Plex Media Server

Software Screenshot:
Plex Media Server
Software Details:
Version: 1.13.4.5251 updated
Upload Date: 17 Aug 18
Developer: Plex, Inc
Distribution Type: Freeware
Downloads: 303

Rating: 3.3/5 (Total Votes: 3)

Plex Media Server is a powerful application that will help you to manage and stream media files stored on your computer to various mobile devices and smart TVs, across a local network or over the Internet.

The application can be downloaded for Chromcast, Roku, Google TV, and a supported Samsung Smart TV, as well as on Synology, Netgear, QNAP, unRAID, Drobo and ASUSTOR NAS (Network-attached storage) devices.

Features at a glance

With Plex Media Server, you can organize your movie, photo, music and TV show collections in order to access them easily and fast from one of the aforementioned devices and platforms.

It can serve content to clients on the same machine or within the local network, and even over the Internet. One of its best features is that it includes its own App Store, from where plug-ins can be installed and extend the default functionality of the software.

In addition to the free version reviewed here, there's also a PlexPass edition of Plex Media Server, which provides users with a paid service that gives them early access to new versions and premium features.

Getting started with Plex Media Server

On Linux, the application runs as a server/daemon, in the background. It automatically starts when the computer boots and can be administer through a web-based interface using a modern web browser, such as a Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

It supports transcoding of video and audio files, as well as several sources of online content, called Channels. It is simply the best media center application available for an open source operating system.

Availability and supported operating systems

It is distributed for free as binary files, supporting the GNU/Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X computer operating systems. In addition, it is available on the Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile platforms.

Bottom line

If you don’t use XBMC already, we strongly recommend to download and install Plex Media Server today. We guarantee you will not find a better media center software!

What is new in this release:

  • Fixes:
  • (Library) Episodes could show duplicate roles for actors (#6117)
  • (Metadata) An issue with TheMovieDb agent contributing to TheTVDB agent for TV shows (#8645)
  • (Photos) Improve the extraction of Place names from geotagged items in photo libraries (#8683)
  • (Playback) Rare deadlock with stopping sessions (#8659)
  • (Streaming Brain) Rare deadlock involving bandwidth limits (#8498)
  • Attempt to find better channel numbers in XMLTV files (#8744)
  • Shrunk the excessive memory usage when serializing large JSON trees (#8579)
  • Update localization strings

What is new in version 1.13.2.5154:

  • (Web) Updated to 3.53.7

What is new in version :

  • New:
  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 3.23.1
  • Fixes:
  • (Search) Duplicate albums/tracks could be returned in search.
  • (Sync) Clients wouldn't account for files bigger than 2GB when calculating the used space. (#7664)
  • (Companion) A crash could occur when using companion (#7689)
  • (Transcoder) Playback could fail near the end of a video, most often when using automatic quality. (#7691)

What is new in version 1.8.4:

  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 3.20.5
  • Fixed: (NAS) Asustor ARM builds would fail to start

What is new in version 1.7.5:

  • Fixed:
  • (Linux) Ubuntu package would not install unless udev was installed (#7205)

What is new in version 1.5.4:

  • (Transcoder) A/V sync issues when transcoding TrueHD audio
  • (Transcoder) Transcodes could fail if the transcoder cache directory did not support filesystem change notifications (This is a fix for the known issue in 1.5.3, the workaround described here should no longer be necessary).

What is new in version 1.4.3:

  • New:
  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 3.0.1.
  • Fixed:
  • (macOS) Automatic updates from 1.4.2 were failing. (#6435)
  • (Streaming Brain) Occasional crashes when per-user bandwidth limits were enabled. (#6427)
  • (Subtitles) Issues playing soft subtitles with certain clients. (#6386)
  • (Database) Performance issues or deadlocks optimizing the database while scanning photo libraries. (#6358)
  • (Metadata) Preserve customized text fields when unmatching. (#4999)
  • (Metadata) Display issues with cast members for certain shows. (#6117)
  • (DLNA) Crash setting preferences when preference string in settings was corrupt. (#6421)

What is new in version 1.3.4:

  • New:
  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 2.13.0
  • (Media Flags) Updated bundle to 2016-12-22 (#6033)
  • Fixes:
  • (DLNA) Crash browsing to certain photo library sections. (#5874)
  • (Streaming Brain) Certain videos might transcode instead even when enough bandwidth was available to direct play. (#6085) (#6216)

What is new in version 1.3.3:

