Decided to try Plex after many years and it’s finally arrived. Listening to direct play flac audio or watching my 2160p HDR/DV movies and shows transcoded to my phone and everyone in my family for 4000nt lifetime. Well worth it. And the interface for mobile apps or home on the PC or Shield is great and simple to navigate. Should have done it earlier.
I forgot to add that Plexamp is freaking awesome and worth the lifetime subscription itself.
Do you mean this is worthwhile because you can stream your movie collection? Because a quick look at the streaming library that they offer doesn’t look very compelling to me
You need to set up your own server with your own content.
Use FileBot to rename all your files.
I use Plex myself. Use it to stream to my computer, projector (which has Android TV on it), or phone when I’m at home. I use a kind of dated Raspberry Pi to run the Plex server, so it kind of sucks at transcoding on the fly, so I always have to stream everything at original quality, which sometimes causes lags. Also, when it’s doing its nightly cron jobs it’ll sometimes tweak out and never stop running. But despite my two issues, which are caused by my cheap setup probably, I also really enjoy it.
Plex is pretty good, yeah, I use it to host my own downloaded content and music and stream to my TV/iPad/iPhone. It’s pretty easy to setup although you may need a bit of technical knowledge. Usually you want to play at original quality anyways, unless you’re struggling for bandwidth.
You also need to… ahem… acquire your content from somewhere.
The only infuriating thing is they use an ISO-3166 library for building their apps and so any content you have from Taiwan will be “Taiwan, Province of China.” They don’t seem to care.
Lots of my content is high bitrate HDR/DV content that needs to be transcoded to properly tone map to SDR. On my phone I can’t tell a difference in quality after 720p/4mbps anyways since the screen is small and I’m not wearing my glasses.
At home, only original streams of course.
Is category error the right term for the logic in the title? It’s a bit like saying “Ditch spending money on groceries, get a great refrigerator instead.” OK, congratulations - but then where do you get the groceries from?
Netflix and Spotify are useful for getting access to content you don’t already have; Plex is great for accessing content you’ve already acquired. They do different things.
Not necessarily, but we’re not allowed to talk about that here.
Let’s just say I have a big garden with unlimited food.
This video explaining Plex was helpful for me
Can I use Plex or another platform software to privately stream videos that I make to a specific and limited audience, like family members or business partners. For example, I record a weekly meeting of extended family scattered around the world (mostly in the US) and I would like to make those meetings available to family members who cannot make it to all the meetings. Some of these relatives are not computer savvy, so asking them to install an app on their device and access my collection of meeting recordings would be ideal. Until recently, we were using unlisted YouTube links, but some have expressed concern that these videos can too easily be shared. Another example, say my company exports a product to licensees who are in different overseas markets, and we want to provide training and product videos in a secure and private channel. Again, unlisted YouTube videos or Vimeo links seemed to work perfectly for this, but some have cited privacy concerns.
Would a “platform” like Plex allow me to control access while still being easy for viewers to use? I envision setting up a NAS in my home network and making available the meeting recordings and training videos to different private audiences using Plex. Is this how it could work? Are there better/simpler/cheaper approaches?
Maybe not, but despite that, the existence of this thread is sotto voce suggesting jumping into the neighbor’s garden and pilfering their pigs and produce.
Or maybe loudly proclaiming the virtues of doing so, rather than sotto voce, actually.
Again, Plex is great - I use it myself, although for me the free tier is good enough. But Plex and Disney+ et al. are not providing the same service.
Yes. There is a home sharing section in the settings for exactly that, and you can require pin codes so that other people with access to your relatives devices still can’t watch the videos.
I’m growing very skeptical.
And…I’m out.
Lol, it’s simple and there are step by step guides everywhere.
