It’s difficult to find a video cataloguing and playback application that rivals the formidable pairing of iTunes and Front Row. But now there’s Plex, a media center for Mac OS X that’s capable of cataloguing and playing back every major video format out there, and it works admirably with the Apple Remote to boot.
Unlike iTunes, Plex doesn’t make a copy of your media files and pull them into its own organized hierarchy, opting instead to let you control the folder structure of your media. Once you have your movies and television shows organized and renamed by release dates for movies and seasons for television shows, all you have to do is point the application to the folders in question and it automatically pulls the relevant information about all your media from various online sources such as the Internet Movie Database, the Online TV Database, and MTV. Furthermore, it also automatically adds all the media files from your iTunes library to its own, allowing you to take advantage of iTunes’ superior music organization along with Plex’s strengths in the video department.
Once you have your media added to Plex, you can use either the Apple Remote or the cursor keys on your keyboard to navigate through the interface and play your music, movies, and television shows. The interface is beautifully designed and easy to use. The folks behind Plex have done a good job of hiding the complexity of the application behind the contextual menu (invoked by pressing and holding the Menu button on the Apple Remote for a second or two or hitting the ‘C’ key on the keyboard) and preventing it from spilling onto the main interface. If you want to do some things manually like editing the title of an item, marking it as watched or unwatched, scanning for new content, or adding an item to your favorites list, that contextual menu allows you to do it all and then some.
One other great aspect of Plex is its newfound extensibility and integration with online sources for free content. Recent versions of Plex include the App Store, a built-in library of free third-party plugins that allow Plex to download content from websites like Apple Trailers, Hulu, Joost, Netflix, Pitchfork, Vimeo, and YouTube, which is just a tiny sampling of the rapidly growing library that consists of hundreds of such plug-ins. Combine this burgeoning library of plug-ins with the incredible pace at which new features are added to Plex itself and you’re looking at an application that has something new to offer almost on a daily basis.
Plex has almost completely replaced the combination of Front Row, iTunes, Perian, and QuickTime Player for me. It’s not just a great cataloguing and media center application; it does a stellar job of playing back media files as well. Very high definition videos, in particular, play smoothly in Plex, although they don’t in any of the aforementioned Apple programs, even with the Perian codecs installed.
Plex is supported by an active community of developers and users, and new features are released on a weekly basis. Even with the abundance of features Plex already has, the developers assure me that there is much more to come—and I believe them.
As great as it is though, there are a few features I would like to see added to Plex. The first one is more manual control over the tagging of media. Although Plex’s automated scraping of online databases is very reliable and does a great job nine times out of ten, there is always that odd video that just refuses to be identified correctly and you’d much rather fill in the details for it yourself. Also, you might have a series of videos that you want to corral into the television shows section, but you cannot do so in the current version of Plex’s library.
One other feature that makes a lot of sense is a built-in theme browser (which may even be made a part of the App Store) that allows you to browse and download a variety of third-party themes for Plex and install them with a single click. As it currently stands, Plex’s default theme MediaStream is pretty much the only option for users. I would like to see this change and the Plex team’s emphasis on this area might bring about that change.
If you have an even moderately large media library and like the idea of having everything neatly catalogued and readily available at the press of a button, or if you simply like watching high-definition movies, then you should try Plex. To see Plex in action, watch the video below (visit the Macworld YouTube channel to see the Plex video demonstration in HD).
Plex 0.8.3 brings extensive Snow Leopard compatibility
If you want to use your Mac as a media center, there’s no better app for accomplishing that objective than Plex (). This modern media center application features a gorgeous interface, automated and intelligent metadata-fetching capabilities, support for a vast variety of formats, the ability to play full 1080p high definition videos smoothly, an extensible plug-in architecture, and a host of more advanced, powerful features.
As with many other applications, Apple’s release of Snow Leopard left Plex playing catch-up and though there has been an update or two over the past couple of months to improve compatibility with the latest big cat, Plex’s relationship with Snow Leopard has remained strained at best.
That's all over, however, because Plex 0.8.3 is out and it brings a whole bunch of important bug fixes to the table, putting the software right back where it was before Snow Leopard came prowling. The most important fix involves the installation of a Candelair driver for the Apple Remote that makes it once again work smoothly with Plex (without also triggering Front Row and controlling iTunes in the background).
And that isn’t all. The fine folks at Plex have finally put in a feature that addresses a longstanding complaint of Plex users around the world—myself included. It’s called dynamic range compression and it boosts the volume of downmixed 5.1 audio. To enable it, go to Preferences -> System -> Audio and change the Mixdown Volume Boost setting from Disabled to Normal.
You’ll also need to change the Digital Output Support setting to Force Digital and then disable the Dolby Digital (AC3) Capable Receiver and DTS Capable Receiver settings. Once all that is done, go back and play a movie with 5.1 channel audio. And turn down the volume, please.
The update weighs in at 104MB and is worth every iota of bandwidth you spend downloading it. And did I mention that Plex is a free application? Well, it is, so go ahead and give it a shot.
