Introducing Plex/Nine

In the same week that Apple introduced the new "streaming only" AppleTV, another popular media centre also reached a major milestone, which in my opinion is far more exciting then the Apple announcement.

Plex is a fantastic media centre application available for Intel based Macs, which has been specifically designed to deliver a wide array of media to your HDTV. It's significant strength over other platforms, such as AppleTV, is it's incredible support for just about every media file available, whether that be from locally stored content, network shares, Internet streaming or third party plugins (such as BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Netflix, etc).

Plex was originally based on the super versatile XBMC core, however with the release of Plex/Nine (v0.9.0.21) yesterday, there has been a major overhaul which focused on offering more efficient media cataloging and playback, as well as opening the door to new features such as the iOS application for over the air streaming (and transcoding) to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

The Plex development team are very excited about the release of Plex/Nine, however as the majority of the changes for this release happened "under the hood", the team have done their best to summarise why this release is so important - "The Road to Plex/Nine".

Some of the changes that your will notice with Plex/Nine are GPU-accelerated video decoding for smoother 1080p video playback and a new Media Manager, which sits outside of the main Plex application and continuously monitors your media folders. As a result you can can easily add new videos, photos, music, and other content to your media database without even entering Plex.

The images below give you a feel for Plex, however if you head over to www.geek.com, they have an excellent preview of both the main application and the new iOS app.

Once Plex has launched you have direct access to all your media, either via direct storage, network shares or the Internet. Simply select an option from the main menu to get started. 

Out of the box Plex comes ready to connect to hundreds of Internet media stations. These are all pre-configured and ready to go, meaning it simply a case of picking the ones that interest you.

No matter what media you are browsing in Plex, it is always displayed in an attractive, easy to use format, that is perfectly scaled for your HDTV. It even integrates with your Apple remote.

New in Plex/Nine is the ability to manage your media outside of the main application, from the Mac OS X menu bar. This simplifies the process of adding new media and ensures that when you first load Plex it is automatically ready to go.

Now you have seem some of what Plex/Nine has to offer I suggest you head over to their download page and check it out for yourself. Especially as the main Mac OS X application is 100% free!