How to organise all your media? Plex

WITH Plex, it can all be housed under one remote.

IS your collection of downloaded movies, TV series and music a dog’s breakfast?

Would you like to organise it?

Would you like to pour a yourself a drink, recline on the couch, pick up the remote and seamlessly switch between TV, streaming services like Foxtel Presto and Netflix, podcasts, and your collection of movies, home-shot videos, music and photos?

Then Plex could be your answer. It is an extremely useful, for the most part, free suite of software. It not only organises media, it offers a beautiful user interface to display it. But there are pitfalls and for this review, I’ve looked at different ways you can set it up.

The first step is organising your media on a home network with sharable folders for movies, TV series, music, and photos. One way is to buy a small network connected storage (NAS) box, link it to your home network and store media on that. Another is to create a media centre computer that houses movies, video and music on its hard drives, and link it to a TV with an HDMI cable. Alternatively, you could store your media on an existing home PC and share it from there. Each way has advantages and disadvantages.

My first test involved setting up an NAS box as a Plex server. I chose a 2-bay Netgear ReadyNAS 102, an entry-level device that costs from $279 although you’ll need to buy the hard drives separately. It comes with 70 installable apps including a Plex server app.

I tried different scenarios. I installed a mirroring Plex client app on a Windows 8.1 PC, an Android phone and used a Google Chromecast dongle that can receive Plex content. The NAS Plex server streams media to these clients which can also include Apple smartphones, Windows 8 Phone, and Xbox and Xbox One. A week ago Plex announced availability on PS3 & PS4.

Plex has apps for each of these devices and you fire the app up to peruse media and select what you want to stream. Media stored on Plex also can be accessed outside home and when I tested this the streaming quality was excellent.

What makes Plex compelling is the way it decorates and presents media. It works in the background downloading all types of metadata: titles and descriptions, movie and TV show banners and posters, and adorns the media catalogue with them.

Plex isn’t the first to do such cataloguing. For years, I used a fine piece of Danish developed software called My Movies which also trawled for movie and TV series metadata. But it needed more manual configuration. My Movies wasn’t available on as many platforms, it was designed primarily for Windows Media Centre.

The Plex client also can run on some Samsung smart TVs, Visio-P 4K TVs and Sony sets running Opera TV. Users can switch from watching TV to the Plex app with their remote.

In fact, you can stream to any TV that has an HDMI connection with Google’s Chromecast dongle. I selected media from the Plex app on an Android smartphone and directed it to Chromecast. I could even pause it from an Android smartwatch connected to said phone.

NAS boxes present one major problem — transcoding. The NAS box has to crunch video from one format to another before sending it to a TV or mobile. It depends on the file type. Files such as .mp4 don’t need it, and Plex uses what it calls “direct play” to stream .mkv, .avi and .wmv.

Direct Play worked when streaming from the NAS to a PC but not a smartphone. That needed transcoding and the Ready-NAS 102, with its 1.2 Gigahertz ARM processor, could not do it. Many NASs sport ARM and ATOM processors that are not powerful enough for transcoding. Some QNAP NAS boxes have more powerful Celeron processors and can transcode. Hopefully more manufacturers will eventually use faster processors in even cheaper entry level NAS boxes.

(See Plex NAS compatibility list.)

An alternative to an NAS is to install the Plex server on a computer — either a dedicated media centre or a computer that Plex will share other functionality with. You download Plex Media Server onto this device. It’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Free BSD systems. You can still use NAS storage to passively house your media, but here, the transcoding and serving is done on the computer. I found transcoding issues seemed to disappear when I configured Plex in this way.

As with the NAS configuration, you install a Plex client on devices you use for viewing. Even Apple TV can display Plex media, but the workaround to achieve may be complex for some users. Plex’s download page also offers a souped-up Home Theatre version of Plex for the big screen.

It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can wirelessly sync photos to Plex, create music and video playlists and there’s a subscription service to about 200 podcast channels which are shown in the Plex user interface.

Within the next few weeks, Plex will add new music upload features.

Plex says users will be able to import iTunes music, rating and playlists in one click.

A partnership with music database firm Gracenote means that Plex will identify a song’s metadata by analysing the track, the firm says.

A paid feature called Plex Pass lets you store auxiliary movie clips such as interviews and movie trailers. You can tell Plex which media you want when you are leaving home and it will automatically store it on a nominated devicebefore you go. You can also create a Plex server in the cloud and stream from that.

At the current Australian dollar rate, Plex Pass costs $6.44 monthly, $51.50 yearly and $194 for lifetime activation.

Plex was founded in 2009, is based in Los Gatos, California, and has about 60 employees. The company says it has more than 4 million registered households worldwide.

Price: Free. (Plex Pass costs extra)
Rating: 8.5/10