Plex

PLEX organizes your media (video's, music, photo's and more) and streams it to your devices, such as PCs, Smart TVs, tablets and smartphones at the highest possible quality. Its list of features is impressive and it is very user-friendly.

To use PLEX you need an account on plex.tv. One account has been created for you when you first received your DLNET.ORG Cloud login. If you don't want an account, you can delete it. See also section #Privacy concerns.

To give other people access to your media, you need a Plex Pass, which is a €5 per month subscription.

Adding media

Using ownCloud

In your ownCloud account there is a folder called "media" which is accessible by Plex. Within "media", you should create subfolders that are designated for a particular type of media. After the subfolder has been created you can add in Plex. Plex needs to know if it contains movies, TV shows, music, photos or other videos. It is a good idea to organize the structure of the folder and file names in accordance with the guidelines on the Plex web site.

When you've uploaded some media to your ownCloud, follow the instructions here to add a Library in Plex. After clicking "Browse for Media Folders", click on "media" in the menu on the left or navigate to "/home/media". Then select the correct subfolder.

Using BitTorrent

You can use Deluge to download media that is accessible to Plex. To do so, make sure your download is store in the correct subfolder under /home/media.

Quality and CPU usage

PLEX is capable of streaming in maximum quality – the quality in which the video file itself is encoded – or it can convert ("transcode") to a lower quality.

You need to set a default quality in every PLEX app that you use (Settings - Quality). Please set the default quality to "Maximum" and only lower the quality of a stream when your internet connection is not fast enough. Streaming at maximum quality whenever possible greatly reduces server (CPU) load.

Please use Plex apps instead of the web browser version. Since browsers do not support many video formats, the server often needs to transcode in order to play the video in your browser. This is bad for video quality, it is bad for server (CPU) load, and it is bad for the environment.

Privacy concerns

It is possible that the Plex server application and/or the Plex players share information about your media with the company that develops Plex. Since Plex is partly closed-source software, it is hard to find out exactly which information is and isn't shared. Some concerns about privacy have been voiced; see Wikipedia and this Reddit discussion for more information.