Warning Tech Post with Apple focus. Don’t bother reading if you aren’t into Apple, Tech, and digital Media.
On September 1, 2010 Plex released an upgrade to their already powerful and flexible multimedia software. For the record it is definitely a beta, but it is a brilliant. It plays most media flawlessly, but its real power as a home theatre backbone is in the remote friendly interface that intelligently gathers metadata from the internet to organize your television and movies. It pulls, movies posters, cast and episode data, in some cases even theme music. This is without a doubt my favorite and most used piece of OS X software. The irony that Plex evolved from a program that had its start on the XBox, XMBC, is not lost me.
The real power of their latest release is decentralization. Meaning no matter what computer you are on (in network), you have access to your full library. Start a show in one room/computer pick it up on another. I am currently running the Plex server/player software on three computers. My macbook and two hackintoshes. For the record, Apple makes great hardware (well they don’t technically make it); I choice the hackintosh route to augment my home theater setup as I already had the hardware available. Also for the record, I have a license for each copy of OS X that is installed.
So I can start a show here, conveniently set up right in front of my treadmill.
Then finish it on the Plasma.
I can also watch it in any other room in my house that I have my Macbook, iPad or iPhone. Yes, Plex also released client software for IOS iPad and iPhone. It transcodes and streams your content to the iPhone or iPad beautifully. I had no problem sitting on my patio tonight and streaming a 720p video. With a little port forwarding, I could even stream over 3g, although at a greatly reduced video quality. 
While this isn’t something I would use often, you even have the option of using the app as a remote. Select the video you want then choose to either stream it to the IOS device or open on the server. Typically I would just use my remote, but if I couldn’t find it, it could be useful.
The Plex software for OS X is free/donation model, but they do charge for the iPhone/iPad app. Probably the best $5 I have spent in the App store. The video quality is beautiful, and it just works. I have used other video streaming software for IOS devices, but the integration into Plex, the access to metadata, and being able to just pick up were you left off on another computer/device…At $5 it’s a steal.
A I said, this is still Beta software, and it is not without it bugs, but after a few days of use I can honestly say it has been damn near flawless with one notable exception. Plex had to temporarily shut off the gathering of the metadata (Show Info, Posters, cast etc..) on TV shows. It currently uses TheTVDB.com to gather the information, and thoroughly hosed their servers. It is beta software and there were a huge number of users who upgraded, all scanning their full libraries all at once… From what I understand, Plex is setting up a cache to share the load, and that is expected to be online over the next day or so. I was lucky and managed to get most of my metadata before the lockout. And if you really want to reactivate the scanning before Plex officially turns it back on (I don’t recommend this unless you have a small number of shows), it is as simple as removing one line of code. I’m not going to tell you how, but google is your friend.
Update – The TVDB.com database issues seems to have been resolved. I have had no problems with meta-data.
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