Plex Cloud out of beta, use cloud storage services to stream movies
I haven’t covered Plex at all, which is odd as I think it’s one of the greatest apps/servers/programs out there for the digital world, and now it’s gotten significantly better.
For those who are not familiar with Plex, you generally have a Plex server which has and gets your content, it does whatever is required to make it work with whatever device you’re trying to get the content to. I want to play a TV show on my Roku downstairs, bam it works. I want to cast a movie to my Chromecast? Huzzah, it’s there. I want to finish watching my movie I fell asleep during on my lunch break on my phone? Bam it’s done.
It also has DVR and streaming channel functionality, but I’m not going into that.
More than just a media player, the server organizes the content, pulls cover art, ratings, movie/tv show descriptions, can play the theme music in the background, keeps up with where you’re at in a TV series by placing things on deck, and generally is amazing.
Device it’s sending to doesn’t have enough bandwidth to handle that high quality stream of data? Transcode time.
It’s been great, but until now it’s meant that you had to have your content stored on a computer you manage that’s switched on and running in order to access it. Annoying because sometimes you don’t want to leave a computer running all the time due to storms, bad understanding of how much electricity it’s actually using, good understanding of how much juice it’s using, planning on being gone for vacation, etc.
Plex Cloud is also not subjected to your computer’s crappy OS, power outages at your house, ISP going down, etc.
Plex Cloud is their new offering that integrates with the server and simply moves your content somewhere to the internet. If you’ve got Google Drive space, you’ve got a 24/7/365 server. Go a Dropbox account? Drop everything and catch up with some of your shows. Got some Onedrive space? Well, yeah… I can’t think of something catchy to say here.
And the great thing is you don’t have to abandon your home server. You just have a new cloud based option on your servers menu that allows you to select what you chose to store there. For most it’ll be as simple as dragging the folder containing what you want constantly available to your Google Drive movies folder or some such and just let the cloud drive do the sync.
Getting on a plane in a few? Just use WiFi or LTE to sync that series to your phone or tablet.
For playing and organizing and usefulness with your content Plex rules the field now.
You’ll need a Plex pass in order to utilize the cloud service. You can get one in monthly, yearly, or lifetime options. I personally suggest lifetime.
[Plex blog]
