Plex’s Major iOS Update Makes It A Complete Media Solution
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Popular Mac and PC Media Center application, Plex, has released a major update to its iOS application that makes the cross-platform media center a great download for your iOS devices.
Make sure you check out Plex because the application is a great way to stream your media files, search your devices and online media storage, find movie collections, and enjoy it all on your iPad, iPhone or iPod devices.
In case you’re not familiar with Plex, it’s a media center application that allows you to use your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to browse and play your media (video, photos and music) using the Plex Media Server installed on your Mac or PC. You can also view online media from a variety of sources, and if you have iTunes, iPhoto, or Aperture installed you can also stream the content to your mobile devices. In addition, the Plex app can also work as a full-featured remote for the Plex Media Center application and support a variety of codecs.
The desktop application allows you to play your media files locally on your computer without using a mobile client. You can customize your themes, connect to online streaming services from Vimeo, Youtube, BBC, CNN, Hulu, Apple and many more.
The new iOS Plex update brings major feature additions that will make your media experience quite good.
- An improved look and feel with enhancements for the iPad: The developer has added some beautiful grid views. The Remote interface has been updated on the iPad with the addition of new buttons, and landscape support.
- Local image caching for faster browsing: In the previous version of Plex, some folks complained about not been able to browse and search for web content quickly enough. The new update has added local image caching which has certainly helped with faster browsing, especially over a 3G connection.
- TV Out support: Now you can watch all your media on the big screen. The application also supports subtitle and audio stream selection with support for SSA, SRT, and SMI subtitles.
- AirPlay integration: The developer has implemented an experimental version on the new update. You can activate the experimental AirPlay integration via the Preferences setting to stream everything to your Apple TV or AirPlay-compatible speaker. However, keep in mind the feature has some issues when resuming videos over AirPlay. We hope the developer provides a fix quickly.
- Direct Streaming and Direct Play support: With the new update there is no doubt that your media files play much faster and look better. The main reason for that is that Plex revamped their transcoding tecniques. The Direct Streaming feature includes an improved H.264 algorithm that makes images look way better on the iPad, iPhone and other mobile devices. The Direct Play support ensures that you can play video files without requiring any actual conversion.
- Unified channels view for plug-in management and Universal search: These features allow you to find media across all your media servers and on the Internet. The developer leverages VideoSurf to allow you to search for content on your servers and online. For example, when you do a content search, Plex will display results for videos and music from your local servers, and from online services like Vimeo and Youtube.
- Other features allow you to do multiple things: like using the Headphone button to play/pause, and the photo browser displays thumbnails instead of default images.
There is no doubt that Plex is a powerful media center and mobile application for your iOS devices. The application will allow you to experience your media in a wonderful way. The Plex iOS application is available to download for $4.99.
