Media management service Plex has announced that its Plex Media Player app is now free to everyone. Previously only available to Pass subscribers, the Plex app for Mac is a home theater-style media browser and player for content stored in personal media libraries.
Plex Media Player (which is distinct from the Plex Media Server client app) now features a fullscreen desktop interface where it integrates online files and metadata to present users' media, including artwork and, optionally, movie subtitles. In the latest update, the Player also allows users to queue up movies and music.
Maybe you pine for stuff like Plex Media Player’s silky smooth playback, complex subtitle rendering, and lightning fast seeking on your desktop. Maybe you have a lower-powered NAS server that doesn’t like to transcode. Or maybe you’d just like to rock out to some FLAC while you work. Until today, your only option was to find some place to stash a little baby Media Player window and muddle through the TV UI to queue up your background music of choice.
Well, no more: we’ve harnessed our incredibly powerful Web app and wrapped it up inside our lovely Plex Media Player shell to give you a full-fledged “desktop mode” experience right out of the box. With Plex Media Player running in a window, you can now use your mouse and keyboard as nature intended, and switching to the TV UI is as easy as going full-screen.
In addition to making Plex Media Player a free download, Plex also announced the long-awaited Plex for Kodi add-on. Kodi is a fully extensible, community driven software media center with wide support for playing a range of media content. Exclusively for Plex Pass members, the Plex add-on brings users' Plex-processed media libraries to the Kodi interface for the first time.
You can download Plex Media Player on this page by clicking the 'Get an app' button (third option).
Post updated for clarification.
Top Rated Comments
I switched to OpenPHT a few months ago and have been very happy with it since.
Plex Media Player is a different thing - a standalone media center app, as described above. You can download it from this page, by clicking on 'Download a Plex app': https://www.plex.tv/downloads/
Confusing, I know!
The lousy thing never worked right, so I deleted it. I followed the instructions at Plex as well as what was posted here in other Plex threads. A few months later, so many good reports were posted on how well Plex was working I decided to try it again. Surprisingly, it skipped the setup and went right to working as if I'd never deleted it. According to everyone I spoke with in various forums, I didn't miss a single file when I deleted everything. So where did that setup info get hidden?
So, we have a program that can't be completely deleted, that requires you to log in to a cloud service in order to use your own media on your own devices. Who really designed this thing? The NSA?
I deleted it all, again, and spent a lot of time scouring my system, and found a few hidden files which I also deleted. Then I installed Infuse from Firecore and was very pleased with it. It works brilliantly on my aTV4.
Plex Media Player - This is the official replacement for Plex Home Theater that was built from the ground up.
OpenPHT - This is the community supported fork of Plex Home Theater.
Plex add-on for Kodi - For those who want to use Kodi, Plex now has an official add-on that's available for Plex Pass members.