Why I love Plex, and where it could improve

Fri 24 Jun 2016, 18:56

Today Plex released version 1.0.0.2261, the first 1.0, of their Server application, and I thought I would celebrate them.

The reasons I use Plex instead of say, Kodi, are very simple:

• Only one place I need to manage metadata

  • If I setup another device to view media on, say another phone, Raspberry Pi, Apple TV, all I do is sign into my Plex account. I don't need to pick Media folders on each player and select media agent.

  • If I want to manually change the title or artwork of something I only need to do it once. I don't need to do it on every player.

• I can listen/watch pretty much anywhere

  • I can watch my content on my phone, iPad, Raspberry Pi, PS4, web browser, web browser on second computer. Everything syncs with the server so I can continue playing where I left.

  • My local mp3 library is available everywhere. I recently switched to a Plex (Pass) music library, and it's been working great. Last.fm scrobbling and all. Last.fm is set up on my Plex account so I don't need to sign into Last.fm on all my playback devices.

  • If there is a power out, I have offline synced a lot of TV shows to my iPad so I can watch there while the TV has no power. When power is back and my Mac Mini Plex Server is back on, what I watched offline will be synced.

• I can share my content with friends and family

  • I can manage who gets what

  • My friend or family can be anywhere in the world, and it's securely transmitted

I'm not saying Plex is perfect though. There are some areas where I think it could improve:

• Kodi has a better Raspberry Pi client

  • Plex Media Player has potential but so far it has been very buggy for me.

• Kodi has more and better plugins

  • Trakt.tv is semi-flaky on Plex, while on Kodi it's usually rock solid and tells you what it is doing (this is more up to the Trakt.tv plugin developers though)

• Kodi has better automatic subtitles via OpenSubtitles integration

  • To be fair though I don't trust automatic subtitles anyway, but it is a nice feature to have sometimes.

• Plex doesn't handle re-watching TV shows that good

  • If I want to get "watched markers" reset, I have to mark the show as unseen...

  • ...but then that also makes trakt.tv consider it unseen

• Plex doesn't have a dedicated music player app for any platform

  • I would love to have a dedicated music app for it on my phone so when I start it I immediately get to my music, and don't have to pick my Music library instead of Movie library

  • I would also like a native music player app on Windows and OS X, running your music in a web browser window is not great

• Plex on PS3 can't use a server which requires HTTPS, which is really weird

  • I enforce HTTPS on my server so no one can use a PS3 to access my Plex shares

These downsides are relatively minor though. It's really the first upside I mentioned, the one place to manage metadata, which is the biggest deal for me. It is so much more convenient for me, as I constantly reset and set up new devices back and forth.