- Is Plex the last streaming app you're ever gonna need?
I mean, it's pretty great.
I've skimmed over Plex in the past when I've featured it
in some of my top 10 lists, which you should check out.
But today we're gonna do a deep dive
into this one app, Plex.
Now I've had a lot of requests to cover Plex
in the comments over the last few weeks.
I do read those by the way.
And now, you know what, I think this is a good time
since nothing else is happening
in the streaming world right now.
(car screeching)
(car crashing)
Right. Okay, but that's a topic better kept
to my Friday live streams where by the way
you can come and hang out, you get the news of the day.
We play some fun games, do Q and A's
and have a weekly giveaway as well.
So it makes sure you are subscribed
and tune in every Friday afternoon for those live streams.
But for now Plex, let's dive in.
(upbeat music swells)
All right. First question to answer here,
what is Plex?
If you are brand new to this thing
let me kind of explain what it is.
The best thing I can think of is,
if you were to combine Tubi and Pluto TV
and your own library of content, you would have Plex.
So wait, what does that mean?
Well, okay.
Tubi and Pluto, if you're unfamiliar with those
those are kind of free versions of things that you may have
or have had in the past.
So Tubi is kind of a free commercial supported version
of Netflix.
Pluto TV is kind of a cable or satellite imitator
with live TV.
Again, it's free but it's commercial supported,
et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, you kind of smashed those things together
so you get one part live TV, one part on demand
movies and shows, and one part your own stuff.
And on top of that, it's all free.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, you can decide to go premium
but still all that stuff for free.
Pretty nice.
So how do you use Plex?
Well, let's go ahead and take a tour of the interface.
All right. So buckle in.
We're gonna spend a few minutes here in Plex
and I'm gonna show you around exactly what it is.
You start here on the home screen.
Now we're gonna come back
to the home screen because I really quite like it
but I will just say,
all right this is where you're gonna spend
most of your time once you get it set up.
The next tab is movies, and this is your movies.
All right. So right here, we should stop
and talk about how you add your stuff to Plex.
So let's have a little tutorial.
How do you add your own movies, your own music,
and photos to Plex?
Well, essentially what you need is you need some movies,
some shows, some music on a drive connected
to your PC probably.
Once you've got that drive set up
you simply add stuff to it.
So I told Plex when I want to add some movies
I want you to look in this specific folder.
And then I started adding things to it.
I've only added a few things for now
but I went and grabbed a Blu-ray off my shelf,
rip that blue Ray onto my hard drive on my computer
and put it in that folder
and grabbed a couple of other things,
some old videos that I made for this channel,
an interview that I did with Jim butcher some time ago
for a different channel and put them all in the folder.
Then when I have it scanned that folder
it pulls all of that stuff into my library.
Then when I go into my Plex app on my Roku or my Fire TV
or my Android phone or whatever,
I'm gonna be able to pull those assets
and watch them on demand
just like I would on any other streaming service.
So this is a great way if you have your own library of stuff
to kind of get around this problem that we have
where streaming services are constantly adding
and removing shows, and it gets very annoying after a while
you never know when something's gonna come or go,
well this would put a stop to that
if you have the physical media yourself.
And in fact you can share your media folders
across other users as well.
So you can give somebody access to your server.
Your PC would need to be turned on for them to access it,
but they can do it.
Now you do run into some legal issues there.
So be careful that you don't cross any lines
but if you have photos or home videos or whatever
stuff that you wanna share from one person to another,
Plex is a good way to do that.
Now, moving on through the interface,
you'll see right under movies that says music,
and then there's photos.
This is essentially the same thing.
These are your music, your photos,
and it's pulling them from your server.
So yeah, pretty great.
You can put your own stuff so that you can watch it
essentially wherever you want, right?
But that's not all Plex does more than that.
They've got live TV like I said,
kind of like Pluto TV, where they've got all these channels
that you can scroll through.
In fact, I counted 162 channels on Plex, not bad.
Now I'm not saying that these are all channels
that you're gonna wanna watch.
Obviously, that was true with cable and satellite as well.
But there is plenty of stuff on there.
In fact, I really liked this live TV guide
because as I was counting the channels,
yes I counted every single channel,
as I was counting them I went past several things
that almost had me stop in my tracks
and click on it and watch
'cause I was interested in it.
And hey, that's a great sign.
They do have stuff on here that's worth watching.
And then we moved back over to our navigation bar
right under live TV, you'll see movies and shows on Plex.
And that is essentially the Tubi version
that I was talking about.
Okay. So there's a million of these Tubi, Crackle, whatever.
Anyway, point being, this is a little bit like scrolling
through a commercial, supported Netflix.
Tons of titles for you to choose from.
And I do like that they have it sorted
in a few different ways.
So you can go to the browse page and look at stuff
that they are recommending for you.
You can go to the channels page
so you can see by studio or by provider
which thing you might be interested in watching.
Or you can go and browse by genre
and find something that you might be interested in watching.
As we keep moving down the list, here we go to web shows
that's exactly what it sounds like.
This is stuff that they're pulling from online.
