Plex on iPad Impressive, but Imperfect

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Plex is a media center application for Mac based on XBMC. The latest version, called Plex/Nine for the Mac was released this week, and in addition to the desktop software there’s also a new iOS app. The mobile app promises to act as a remote control for your desktop as well as a way to watch your videos. Since all the organization is done on the Plex desktop software, the iOS app doesn’t have to do much other than stream content.

First, I ran the Plex/Nine software on a Mac Pro using a library of under 100GB. The Plex Media Manager, when first loaded, goes online to get metadata about your collection so you can find movies or TV shows by director, year, genre, and more. It took about an hour to grab all the data for the library.

While the desktop software for Plex is free, the Plex iPad app costs $4.99. The interface is very basic – there are no left and right panes here. There is just one list that lets you navigate your videos, music, and other plugins. You can connect to multiple Plex libraries – so if you have files on different machines, you can access them all via the Plex app. Read the rest of this entry »

2 thoughts on “Plex on iPad Impressive, but Imperfect”

  1. I’ve been playing with the desktop version of the new Plex, and believe it or not, it actually shows a lot of promise.

    (I’ve played with previous versions of desktop Plex and Boxee, and never felt that way before.)

    The metadata fetcher is pretty impressive, and their smart decision to make a standard OS X UI Media Manager is crucial to making this thing actually work.

    All that said, this is a bit of an alpha release. The Media Manager is still bare bones, more proof of concept than functional Media Manager. If they put some work into beefing up the Media Manager, I can imagine Plex replacing my current Mac Mini HTPC workflow, which I never imagined before…

  2. Visit http://www.filereflex.com allows you to access remotely your desktop or laptop computer from Windows Mobile 6.5. You can send and receive emails, surf web, edit documents in word processor, copy, cut, paste files or folders and do hundreds other things that you typically do sitting in front of your home or office computer.

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