I DO have media that is well-used and I would like to rip or otherwise transfer my LEGALLY BOUGHT media to digital for many reasons. Any complaint device can use and share the resources. If I recall correctly, it’s a standard for home media and my Blu Ray and other devices can use any compliant system or device. Plex Media Server is a DLNA source for those that know what that is.

You can get a feel here, Plex Media Server Music wise, 278 Albums, but I’m not nearly done on that front… sigh… And it took a while to rip everything… 675 DVD movies, 46 TV Shows (most of which we have all episodes and seasons… so there’s a lot, a whole lot)… Tablo wise I have 82 movies moved from Tablo to Plex using SurLaTablo and 5 TV shows (including multiple season and one is NFL Football for 2014). I’ve only had ours for a litttle over a year. Quite hard to describe everything Plex can do. The end device might have special requirements, or because of networking, it might require something “less” than the original media… thus it transcodes.

The horsepower is so that PMS can transcode for the end device properly.

Mine runs on a Sandy Bridge Celeron just fine. PMS, ideally should run on a medium to high end Core2 Duo (which isn’t saying much). I contribute posters and graphics as well… sometimes very much of my own creation where I think the meta data for such is awful, etc… I contribute to both and when I feed it something where existing meta agents can’t find info… and recommend that everyone else do the same (helps us all). But I mainly use it to manage all of my DVD and CD media… I rip, PMS fills in all the blanks (mostly… you can override things, including graphics, etc.). However, Plex (and moreso Kodi) do have ways of watching “illegal” media… and even plugins to extract and save such to your PMS automatically. If you are a cord cutter and especially if you are a “legal” cord cutter (you don’t steal copyrighted media, but have your own purchased physical media) then Plex is definitely a must have. I started out with XBMC (now Kodi) and switched over to Plex, because it fit my needs better, there are things that Kodi can do that Plex can do and (IMHO) there are things that Plex does really well that XBMC struggles at (like being relatively stable). You can optionally control and share your media with others. In some ways it is like Tablo in that you seemingly get to your PMS content/channels through Plex’s website, but it actually goes to your PMS. But the web app is pretty good, if that’s all you have. These are generally how you play your media. On the front end side there front end app/clients for Windows, iPhone/iPad, Android devices, Roku, etc. Other things it can do is associate online trailers with your media, and recently it was made so that you can play trailers for other movies you have (or don’t have if you are a Plex Pass member) in front of a movie (for example)… if you get into that whole home theater experience. For example, there is a plugin that will grab subtitles for you for media that doesn’t have subtitles (of course, it assumes a bit with regards to the media you have… something that doesn’t start/end like a pure rip, or something with commercials isn’t going to work with that).

There are plugins in addition to merely channels that can be use to enhance meta data etc. It also can host channels, which are dynamic streams of video or music. Plex Media Server (PMS) houses your media.

Plex media player download windows 7