Roger Fingas
Plex on Thursday announced the official launch of Plex Cloud, bringing the remote media access feature out of beta for people with a Plex Pass subscription.
The option creates a cloud-based Plex Media Server, avoiding the necessity of a constantly-running computer or network-attached storage, the company said. Users have to attach their own Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive account.
Movies, photos, TV shows, and music can be uploaded, but the size of an account will dictate how much storage is available. Files must also finish uploading before streaming can start, and OneDrive users are restricted to personal accounts.
Notably, Plex stripped out Amazon Drive support during the beta. Apple's own cloud storage service — iCloud Drive — is incompatible.
Plex Pass costs $4.99 per month, $39.99 per year, or $119.99 for a lifetime subscription. Some other perks include DVR functions for broadcast TV, offline caching on mobile devices, and expanded music playback features.
Plex clients are available for the iPhone and iPad as well as the Apple TV, and on Macs via the Web. The iOS app is a free download and runs on any device with iOS 9.3 or later, but some features are gated behind Plex Pass and/or a one-time purchase.
Some other supported platforms include Roku, Android, Chromecast, Xbox, PlayStation, and the Nvidia Shield.
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9 Comments
Recently l tried to use Plex. I found it disappointing. The software would not recognise my videos. There appears to be no easy to understand installation instructions on the Plex site. The option of running from NAS is only available if you have a NAS with fast powerful chip and the right operating system. Sadly it seems many NAS are not the right specification.
Maybe I'm an exception but I still use iTunes to manage my movies and TV shows. There are some great tools out there that import all your files into iTunes and then they are easily available on AppleTV and iOS devices. I use VideoDrive for the job: converts video tracks if necessary and adds descriptions and artwork along the way.
I do agree with the critics that iTunes 12 is quite counter-intuitive, but I hope that Apple will either fix it, or finally split it in multiple applications and still maintain compatibility with existing media libraries.
I've got a lifetime PlexPass membership. I use a Mac mini as my server and a NAS to store the files. Thus avoiding the NAS processor-is-too-weak-too-transcode-video-in-real-time problem. Red Fox makes a product that can rip Blu Ray content to disc, though it must be run on a Windows machine. After ripping, a Blu Ray folder can be run through MakeMKV to produce a file that can be dropped into the Plex library.
Its kinda technical, but worth the effort. I don't need a Blu Ray player at every tv in my home anymore. With an Apple TV and Plex App I have access to my full collection of movies.
Now, cloud storage? That is a tough sell. My full-size Blu Ray transfer collection is TBs in size. Prohibitively large to store in the cloud. I'm guessing I'm not the target market for this feature.