Attached to that server will be the storage (hard drives, USB hard drives, NAS storage, etc) which contains all your media files. To get to this point however you are going to need to connect it to a Plex Media Server which is what we are going to set up. This is what you will use to stream everything to your display. You may have noticed if you have a TV by a company such as HiSense or Samsung that it comes with a built-in Plex app already. Plex comes as two software components – Plex Media Server and then a Plex TV app which comes in a variety of flavors – Windows, macOS, iOS, tvOS, Android, even Xbox One, and lots of apps for various makes of Smart TVs. If managing them is becoming a chore then Plex is definitely for you as once set up it takes away all of the hard labor.

If you are thinking about streamlining your media management with Plex it’s probably the case you already have a lot of downloaded TV shows and movies that you want to get a firmer grip of. This is way back in 2007.Īs was often the way in the heady days of tech startups, Feingold’s progress was noted but Cayce Ullman and partner Scott Olechowski who had just sold their previous business to Cisco.įurther Mac dev work continued and the project gradually morphed into Plex with Plex, Inc formed in December 2009 with Ullman as CEO and Feingold as CTO and the rest, as they say, is history.

Originally a fork from XBMC as a hobby project by coder Elan Feingold (who sounds like a movie character from Ghostbusters) who was looking for a media center program for his Mac. In the background to all of this Plex came along. Over time the devs realized there was definitely a need for a simple way to stream media (mainly films and TVs that you had downloaded and what started out as basically a frontend for all your torrented files gradually moved over to the PC and become a fully-fledged server, capable of beaming files to devices around your house, and even, potentially, the world.įor a while, it still confusingly kept its Xbox moniker before morphing into what we now know as Kodi. Back in the day you may have heard of XBMC – it was a media server that first originated on the very first Microsoft Xbox – hence the name Xbox Media Center.

Plex media server setup 2017