Love Plex? You'll love a Plex Pass even more.
Plex Pass brings you new features, before everyone else, and exclusive features that are only available to Plex Pass holders. If you love your home media center as much as I do, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. Read on to learn more about the premium Plex experience, and we've got four lifetime Plex Pass licenses (a total value of $600) to give away!
If you have no idea what I'm talking about but I've piqued your interest, I'll explain:Plex is the best media center software around . We have written an extensive Plex guide. Setup A Perfect Media Center with Plex [Mac and Windows Setup] A Perfect Media Center with Plex [Mac and Windows] Plex is considered by many to be the best media player, manager, and streaming app. - available for Windows, Mac and even mobile phones (although the mobile apps are not free). If you're... Read More
With all of this available for free, you'd be forgiven for wondering what features you can get with a premium Plex Pass. Let's talk about what's currently on offer, but remember that more features are in the works all the time, and as a Plex Pass holder, you'll get priority access to them.
Plex for Xbox One is the latest release from the Plex team and is currently only available to Plex Pass holders exclusively. At some point, it will be made available to the general public, but at a price:Plex Pass holders usually get these new versions for free, ahead of everyone else. Preview versions of Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8 versions are also currently being offered.
For Roku or Android owners, Plex Pass entitles you to free versions of paid apps.
The true home theater experience means having a few previews before the movies - with a Plex Pass, you can. Simon showed you how to manually add trailers for movies Get Closer to the Movies Experience with Plex Movie Trailers Get Closer to the Movies With Plex Movie Trailers The Plex cross-platform media server now supports movie trailers and extras. Here's how to add those clips to your movie library. Read More
Setting up the trailers feature isn't as easy as I'd like, but we hope it will speed up the process. First of all, trailers must be enabled both on the server and on each device you use as a client. To enable them for the web app, for example, this means updating both Settings -> Servers -> Extras and Settings -> Player -> Extras . You should also make sure that Freebase Movie Agent is enabled - be sure to follow the support document outline precisely. It was this crucial last step of enabling Freebase as an additional “broker” for movie data that finally enabled trailers for me.
I finally got the trailers to play, and they are just as impressive as expected, a true movie theater experience. It made me realize how much I missed them as a method of movie discovery, and having them automatically injected into the home theater experience is an amazing addition.
Extras like interviews and cast profiles are also automatically searched for in local media, though these tend to be available only for the most recent releases.
A new feature for mobile users, Camera Upload automatically adds your mobile photos to the Plex Media Server and works across platforms. Combined with user sharing access, this makes it easy to view photos on any device and distribute them to friends and family.
Although Apple offers similar functionality with shared folders, it requires everyone to buy into the Apple ecosystem exclusively:Plex works with iOS and Android, and the Plex client is available on just about anything.
Plex is designed to stream media to any device in a simple way:it automatically transcodes the elements to an optimized and compatible format. But mobile data coverage is far from perfect, and you don't always have a web connection - that's where Plex Sync comes in.
Plex Sync transcodes, then downloads the optimized media to your device for offline playback. Perfect for commuting and long trips. Using it couldn't be easier:from your mobile client, find the movie you want to sync (before you start your epic adventure) and hit the download button. Of course, you'll need to make sure you have enough space available locally, but you can set a limit so you don't accidentally fill up all of your device's storage.
Cloud sync it's similar, but it's designed for times when your home server is inaccessible but another cloud provider is fine; it doesn't sync locally, but it does prepare a copy of the media and sync it elsewhere:Box, Copy, Google Drive, and Dropbox are currently supported.
The home environment is generally not single-user, so it is surprising that most systems are still configured as such. With a Plex Pass, you can give multiple users access to specific media libraries, which is useful for restricting kids' viewing to just your library of educational videos; Or to share photos with the family.
Of course, this doesn't have to be in the same house either, as you can share specific libraries with friends or family across the country, which they can even watch using a web client, so you can basically create your own custom, high-end Netflix. power..
Setting this up is absurdly easy. From the web interface, select your server and select Share Server. Type in your username or email address, and you'll probably want to uncheck share all libraries Option, which will allow you to choose specific libraries for sharing only. Hit save and you're done! Of course, they will also have to accept the invitation, but they will receive an email invitation automatically.
Note:The default behavior of the server is to make everything available on the local network, so if you're trying to restrict libraries to different members of the same household, you'll need to enable local network authentication first. Do this from the Plex web application -> Settings -> Server -> Connect -> Advanced show .
The best value Plex Pass is a lifetime subscription, available for $149, but it will only be available for a limited time. You can also subscribe annually for $39.99, or monthly for $4.99. Sign up for a Plex Pass bonus! It's a small price to pay if you're serious about your media experience and want to support the developers of the best media center app of all time.
We have FOUR Lifetime Plex Steps to give away, worth a total of $600. Enter below for your chance to win one!
Plex Pass Lifetime Subscription Giveaway