By
Sledgstone
I've gotten annoyed with managing my digital movie and tv series collection. It didn't bother me before because Netflix had pretty much everything. I'd never have to search for stuff on my hard drives or old dvd-rs because it would all be on Netflix. Now that Netflix has dropped about 50% of their content over the last couple years and will lose significantly more once all of Disney's properties are removed next year I've realized all my old dvds, blu rays and digital movies are all getting more use again. This is were plex comes in.
I setup plex on my main pc, moved a bunch of movies and tv series into some folders and set plex to use those folders. This program auto grabbed all meta data for the content, images, etc and is basically a Netflix clone. I was shocked by how efficient this is. I installed the plex client app on my ps3, ps4 and roku stick and as long as my pc with the plex server is running I can now stream all my content to every tv in the house. It even keeps track of where i left off in a movie and i can resume it on a different device if I want.
So I bought a 4tb hard drive yesterday and I'm going all in on this. I'm going to rip a bunch of my dvds and blu rays (the ones that don't have a digital copy) into mkv files and throw them on that hard drive for my plex. I'll try putting my old anime avi files (with hard coded subs from back in the old download days) in there to to see if plex can play those too. Plex will even organise by genre to so it all works good. And plex is free.
I was thinking about buying a nvidia shield because it can be used as a plex media server instead of just a client like the PlayStation/roku apps but it looks like it has some limitations with file types and my old anime files would definitely not play on it unless i converted every file thru some program called handbrake. I'll look into that some more.
I figured I'd share this in case anyone else was getting annoyed with Netflix and every company making their own Netflix clones. Instead of paying every company a piece of the pie it'll be cheaper in the long run to just make my own Netflix with the content i already own that is already tailored to my preferances. And plex can stream outside of your home in 720p if you go on a road trip. I doubt I'll ever use that feature tho, especially with upload rates being shit with spectrum.
Go to https://www.plex.tv to get the media server and the PlayStation/xbox store/roku/android to download the plex app. I know this topic seems like am advertisement but they're paying me nothing and it's all free downloads anyway. it just works and works great.
By Sledgstone