The folks at Plex offer a series of media tools that let you stream your local media library your smartphone, tablet, laptop, or TV thanks to a series of apps for Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Roku, and other platforms.

But Plex has also long offered a media player that you can install on a PC to turn your computer into a home theater. Now Plex has completely rebuilt its home theater app from the ground up. And it’s not called Plex Home Theater anymore.

Meet Plex Media Player.

plex media player

The new app uses the open source mpv media playback engine. In fact, the primary contributor to mpv has been hired as a full-time Plex employee.

The playback engine can handle most popular video codecs and supports hardware-accelerated video playback on a wide range of devices, including the Raspberry Pi 2.

Plex also retooled the user interface by using a web-based UI rendered in Chromium 45, so that Plex Media Player has the same UI as the version available for smart TV products. The new UI is also available in Ultra HD resolutions (or 1080p on lower-power hardware like the Raspberry Pi 2) and improved support for H.265/HEVC videos.

That’s the good news. The less good news? Some features are still in development. There’s no support for search yet, for instance. But it is on the way.

At launched Plex Media Player will be available to Plex Pass subscribers, but after a preview period is over it will be available for free users as well.

Prefer the old Plex Home Theater? You can still use it, but the Plex team has no plans to continue developing new features (although bug fixes will be available for a while). Since Plex Home Theater is open source software though, there’s nothing stopping someone else from continuing development of the software.

via TechHive

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,546 other subscribers

5 replies on “Plex Media Player is a brand new home theater app from Plex”

  1. This article reads like Plex is something new. It isn’t. Plex is a fork of Kodi, which used to be XBMC. Plex has been around for more than six or so years if memory serves. There is a Kodi fork called OpenELEC that is (arguably) more popular than Plex. In-fact there is a downloadable OpenELEC plug-and-play image for the Raspberry-Pi devices.

    1. Not really, no. Plex isn’t something new, but this is just one of the apps in the Plex ecosystem. Plex started as a fork of XBMC/Kodi, and grew to be released for many devices. It has a Media Server application which transcodes and categories media in real time as it is added to its folders. For example, episodes of the Simpsons are ordered by Season and given metadata.
      If I have content on my NAS, network drive D:, I run Plex on D: and it becomes a DLNA server and a Plex server. I can now go on any device on my network with a Plex app (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, SmartTV, Xbox, Playstation) and watch my content on D: all categorized and streamed for me. Featured in the article is Plex Media Player, the Windows/HTPC version of the standard Plex client.

      Kodi is a media viewing application.
      Plex is a media server + media viewing application suite.
      OpenELEC is a Linux distro that serves as a simple, plug-and-play Kodi solution for many devices.

      There is a difference.

    2. One of the major points of this new release is that it no longer contains any XBMC/Kodi code. Your comparison is a little out of date.

    3. I think that’s the point of the post. PMP is the first release being rid of the xbmc code. The last piece of xbmc is gone

    4. OpenELEC is NOT a fork of Kodi. OpenELEC is a stripped down and optimized Linux OS that comes with Kodi, for a few different hardware platforms. It is not just for the Raspberry Pi, actually RPi image was created in later times, its original targets were x86 computers and Apple TV 1st gen etc. Its Kodi is exactly the same Kodi from Kodi, so it isn’t a fork. Plex is not a fork of Kodi. Plex was once a fork of XBMC, but it’s way before it was called Kodi, which is very recent. Plex is also a media transcoder and server, which XBMC and Kodi never was (transcoding), and barely as a “server” (more like a sharer w/ enabled network sharing). You knocked the article, yet you don’t even know stuff.

Comments are closed.