incredibly powerful little chips inside them for decoding video. Even though the specs say they are capable of 720p, it turns out that they do a good job with a lot of 1080p content as well. So when a client connects to the Plex Media Server, it describes its capabilities, and if the file falls within the acceptable range, the video is simply copied over to the new format (a process known as re-muxing). This again means that there is very little CPU used on the server side, and no loss in quality in the video.

I have been using AirVideo since forever now, even though I am still very impressed by it I think I just found a replacement.

 

[davwin]

I can't recommend Plex highly enough. It is without a doubt the best media manager/streamer I've ever used.

It has worked flawlessly for me for some time now and the update yesterday has made it even faster; especially when transcoding from MKV or AVI to an iOS device. I am now using it during my commute in the mornings and afternoons and stream TV eps from my home server (MacBook) to my iPad over 3G using the iPhone hotspot feature. this is probably not the ideal connection method but it has worked surprisingly well under these circumstances.

This is probably a given but, I also use it almost daily as my HTPC directly connected to my HDTV and again - it has been the best experience I've ever had with a HTPC. The interface and media playback support are second to none and it still runs Full HD rips smooth on my admitedly older MacBook.

Very impressed with Plex every time I use it.

Plex is Easily worth the price IMO

 

[barryst]

I was interested in this as a replacement for my current boxee set up. but it looks like the media center (not server) is only available for mac. ah well.

I'm using air video right now, can anyone comment on any performance issues? If it's as good as air video but with scraped metadata, then it may be worth it for me to spend the 4.99 and just download the windows server software, and still use boxee for my big screen viewing on my plasma.

 

[d00by]

I disagree.

I have had an extremely bad experience using this app.

It does not connect to the server app on my Mac Mini2,1 most of the times. The Plex app on OSX incorrectly tags media files. The scannning seems to go on for an eternity.

Air video has given me ZERO problems.

 

[barryst]

yeah im having some issues running the server from my pc. it seems to not want to connect sometimes. it froze my macbook running the client app a few times.

air video is great although i wish it had the capability of scraping metadata like plex.

 

[Mac In School]

I just started testing it today, so I haven't completely made up my mind yet. So far, I like it, but not sure it's the best.

I love the fact that it uses meta data, but really wish it would have trusted the meta data I already had in place. The music genres, for example, are all over the place. In my iTunes library I have everything neatly categorized into 12-15 genres. Plex has everything spread across hundreds of them, making genre browsing completely worthless for my needs.

It also bugs me that it doesn't play DRM-protected content. I've been using StreamToMe. It plays my iTunes-purchased video content by pushing it out to Safari. Seems like a simple solution that many aren't implementing.

It loads the library pretty quick. MUCH quicker over wifi than iTunes Home Sharing does.

It still too slow loading over a 3G connection for my tastes. Then again, I'm comparing it to mSpot, which hosts your music on a server, rather than your local machine.

I think I'll use it for music when I'm in the house and on wifi. Probably won't use it much when I'm out.