Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might have heard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.
Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.
This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.
I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.
Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.
There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.
The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)
13 Comments
WOW!!!!!!! I was looking for a multimedia hard drive, like Dvico Tvix or HTPC but this Media Center is awesome. After this I’m reconsidering to buy a mac mini with Plex.
But, is Plex a beta or final version? Can it play any video files that MacOSX do? How capable is a mac mini for playing HD movies and works smoothly? Can Plex browse local folders?
Thanks and excuse my bad english.
Plex is under development. It can play many video formats. A Mac Mini has no problems with 720p video. Browsing local or network folders is possible. You can get answers to all your questions at the forums: forums.plexapp.com
How did you add lastFM and the shoucast stations to your music?
To add a Last.FM source, first you have to enter your username and password in the Music setup menu. Then you have to create a new source as lastfm://. More info at http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=LastFM.
To add shoutcast stations, simply create a text file with the shoutcast link in it and save it as a .strm file.
How do you get all of your movies and music from your computer into Plex. I know its a stupid question but I can’t seem to figure it out that well. All I want to do is to get my music and movies from my iTunes into Plex.
@brettp There’s a couple options for this–Library Mode and File Mode. I suggest you hit http://forums.plexapp.com for in depth help. You also might wanna check out the XBMC wiki over at http://xbmc.org/wiki as Plex is based on XBMC.
I have recently heard of plex on Macbreak Weekly. I am at starting stages of installing a new home media center and found plex could be my best fit. I originally was going to install an Apple TV but now would really like to learn more on plex. Is there any system hardware and software requirements. Also does this need a xbox? Could I used a drobo at storage? Thanks for any info
May I ask you something Muzo? How do you get the music, movies and tv show fanart to show randomly in the main menu? :-/
Thanks in advance.
@David They aren’t really fanart. They are a bunch of wallpaper images i got from the aeon site and they sit in a local folder on my machine. you just use the system settings in plex to configure a background images folder for tv, movies and music. hope that helps.
Thanks for the reply. I figured out how to get it work on my AppleTV, but whenever I try to do the same on the MacBook, I get a black background instead. Are there any constraints regarding the image file format?
@David .bmp files work without a hitch.
OK, just for the record. There should not be any special characters in the path to those BMP files ;-)
Thanks for your assistance :-)
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