A lot of YouTube style content on this web shows queue here.
So you can add this to your own personal queue
and get a list of web shows if you want to.
And then when we go back over
you'll see there's a spot for podcasts.
That's pretty self-explanatory.
You can search a ton of podcasts.
I looked for a bunch found a couple of my own,
which is great, but I also found
that there were some shows that did not show up
in the Plex library here.
So you may or may not be able to find the podcasts
that you prefer but they do seem to have a lot
of the bigger stuff on there.
Now the music tab is a little bit frustrating
for somebody like me simply because I don't use Tidal.
I use Spotify.
And so because of that, I wasn't interested in signing up
for Tidal I have no intention of doing so.
So the music tab wasn't very effective for me.
But if you are a Tidal user
then you will find it obviously very attractive.
So there you go.
That's your basic run through of what Plex looks like,
how you navigate it, how you put stuff onto it.
Now, what do I like about Plex?
There's a ton.
Honestly, there's a ton to like.
One of the things that I really, really, like.
I said we were gonna come back to the homepage
and let's do that now.
If we go to the homepage, one of the things I love
is that they put your content front and center,
even though they carry some good titles themselves,
in their movies and TV or in their own live TV sections,
they put your stuff first
which is exactly what you would want.
I would assume.
So when you go to that homepage
the first thing you're greeted with
is the continue watching tab.
Some services tend to bury that under their own suggestions
sometimes which gets really frustrating.
Flex doesn't do that.
Again, they put your stuff up there
so continue watching whether it's stuff from your own server
or stuff from their libraries
you can continue watching from there.
I also mentioned how many live TV channels there are
and how much good content on-demand content there is.
This is not the same as going to Netflix or HBO Max
with their suite suite $15 a month library,
something like that.
But for something that you're not paying for,
it's pretty dang sweet.
And honestly, that's the only thing I could come up with
as far as what steers me away from Plex
is if you're looking for premium content, it's not here
unless you're loading it into your own server.
This is not a replacement for Netflix.
It's not a replacement for Disney+ or HBO Max.
It's not gonna have some of those super compelling titles.
But other than that, like I said,
there's not really a ton to complain about
especially because it's free.
But that brings me to another thing
that we should talk about.
There is a premium version of Plex.
Should you get it? Is it worth it?
Well, who would pay for this is five bucks a month
or 40 bucks a year or $120 for a lifetime membership
for Plex.
And what does that get you?
Well, it gets you an offline downloads on mobile.
So you can watch your stuff on the go
when you're not connected to WiFi,
it gets you data usage statistics,
if you have a lot of people using your server
then you can see who is doing the most
and who's doing what with it.
You get a live TV DVR.
So if you have an antenna that you have up in your window
you're getting live TV stations through that,
you can actually DVR that on your Plex server.
That's pretty sweet, right? That's not a bad deal.
And then they have something called web hooks.
This is an automation system
and this is gonna be pretty advanced.
But if you sign up for this
you can use web hooks to integrate with your,
I don't wanna say her name,
your echo device or your Google device,
or what have you so you can do some cool automations
like when I start playback on Plex then it'll dim the lights
in my room or something,
you'd have to have a pretty advanced setup to do that.
But if you have it, hey, it's pretty sweet.
The last thing that they list here
is some extra music improvements,
sound leveling and cross fading that sort of thing
that you can do with music.
Again, if you're a Tidal user that's gonna be attractive
if you're not then maybe not so much.
So when it comes to the premium stuff, in my opinion
if you're intrigued by Plex after this video
here's what I would say.
I'd say, go give it a shot first.
If after a few months you find yourself using it a ton
then go for the premium version.
Hey, not bad, right?
Five bucks a month for all those features pretty good.
But the free version is already pretty sweet, right?
So the final word here is, yeah, I kinda love Plex
and I'm grateful for you guys
for going into the comments and letting me know
that this was something that I needed to do a deep dive on.
I appreciate that.
The only word of caution that I would provide here
is that this is it's an app
that's approaching power user status, okay?
It is actually great if you use none of the, my library
sinking your own server and all that,
they still have some good stuff that makes it recommendable
in the live TV and in the on-demand sections
there's still enough there to recommend it.
But if you wanna really take advantage of Plex
using that home server,
getting your own library into Plex,
then it does come with a bit of a learning curve.
So just be aware of that going in.
If you are very technologically savvy
you probably won't have any problems with it.
If you are technologically challenged
I'm halfway there, right?
It took me a little while to get things going.
I still need to go and stitch all the chapters together
from that one Blue-ray that I ripped
and put in the library, but I'll do that later.
Anyway, point being
if you're a little technologically challenged
it might just take you a little while to get it set up.
Once you do have it set up,
once you get the hang of it, it is awesome.
So fully recommended.
I really, really liked Plex and I think you will too.
So there you have it.
Let me know in the comments below,
if you agree with my assessment,
if there's anything I left out that you think is important
for people to know.
And yeah, don't forget on your way down there to like,
and subscribe.
If you enjoy videos like this, I appreciate you coming by
and I will see you on the next video.