Windows/Mac: Plex is making a big change to its desktop strategy. The company is now replacing Plex Home Theatre with the new Plex Media Player. It looks pretty great, too.
The new app uses the same interface style that Plex has already been using on a ton of other platforms, so it should finally look consistent across most platforms. Previously, Plex on console game systems or the Roku looked wildly different from the Home Theatre app, but now they should look the same, which should make it easier to navigate.
It’s also being rebuilt to handle nearly every video format you could throw at it. Right now, Plex Media Player is only available to PlexPass subscribers, but it will be available broadly later on after an initial trial period.
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7 responses to “Plex Media Player Replaces Plex Home Theatre, Looks Awesome”
Used it last night to watch a show.
It froze the video for a second or two a few times.
Went back to home theater.
Might give it another go to see if it was my network being buggy.
ohhh… this will no doubt make anyone with N40L / N54L microservers even happier – far less likely to need any transcoding now!
So will it play .TS files? This was one of the main issues I’ve always had with Plex. That and ISO files.
I’ve got it on my Xbox and it stutters at the beginning of every HD vid.
I downloaded it last night for my Mac Mini in the bedroom and while it’s very pretty it actually seems less usable.
– You can’t see as many items on the screen at one time. Why, in the age of ever increasing TV sizes, do people feel the need to make every element BIGGER with each iteration. With PHT I could see the Posters/Covers for 18 TV Shows or movies on a single screen. With PMP I can see 4 and a bit.
– Page down doesn’t work on my Harmony remote any more meaning dozens more keypresses to scan through media by going down/across one line at a time.
– You have to drill through even MORE levels of “Recently added” and Recommended” and “Genre” etc to get to see your full library of a particular media now.
Home>TV Shows>Discover>Browse>Recommended/Recent>All
WHY???
– There’s no “Play from here” which I love in PHT. I can go to a season of Mythbusters and just set it to play. Can’t do that with PMP.
I know they are still adding features and it’s currently in Plexpass preview but none of the stuff above is mentioned in the dev plans…
I’ve been using Plex for a few years now and I love it and for us it’s been very reliable. I do tend to stay away from the bleeding edge for these kinds of reasons, they completely buggered the transcoder a few months back.
In the interim, have you updated your Plex Media Server application? New Plex clients often need the latest and greatest server version. to really shine.
Yes. me too. It took me a while to decide to make the switch from XBMC as I really liked the customisation available in XBMC but when I picked up an 8-bay Intel QNAP it became a no-brainer.
Overall I’m very happy with Plex but the main issue I have is that each time they do a major upgrade it is missing key components from the previous version and those components will be “Added back in in a future release” – but they never are…
Example: We have been waiting for them to add back the ability to “flatten” single season TV shows for several years and 1/2 dozen releases now.
It’s all well and good for it to be pretty and the streaming/transcoding capabilities are fantastic but if it takes longer to navigate to your content than it does to watch it then you have to question the organisational structure of the interface.
As for updates, yes, my server and clients are all running latest Plexpass update channel release.
Got Plex so I could stream stuff to my Chromecast. It’s handy but it’s automatically TV style cataloguing of things can screw up some info of things -mainly anime- either meaning I can’t watch them or can’t find them.
hopefully the new version fixes that a bit, as well as makes it easier to stream.
If not, will stick with the browser version.