I hear people talking about plex and see technical articles. In laymans terms…what is plex?
Ok, so Plex is kind of like Infuse, if you will. I only heard about it before from this forum as well. When I first saw that the FireTV had plex I thought I’ll get one and check it out. Basically, it allows you to view your files just like Infuse, with some differences. It’s free, at first. If you just want to download the server and view your files on the computer. Then it’s like 5.99 for any app purchases, example, I bought the app for my FireTV, and my iOS device. So that’s 11.98. Then if you want to see all of your stuff outside the network you have 3 choices. 3.99/mo, 24.99/year, or 74.99 lifetime. Now, this is actually nice and tested. It works well. I’ve been looking for an easy way to share my library with the family. Now IMO, the down side is it requires my computer to be on 24/7 running the server which then can only point to my NAS drive if I Network address them, unlike Infuse which can find them automatically or via IP address manually. So, it’s different, it works, and that’s how I’ve experienced it so far this week as I’ve been testing it out.
This part is not true. You do not need to pay for Plex pass to access your content outside your network or to share it with others. You only need to pay if you want use LiveTV functionality, use the new experimental video player (on tvOS), and/or have a play history dashboard that allows you to see what all your shared accounts have watched.
Otherwise, the server is free to use. You install the server on your machine and when you connect to it from a client device (I.e. AppleTV, smart TV, roku, Infuse, and a lot of other devices that Plex is available on) it doesn’t cost anything with the exception iOS and Android have a one time fee of $4.99 per account But if you use Infuse on iOS you can bypass that fee.