1 When I picked up an Amazon Fire TV last year, support for Plex was the number one reason my Apple TV ended up relegated to second-best. For a long time, I watched via a Mac mini hooked up to my HDTV, but the interface was often cumbersome, requiring the use of an iOS app to navigate the front-end on the Mac. I’ve been using the Plex server for years now. Honestly, it’s more or less a wholesale replacement for the media library features of iTunes. You can also build playlists, search, and quickly filter for certain types of content. On the server, Plex catalogs and organizes your content, pulling down metadata where appropriate. If you’re not familiar with Plex, it’s a combination of software and service that lets you stream media from a server-generally your Mac, PC, or Network Attached Storage box-to a client device, including your iPhone, iPad, another Mac or PC, or some set-top boxes like the Fire TV. But the app that I’ve been waiting for perhaps longer than any other may actually be the best of the bunch, and that’s Plex. So far a lot of the Apple TV apps I’ve installed have been underwhelming: many of them are warmed-over versions of iOS apps or suitable only for bare-bones streaming. You can find the universal iOS/Apple TV Plex app right over here.Note: This story has not been updated for several years. Today, however, Plex on AppleTV goes legit, and it’s free to download. And it wasn’t official Plex, but a third party rebuild (and, its worth noting, both of the main developers on that build now work for Plex). That’s possible! Plex was available on Apple TV before today - you just had to hack the heck out of the Apple TV to make it work. “My friend had an old Apple TV, and it was running Plex!” Bring up a Plex client on your phone, Chromecast, or now your AppleTV, tap the video you want to play, and bam - it streams it from your PC to your device, transcoding it into a device-friendly format on the fly. Wondering what the heck Plex is? The short answer: you run a Plex server on your PC, and load it up with video and music files in just about any format - from your standard DiVX/XVid file to a big ol’ high res MKV. Plex, the much adored app for streaming totally-legit-and-not-at-all-bootlegged-cough-cough content from your PC to your other gadgets, has just hit the new Apple TV.

Plex media server apple tv