Plex: first impressions
At first glance, you can’t help but think that Plex is one slick media browser and player. But your Mac has Front Row and iTunes built in, so comparisons are inevitable. Before we do that, though, let’s have a look at where Plex is coming from.
It all started about six years ago with a free and open source program called XBox Media Player, originally created for the XBox. It was ported to other platforms and morphed into XBox Media Center, which later became known as XBMC. Finally, in May 2008, XBMC’s Mac developer split from the team and created Plex. There are a couple of other forks, but we won’t bore you with the details. You can read all about it in this entry at Wikipedia.
Plex starts out by one-upping Front Row with an offer to check the weather for you. It’s a nice touch, but I found myself fumbling through the settings before finally getting the weather for my area. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way of changing Fahrenheit temperatures to Celsius.
Maybe it’s just me, but I generally found navigating through the Plex interface to be confusing and non-intuitive. It should be simple: press the arrow keys to move around, press enter to invoke an action, press escape to go up a level. But even with this in mind I had fair number of miscues. Front Row, on the other hand, makes it almost impossible to go wrong — although it could be argued that it does this by offering fewer options.
If you’re determined, of course, you can get used to the Plex way of doing things, and it will do a splendid job of displaying and playing your media. Given the role it fills, you would expect a media browser to be artistic and entertaining, and Plex won’t let you down from that point of view. It gets nothing but praise for presentation.
Well, with one exception. Plex has a visualizer for music similar to the one in iTunes. When comparing the two, iTunes wins hands down — especially with the default visualizer included in iTunes 8.
Overall, Plex is a worthy effort. If you’re bored with Front Row, or would like to try an interface originally created for XBox, it’s definitely worth a look.
Posted Friday, September 12, 2008 in Reviews
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