Plex has finally released their beta of “Plex Cloud” to all Plex Pass subscribers, and
I just couldn’t wait to jump in and try it out.
This is a great service for those who want to manage and stream their media libraries,
but not have to maintain terabytes of videos on their local devices.
You will need a great upload speed and a paid cloud subscription if you want to upload more
than a few movies, however.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun today taking a look at a new feature
in beta by Plex in one of our sponsored tutorials here.
“Plex Cloud” is different from the previous “Cloud Sync” - I know that can sound confusing.
Cloud Sync was for backup.
This new service allows you to utilize your cloud storage providers – currently Google
Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive – as Plex media servers to stream your content to any device
easily.
It works very well in my testing.
Since people will ask, I did want to note: Amazon Cloud Drive is not currently supported.
It was a big selling point of one of the earlier beta tests of Plex Cloud, but this apparently
violates Amazon Cloud’s rules and they were actually suspending accounts that used this
service, so Plex had to disable it for now.
Amazon really doesn’t like anyone doing anything but uploading to their ACD accounts
right now.
So you’d need a paid subscription to one of the other three services, or perhaps some
extra space allotments that come with new device purchases.
I have like 200GB free on Google Drive from the Chromebook I bought a while back.
Different smartphones come with Dropbox subscriptions, and if you buy Office 365 you get like 1TB
of OneDrive space.. there's opportunities out there.
To set up Plex Cloud, you need to be a Plex Pass subscriber.
If you aren’t one already, I have an affiliate link to sign up in the description below.
Gives a kickback to the channel and would mean a lot.
The same thing applies if you want to make a free Plex account or gift a Plex Pass to
someone else.
Log into Plex.
In the top-left corner of the screen where it shows your Plex server list, click the
server name and select Plex Cloud.
This will pop up some information about the beta test of the service.
Once ready, click “Let’s do this!”
Now you’ll be prompted to sign into one of the available cloud providers.
Log in and authorize Plex to access your folders.
Now you’ll need to set up new libraries for your different content types, just like
with normal Plex setup.
I added a Movies library, and then selected the “Movies” folder I created in my Dropbox.
Give it time to load the metadata and process the file, and then you can start streaming.
For the most part, playback has been as reliable as normal Plex servers – it might take an
extra few seconds to buffer, especially if you choose to transcode to a lower quality
than “Original,” but it works fairly well.
And if you have enough bandwidth, streaming the original file is very quick and maintains
the highest quality, obviously.
If you want to add multiple cloud services, head over to your Account settings by clicking
your avatar in the top-right-hand corner and go to “Plex Cloud”.
Here you can sign into accounts for the other services allowed by Plex.
Currently it does not appear you can add multiple accounts for the same service, but you can
load up on all 3.
I have done this.
An important step is to hit “Restart Plex Cloud” after you’ve signed into your other
accounts.
Otherwise when you go to add the new libraries, it won’t find the new accounts.
After it restarts, you can either add a new library for different kinds of media if you
have them separated across cloud drives, or simply edit your existing libraries to include
the folders on alternate services.
They all mix together cohesively as if they came from the same local server.
It’s pretty neat.
And that’s it!
Again, uploading an entire digital media library to a cloud service can take a long time, and
you will need enough space provided by the cloud service, but it’s very, very convenient.
I would love for Amazon to cooperate with Cloud Drive, given the unlimited storage and
all, but this probably pounds their servers and would result in unlimited becoming a little
more limited.
Hopefully we’ll see more services added in time.
Until then, this can save on power bills, too, by not needing a physical computer to
act as a server anymore!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Again, I have affiliate sign-up links for free Plex accounts, Plex Pass subscriptions,
and gifting Plex Pass to others.
This gives a small kickback to the channel and would mean a lot if you use those when
signing up.
I’m EposVox, subscribe for more videos like this, and I’ll see you next time.