Macworld Forums: Hands on with Plex, an alternative to Apple?s Front Row - Macworld Forums

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It's rare for an application to come along with so much promise, and also so many flaws. Plex could be a real game changer, but few Mac users will tolerate it's un-Maclike (or even PC like!) complexity with importing music and video or it's inability to update itself for new files in in assigned media locations. Plex in it's present form is extremely clumsy, but also absolutely beautiful and powerful. I'm really cheerleading for this application to get better, but I think it's premature for Macworld to promote it's abilities with very little mention of it's maddening pitfalls.

i just don't understand why it won't support 10.4? nowadays it seem that nearly all shareware or freeware programs they need at least 10.5 to run, i dont undertand why some other programs like a simple jpg viewer must need 10.5? while my photoshop cs1 have much more feature then these and can run on older operation system?

does apple force or pay programers to only write for the latest and newest os? since the new os only run on intel macs, that means old mac with g5 is no longer supported and force you to buy new mac.

It's especially hard to understand why it won't work with pre-Leopard operating systems since it seems to have very little relationship with the Mac OS in the first place. And that's probably the biggest criticism I have of toward Plex. In a perfect world, Plex would behave more like Front Row. But with the greatly added extensibility of Plex, it would be a monster app. It would have disgruntled cable and satellite subscribers cutting their ties and the providers running scared. Using Plex is like a peak into a much better entertainment future, but trying to use it will rain on your parade rather quickly.

haha, you can hear the streets of delhi in the background, nice soundtrack.
nifty video- i prefer plex to boxee

Okay, as someone who used XBMC on the Xbox and then graduated to OSXBMC, which became Plex, I can respond to a couple comments. The first is that there are actually Leopard specific software features that the developers use and they are pushing for HD playback, so Tiger / PPC hardware is gonna be too slow. The second is that the update feature is only a minor issue if you never turn your machine off. It will update when you start it and you can also update the library by holding the menu button down and selecting update library. Some folks have worked out python scripts to automate it, but in some ways it is better that it doesn't update automatically since it pulls a lot of cool stuff into a database and you might not like any sputters in your streaming Netflix or Hulu if you have a marginal connection... oh yeah, you can stream Netflix and Hulu via Plex. It really isn't clumsy at all; I find it fabulous... and it gets better all the time.
If you must use Tiger, you can always try its sibling, XBMC. They have a port for Tiger.

Forgot to mention that the library update is not an issue at all if you just decide to tap into iTunes for the library since it can do that as well.

Good advice on updating the libraries in Plex dailydisco. However, this points out the "not ready for prime time" nature of Plex currently. How many people would know this or have the patience to glean this info from a forum? Why couldn't Plex just automatically detect a change made to one of it's assigned media folders and ask you if you want to update it at that time? Then if you prefer to not to update it, you can do that. Just like Apple's Software Update. This is a function Mac users already understand. Just have one single "update all" function that can be easily located (such as OS X's use of the Apple Menu location) and do the whole darn thing when the time is right, or at a user defined time (such as 4 AM for example).

Also, the way "scrapers" are handled is unbelievably and needlessly complicated. The end results, like so many in Plex, are awesome. However, all the obscure (to most people) choices for where you want to get the information from every single time you add something is ridiculous. Give me the opportunity to set a default once and never ask me again.

Also, and this is something that may have been fixed since I finally gave up on it, Plex seemed to get indigestion whenever I tried to use it with anything iTunes or iPhoto had touched. Podcast playback/updating failures, photo playback crashes, refusal to allow the iTunes Movies folder to be recognized as a Plex media location, refusal to use album art that the cheap third party iPod video dock in my car can easily get right, etc..

I'm only cracking on Plex because it has SO MUCH potential and it is being promoted as the most amazing media center app to ever come along for Mac users. While it is amazing, I can only imagine thousands of Mac users staring at their HDTVs and scratching their heads in a state of absolute confusion. This app needs to get a lot less geeky and a lot more Maclike before I'd recommend it to the average, casual Mac user. And since this application is obviously designed to be used with a television and not a laboratory, a recording studio or a film editing suite, I think simplicity is imperative here.

In my review for Plex, I'd mentioned that "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."

Although this is true, I'd recently started noticing that Plex dropped a lot of frames while playing back 1080p 'MKV' files. I'd initially pegged the blame on my MacBook, assuming that it simply didn't have the required horsepower to playback such high quality media.

It turns out, however, that there is an easy fix for this problem. Launch Plex and navigate to 'Preferences > System > Cache' and increase the setting for "Video/Audio/DVD Cache - Harddisk" from 4096 kb to 7168 kb (which is the maximum Plex allows).

I just did that and even my 25GB rips are now working like a charm. Good luck.