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| Plex Media Server |
Experience your media on a visually stunning, easy to use interface on your computer or Home Theater PC.
Home media servers are no longer restricted to locally
connected systems, which almost always required a computer. Plex Media Server
gives you the freedom to access all your media on different devices
irrespective of your location. The free media server turns your home PC into a
versatile streaming media center that rivals premium services.
The client side supports a wide variety of devices and
systems, and the development community is quite active. Users should therefore
expect support for even more devices and services.
Using Plex Media Server
When we installed and lauched Plex Media Server, it asked us
to specify the folders we wanted it to index and share. The program recognized
our music and video titles, including their respective details like cast, cover
art and rating. It can also add synopses of the titles gleaned online. We could
change between generic folders containing text file names and a database
showing library information and imagery without typing anything.
It is an in-browser extension that plugs into Plex website
to give users access to their respective content. When we launched the server,
it took us to Plex homepage where we could manage our content. We could manage
our own videos or add channels to view online videos.
The server allowed us to organize our media in different
ways. We could save TV shows and movies we had not completed into a special
folder and keep new media files into another special folder. This made it easy
for us to find the content we wanted. The Activity tab allowed us to check our
past activities.
The devices you use to access your media do not need special
codecs because Plex Media Server transcodes both video and audio automatically
and in real time. You can use the media server on a variety of devices,
including iOS, Android and Roku boxes, all of which deliver descent video and
audio quality. Users add Plex to Roku as a channel that connects to their
servers. We managed to stream some videos in 1080p HD. However, transcoding is
a resource-hogging process that requires a dual-core system.
Features:
- Support for many devices and systems
- Slick interface across all platforms
- Support for almost all media file formats
- Easy to search and browse files
System requirement:
- Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (32-Bit/64-Bit)
