


You sit on the couch, drink beer, and view your videos, photos, and play music.

Hopefully it’s illuminating.ĬrunchGear: What is Plex? How would you describe it to a total computer novice? Did you ever use XBMC/XBMP for the Xbox1?Įlan Feingold: Plex is a media center, which is to say it’s a program which gives you a “ten foot interface” for your media. With that, here’s my conversation with Elan. (You may even want to go further back and give credit to the developers of mplayer and FFmpeg, the two core, open source “engines” that powered Xbox Media Player from Day One.) Let’s give credit where credit is due, is all. In other words, every time you praise Boxee (or Plex, or any other XBMC-derived media center), keep in mind how it all started: a hobbyist project designed to play and organize videos, music, and photos on hacked Xboxes. As the project matured-and the project was in no way endorsed or supposed by Microsoft-it became XBMC, of which Plex (and Boxee and MediaPortal and Voddler, to name a few forks) is based upon. Xbox Media Player was first released in 2002, and was far and away the most feature-rich media center of its time. Plex is a media center that’s based on XBMC, which began its life as Xbox Media Player, a media center that ran on hacked Microsoft Xboxes. Needless to say, if you’re running Mac OS X, you ought to give it a shot. I recently talked to the lead developer, Elan Feingold, to get a better understand of what Plex is, what it does, and where it’s going. Plex, which is exclusive to Mac OS X, was Boxee before Boxee was cool. It’s not even the first XBMC fork to go out and make a name for itself. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV.
Plex app for mac os x free#
You can keep it behind the firewall and off the internet (may not work for a plex server unless you go local server only) or installing a free OS like Ubuntu that also supports Plex and is actually getting current security updates.Plex’s main menu, shown with the optional Aeon skinĪs far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. But you shouldn’t have to cough up money for a new OS on perfectly working machine if you don’t have too. The fact that XP is completely unsupported by Microsoft does pose a security threat though. While they ARE very different types of OSes, there is nothing INHERENTLY more secure about a MacOS. MacOS’s could be just as much as a security issue if the hackers felt it was worth their time to write malware for them (and they do, it’s just not as prevalent).
Plex app for mac os x Pc#
But Microsoft is only a security issue due to the fact it has a lion’s share of the personal PC market. In fact, using an older general purpose PC for a simple specific purpose (like media player) is a great way to breathe new life into an old system. That being said, you were probably just reacting to the criticisms of people flaming you for wanting to use an old machine (XP or an old MacOS).
Plex app for mac os x windows 10#
It job is not to bring ‘technology features’ (which as an OS it actually does)…it sounds like the ‘bloatware’ you complain about is what you want to see more of, more useful built in apps.īut as you said, running YouTube and your media player, etc is all the job a Windows 10 or XP computer SHOULD do. That’s because the job of an OS is to be an OS…it’s the interface between you, your hardware and your applications.
