MD Logo
Site Links
Home
MacDiscussion Forum
Search
Contact Us

Columns
Darkside Tales
MacLinux
Pierce Perspective
Powerful Simplicity
Tech Tips
Well-Tempered Mac
Features



Quick Search





New: Visit our new MacDiscussion Forums!

Features
By Mark Guertin

Review: Plex - A Fantastic Media Viewing App for OSX

As a Mac user I was duly impressed with FrontRow when I first saw it. 'This is the answer to all the times I've wished I could run my mac as a media center!' was my initial thought. Of course that was a couple of years ago and since then Apple has really not done much of anything to improve FrontRow. I still have numerous problems with it, some that I have had for a long time and have given up hope that Apple will see fit to fix them. FrontRow is also extremely limiting in that you can only play media with very specific codecs, and even more limiting wrappers -- namely you can only play files that iTunes is directly capable of playing. This is _extremely_ limiting in this day and age, not to mention the fact that Apple's idea of media wrappers are getting long in the tooth. Quicktime was amazing when it debuted, but it hasn't really made any leaps or bounds in a long while.

I'm a bit of a video geek -- Ok, actually I'm a LOT of a video geek, and things like codecs and wrappers really matter to me, especially when I'm going to commit a lot of time and energy converting most of my considerable video collection from optical media to hard drive based files. With the advent of fantastic open source wrappers like Matroska (.mkv) I really wanted to be able to take advantage of some of the benefits that they could offer, and that meant that FrontRow was out and I needed to find a replacement application for my Mac Mini's -- I have 2 of them setup as media center machines currently.

After much reading, downloading and testing of various options available for OSX in this arena I decided to go with Plex. Plex is a fork of the XBMC project (XBox Media Center) that is geared specifically towards use on OSX and as it's parent project did it handles most codecs and wrappers I've tested without issue. Plex integrates with iTunes and iPhoto in a similar way that FrontRow does (albeit a more limited way with iTunes) as well as giving you a Library mode that automatically collects the information about your videos -- thumbnails, titles, plots and cast. It tracks which videos that you have viewed as well as showing you ratings for the videos and a plot synopsis. All-in-all this application is a HUGE move up in the world from FrontRow.

For anyone out there looking to move up from the confines of FrontRow for your media center setup this application comes highly recommended. They have an active user community that are willing to help out newbies in getting things setup, they have a few great screencasts that walk you through the basics and a wiki with even more details to help you get your setup fine-tuned and ready to sit down with a big bowl of popcorn and enjoy.

Visit the Plex website to download: www.plexapp.com

Plex interface
Plex interface




 Discussions? --- Interact with the writers and other readers...   

Click Here to Discuss this article in our new MacDiscussion Forums



©1998-2009 MacDiscussion.com. All rights reserved. Opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of MacDiscussion.com

Visit our new MacDiscussion Forums! . . . . . MacDiscussion.com