![]() ![]() The media centre is now sharing all your movies and TV shows over the network. With Plex Media Server set up, the hard work is done. If you run into difficulties, check out Plex’s troubleshooting guide. You will need to have a router set up for UPnP. If you want to be able to access the media centre when you’re away from your home network, go to Settings > Server > Remote Access. This will make it easier for client apps to find the server. To finish setting up Plex Media Server, head to Settings, select Server and then login to your Plex Account if you didn’t do it during the set up. Once Plex is done, repeat the same process with any other media kinds, like TV shows, that you want to add. My media collection after Plex has downloaded the metadata. The process might take a few minutes, depending on the size of the media library, so leave it run. Now Plex will pull in all the metadata and download covers, descriptions and everything else from the internet. Click Browse for Media Folder and select the folder where you stored all your movies. Select the media type you want to add, for me it’s Movies, and click Next. If it hasn’t, click the Add Library button. If Plex Media Centre opens automatically, follow the Set Up Wizard until it prompts you to add libraries. If it doesn’t, select the menubar icon and click Open Plex… The first time you open Plex Media Server it should automatically launch the web front end. The server runs in the background but you control it from your web browser. Go to Applications and open Plex Media Server. Download Plex Media Server and install it. On the Mac you want to be the media centre, head to the Plex website and sign up for an account. Once your media collection is sorted, you can set up Plex. Follow the same process for ripping them but instead of throwing them in the catchall Movies folder, add each TV show to it’s own dedicated folder inside a TV Shows folder.įor example, all the episodes you have of the IT Crowd go in a folder called IT Crowd which is inside TV Shows. It covers how to use Handbrake and MetaZ to rip DVDs into well formatted media files.įollow along with Jacob's tutorial just instead of adding the films to iTunes, save them to a dedicated Movies folder. Jacob Penderworth has written a great tutorial on how to import DVDs into iTunes. You can’t just have everything sitting, badly named in a folder and expect Plex to make head-or-tails of it. Preparing a Media Collectionįor Plex to work well, you need to do a little bit of prep work on the media files you want to use. Plex is free to use although the premium Plex Pass, which starts at $4.99 a month, adds some extra features such as offline synchronisation. You can find the complete list of apps the Plex website. ![]() This split keeps Plex lightweight and available on a wide number of platforms. It then streams the film from the server, whether it’s in the next room or a different country. When you want to watch a film, you use the client app to browse your media collection and choose something. On the media centre Mac you install the server app and then on every iOS device, Apple TV, Mac, games console, smart TV and other device you want to use, you install the client app. Plex is the best media centre software available for MacOS. What you should do is set up a proper media centre with an app like Plex which is exactly what I'll show you in this tutorial. Sure, you can connect the hard drive to a Mac, dig through the file system and maybe find what you’re looking for, but it’s not a nice experience. ![]() There’s no point going to the effort of ripping your entire film collection to a hard drive and then just leaving the files sit there. Storage is cheap-a few dozen films won’t put a dent in a one terabyte external hard drive.ĭigitising the media collection, however, is just the first step. No new Mac has a built in DVD drive so, while you still have an old one or a USB Superdrive lying around, now is the time to digitise your film collection and set up a Mac as a media centre. ![]() This is great if you want to get access to thousands of movies for only a couple of dollars a month, but what does it mean for the stack of DVDs sitting on your shelf? Outside of a few hardcore film fans buying Blu-ray disks to get the highest possible quality (and all the film’s extra features), people are making the transition to streaming. Physical media is dying DVD sales are disappearing, Blockbuster is gone and Netflix is a streaming company. ![]()
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