If you’d requested me a few years in the past to choose the easiest way for cord-cutters to run their very own media servers, I wouldn’t have hesitated to decide on Plex.
Plex lets customers host their very own media information—motion pictures, TV exhibits, music, and footage—on one pc, after which stream them to different units over a neighborhood Wi-Fi community or by way of the web. In 2016, it added the power to document over-the-air TV channels from an antenna, and that characteristic, together with Plex’s general stage of software program polish, made it an amazing choice for customers who had giant libraries of media information and wished complete management over their TV setups.
What Plex hasn’t carried out is cut back the friction of beginning a media server or make any additions to what you may document on one, akin to what Channels has carried out. Maybe that’ll change sooner or later, however my guess is that Plex is extra eager about partnering with media firms on streaming than antagonizing them with artful new methods to document their content material.
That’s not essentially a nasty factor for those who’re on board with Plex’s imaginative and prescient—in the end, the corporate desires to offer a central hub for every kind of content material, each self-hosted and streaming, throughout virtually any system—however the end result will probably be fairly completely different from the imaginative and prescient that Channels is laying out.
In writing about cord-cutting, I get a surprisingly excessive variety of requests from people who simply desire a DVR for all the pieces, from over-the-air TV to streaming video. That means not simply having all content material in a single place, however having the ability to watch all of it offline, at any time, whereas simply avoiding commercials. Channels affords the closest factor but to that preferrred, whereas Plex appears to be drifting from it.
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