Home media center

**mrzee** · 07-22-2012, 02:43 AM

If you have a home media center, feel free to share your experience. I'd like to share mine about Plex (Plex - A Complete Media Solution).

I've been using home media centers for about 10 years now - I've built a few of my own HTPC (Home Theater PC), used MythTV, AppleTV, Windows... but one day I found out about Plex. Let me tell you people, this is really something! Great software - easy to use, has a lot of features, and it's very stable. Plays every format I own and even DVD and Bluray directories. Hey, it even works with 3D movies. Plex automatically loads information for all known movies, so when I browse movies in Plex I see descriptions, reviews, ratings, actors, posters, etc. etc. for most of the movies/tvshows I have.

For my own videos it works just as great - when I add them into Plex, I just tag them with relevant information (title, date, description, posters, etc.), and later, I can show my home collection to my family and friends while seating on a couch in the leaving room. I used to use DVDs for that purpose and later YouTube, but having your own videos stored locally, nicely organized, tagged, and easily viewable in the leaving room - that a real win for me.

Btw, I run my Plex on a Mac-mini, but I think there are hardware devices available as well...

**Marc Peters** · 07-22-2012, 07:37 AM

I briefly flirted with plex, but as a fair proportion of my films are from iTunes, it wasn't a perfect solution. I use a mac mini as he server, with apple tv as the hardware "front end". It's not the most feature rich, but works well.

**mrzee** · 07-22-2012, 04:03 PM

This set up is good too. I used to have a similar one, with one difference - I had a Mac Pro as a server. I loved AppleTV's great user interface. AppleTV could also connect to streams/iPhoto/iTune libs from other computers on the home network. That's a good benefit. And most of all, it's so easy to use - you treat it like it's an appliance!

I was kinda happy with AppleTV for two years, but two factors essentially drew me away from it:
1) a must have support for other container types (mkv!!) and video formats (besides H.264);
2) true HD support (at the time AppleTV didn't support 1080).

For those of you who's not familiar with mkv - it's a new video container file format that supports multiple audio, video, and subtitle tracks. Very similar to what DVD format has to offer.

**lynch** · 08-01-2012, 10:14 AM

I recently bought the Apple TV 3G and I'm really happy with my decision! I buy a lot of TV shows on iTunes so it was the perfect choice for me.
I've actually never heard of Plex before...