Over the past few years, Plex has quietly become one of the very best streaming platforms on the market. Plex can even find extra content for your movies (such as interviews and deleted scenes) and stream them. Hook up an HD antenna and a tuner, and Plex will let you watch live TV add in a hard drive, and Plex works as a DVR platform. You can use it to watch news or listen to podcasts. Current offerings include some of the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies. It can also show you popular movies and shows on other free streaming services. It has an ad-supported streaming service that offers free movies and TV. While Plex is primarily a media server, it offers a number of other features in both its free and paid tiers. It makes your own library look just as pretty as anything from Netflix or Disney Plus. It tells you who starred in your movies, and can even find lyrics for your music. While most media servers leave you scrolling through an endless list of poorly named files, Plex automatically organizes your shows into seasons, complete with title cards and episode descriptions. What sets Plex apart is how well it organizes media, and how pretty the whole interface looks. Streaming players from the PS4 (but not the PS5) to Roku devices have media server apps built in even Windows Media Player works as a pretty passable media server in a pinch.

Granted, media servers are a dime a dozen. “The cloud” is really just “a computer somewhere else that’s always turned on.” I’m sorry to be the one to deliver this news. This is also precisely how streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video deliver video to you, just with some extra steps in-between. By using the Plex app on another computer, a mobile device or a streaming gadget plugged into your TV, you can stream content from your computer to another platform of your choice. You direct the Plex software to this folder, and Plex then makes your computer available as a server. While Plex itself can walk you through the process of setting up a media server, it works like this: You provide your own video content, and put it in a special folder somewhere on your computer.

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