Description
Plex organizes all of your video, music, TV, and photo collections, and streams them to all of your screens. With the free Plex Media Server on your home computer and Plex for iOS, you can watch and listen to all of your personal media on your iOS device and share it with friends and family. Enjoy unlimited use of free features of this app, and unlock its full functionality with a Plex Pass subscription -OR- a small one-time in-app purchase (see below).
Here are some ways that Plex makes your media experience awesome:
• Makes your media beautiful with artwork, descriptions, and more
• Automatically converts your media on-the-fly to play on any device
• Makes sharing your media with friends and family simple and easy
• Lets you browse, fling, and control your media on most Plex apps
• Gives you access to a wide range of online channels such as TED Talks, Revision3, and TWiT
• Enables you to queue online videos from sites like Vimeo and YouTube and then Watch Later on any device
FREE FUNCTIONALITY:
• Unlimited casting of photos and videos from the Camera Roll on your phone or tablet to all of your screens (such as your computer, smartphone, tablet, streaming devices, game consoles, smart TVs, and more!)
• Unlimited casting of any media on your Plex Media Server to all of your screens
• Remote control of your big screen Plex Apps
LIMITATION: Playing media from your Plex Media Server on the device running this app is limited (one minute for music and video, watermark on photos) until the app is unlocked
UNLOCK FULL FUNCTIONALITY:
You can remove the playback limitations on the app in several ways:
• Use a Plex Pass enabled account to sign into the app -OR-
• Sign up for a monthly Plex Pass subscription in the iOS app -OR-
• Make a small, one-time, in-app purchase of just the iOS app itself
NOTE: If you've already purchased the app or have a Plex Pass, you do NOT need to purchase again!
Other features include*:
• Accessibility: Connect to your Plex Media Server wherever you are, whenever you want
• Plex Home: Use customized, managed accounts, and restrict content those users can access
• Camera Upload: Automatically upload your photos from your device to your Plex Media Server
• Mobile Sync: Sync media to your phone or tablet for offline viewing
• Security: Enjoy your media away from home, knowing connection is securely encrypted
• Plex Mix: Kick off a playlist of similar and related tracks from your collection at any time
• Rotten Tomatoes: See how your movie collection ranks with ratings from Rotten Tomatoes
• Related Movies and TV shows: Easily find similar movies based on selections in your library
• Top Movies: View top movies by genre, director, and actor
• Movie Extras and Music Videos: Access trailers, extras, and music videos from your libraries
• Mini Player: Continuous viewing and control over what's playing while browsing the app
• Multi-disc support: Listen to multi-disc music albums the way they were meant to be
*Please note, some features are only available to Plex Pass subscribers.
With Plex, your media universe is constantly expanding. Getting up and running is easy, so start now!
NOTE: PLEX FOR IOS REQUIRES IOS 8.1+; YOU MUST HAVE A PLEX MEDIA SERVER (AVAILABLE FOR FREE AT http://plex.tv/downloads/) INSTALLED AND RUNNING TO STREAM LOCAL MEDIA. VERSION 0.9.12.5 OR HIGHER IS REQUIRED. DRM-protected content (such as video from the iTunes store), ISO disc images, and VIDEO_TS folders are not supported.
What's New in Version 4.0.9
NEW:
- Many types of subtitles are now converted into a format that can be displayed by the app instead of burning them into the video stream, which can greatly improve server performance. This feature requires Plex Media Server 0.9.14.5 or above (currently in Plex Pass preview).
- The subtitle size setting is now applied to Direct Play content.
- Long song titles in the audio player will now scroll instead of being truncated.
FIXED:
- The resolution of chapter thumbnail images has been improved.
- The app now resizes correctly to respect double-height status bars (e.g. when on a call, tethering or using a navigation app).
- Crash on network error during music playback.
- A PIN-protected user in a Plex Home wouldn't require PIN to be entered when foregrounding the app if the admin of the Home was the last active user.
- Manually configured IP addresses can now be correctly entered when your locale uses a comma as the decimal separator.
- Fixed a situation where audio tracks started paused
- Fixed a crash when editing sync items initiated from Plex/Web
- "Automatically Sign In" setting was unavailable for managed users.
- Star ratings for TV shows weren't displayed correctly.
- Video no longer pauses when opening settings during remote playback.
- Media flags weren't being displayed under certain circumstances.
- Fixed issues preventing connections to iOS devices from Plex Web.
- Monthly subscriptions from inside the app didn't enable Plex Pass for some users.
Customer Reviews
Excellent server and apps
Plex is the best server and player we have found. It just works and it works very well! Over local net, offsite wifi, or cellular it works wonderfully. The ability to specify bit rate to save on cell data transfer is absolutely wonderful - this is a huge plus for Me with Plex. An annoyance is that I have found the PS3 application doesn't readily manage ACC 5.1 sound correctly; I have tried settings on the PS3, but still have issues. Removing links to files that have themselves been removed from the server seems to be improved. A suggestion for the live transcoder would be to come up with a way to manage jittery video files with an image tracking/smoothing algorithm; this would be way above and beyond, but there are times when encoders don't resolve the video images as smoothly as they could even with the right frame rates and high bit rates. BUT, I do have to say that nothing comes close to Plex!!! I am a lifetime Plexpass holder and was glad to pay the cost; the Apple TV app is great - no issues with AAC 5.1 sound on that app or device whatsoever, and the overall service is wonderful. As a user of a 9.1 system, it would be nice if the plex technology could use the current bluray 7.1 sound capabilities through the service, but I realize a lot of "stuff" likely needs to catch up for that to happen.
Solid, but still a lot of low hanging fruit
A lot more reliable than the previous Plex for iOS app but still has a lot of confusing design choices.
Instead of waisting my time breaking down all the problem areas I will just say this: Never get attached to anything to the point where you're blinded by that attachment and unable to solve for actual real problems.
Your design made sense when this new version launched, but it focused heavily on discovery instead of browse and you clearly heard from many users who preferred a browse-based navigation. So you bolted browse mode on and in the process broke a lot of the conventions your initial design setup. You should have gone back to the drawing board and rethought about the experience of using the app for the first time for an average user. Because at this point what you have is coming dangerously close to the out of box experience of using the current shipping version of iTunes.
OK but frustratingly lacks basic features
This is, so far, the best app I’ve found for streaming media from my NAS, having seen that last day or so trying various applications. However, there are a few glaring, obvious, functionality issues.
In music there is no gapless playback. This makes listening to live recordings or classical a poor experience. The filtering in Music is also fairly useless. For example, when viewing by artists, the only filters are genre, country, collection. you cannot filter by artists, which wouldn’t be a big deal if the index on the right side worked, which is doesn’t. It works on the iPad, sometimes, but not on my 5s. I suspect it’s too far into the margin on the right and it just doesn’t work. Maybe it works on the 6+. When you have 500+ artists this is a problem.
My primary use is for streaming music from my NAS, and I cannot recommend this app for that.
- Free
- Category: Entertainment
- Updated: Dec 17, 2015
- Version: 4.0.9
- Size: 48.2 MB
- Languages: English, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese
- Seller: Plex Inc.
- © 2015 Plex, Inc.
Compatibility: Requires iOS 8.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Top In-App Purchases
- iOS App Activation (enable streaming playback on iOS devices)$4.99
- Monthly Plex Pass$4.99