  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 2.12.5.
  • (DLNA) Transcoded videos weren't showing up on older Sony TVs and Blu-ray players. (#5902)
  • (Photos) Video clips in photo sections might have incorrect dates. (#5924)
  • (Media Optimizer) Version file names would replace non-ASCII characters with underscores. (#5944)
  • (Transcoder) Issues playing some MPEG-TS videos. (#5977)
  • (Transcoder) Issues burning PGS subtitles on Western Digital PR devices. (#6013)
  • (Transcoder) Issues encoding H.264 on the NVIDIA SHIELD. (#5921)
  • (TV) Episodes without season and episode numbers were sorting ahead of all others. (#5777)
  • (TV) Scanning a show with a new episode could leave the episode unlinked to its series until a library refresh. (#5939)
  • (Search) Better disambiguation of matching search results. (#5785)
  • (Search) Searches might return other users' playlists. (#5972)
  • (Scanner) Changing the case of a filename would completely recreate the item on case-insensitive filesystems. (#5935)
  • (Media Analysis) Pre-play pages weren't always triggering a media analysis refresh when needed.
  • A number of user-reported crashes. (#5788) (#5981) (#5894) (#5991) (#5993) (#5994) (#5995) (#5997) (#5999)

What is new in version 1.2.7:

  • New:
  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 2.10.10.
  • (Media Flags) Updated bundle.
  • Fixes:
  • Playback issues on Roku, iOS and other platforms.
  • Occasional server hangs during video playback.

What is new in version 1.2.2:

  • NEW:
  • New Feature - Streaming Brain.
  • (Streaming Brain) Preference for limiting bandwidth on WAN uploads. Limits can be per-stream and total.
  • (Streaming Brain) Playback session termination reasons are sent to the client and displayed to the user. This may require an updated client.
  • (Streaming Brain) Removed 'Prioritize streaming transcodes' preference. Background transcodes such as Sync, Media Optimizer, and video preview thumbnail generation are always prioritized behind streaming transcodes, and will pause completely if the simultaneous transcode limit is reached.
  • (Streaming Brain) Removed 'Cloud Sync upload speed limit' preference. Sync traffic automatically scales based on streaming WAN usage, and uses whatever bandwidth is left unused.
  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 2.9.3
  • (Relay) Allow multiple connections from PMS to relay servers. (#4894)
  • (Windows) Localize installer for Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese locales. (#5189)
  • (Linux) QNAP x64 packages for the new QTS 4.3 64bit firmware.
  • FIXES:
  • (NVIDIA SHIELD) Support premium Plex music libraries. (#4991)
  • (NVIDIA SHIELD) Relay was crashing on startup. (#5419)
  • (Transcoder) Failures transcoding video files that lack a video stream. (#4503)
  • (Transcoder) Stuttering video transcoding HE-AAC on macOS. (#5376)
  • (Transcoder) Completed transcodes might continue to block static transcodes. (#5423)
  • (Subtitles) Inconsistent automatic subtitle selection for media containing multiple embedded subtitles. (#5011)
  • (On Deck) Handle specials and episodes without a known air date better in On Deck. (#4661)
  • (Camera Upload) Fix a couple of edge case scenarios when resuming uploads. (#5152) (#5218)
  • (Pub-Sub) Better load distribution selecting servers. (#4915)
  • (Relay) Relay process might not be killed when the media server shuts down on certain Unix platforms. (#5173)
  • (Butler) Issues deleting old files in cache directory.
  • (Media Analysis) Scanner crashes analyzing mp4 files lacking moov atoms. (#5373)
  • (Media Analysis) Some 1080i media wasn't being recognized as being interlaced. (#5279)
  • (Media Analysis) Crashes analyzing certain photos with malformed metadata tags. (#5461)
  • (Metadata) Issues recognizing episodes of shows whose names contain multiple numeric digits. (#5377)
  • (Search) Duplicate results from different libraries now indicate the library of origin. (#4949)
  • (Search) Treat searches using a single non-ASCII character the same as a single ASCII character. (#5319)
  • (Linux) Local Media Agent errors when paths/files contained non-ASCII characters. (#5470)
  • (Linux) Fixed Readynas RN2xx build to work on ReadyNAS OS Firmware 6.6.0 (#5512)
  • A number of user-reported server crashes. (#5042) (#5459)

What is new in version 1.1.4:

  • New:
  • (Web) Updated Plex Web to 2.8.1.
  • (Nvidia Shield) Enable DLNA server. (#5013)
  • (Security) Allow http requests using the server's machine name to authenticate using the "networks allowed without auth" preference. (#5270)
  • Improved crash reporting infrastructure. (#4669)
  • Fixes:
  • (LG) Connectivity problems when older LG MediaLink TVs connect to signed-in servers with whitelisted IP addresses. (#5271)
  • (Ubuntu) Installation failures on certain VPS systems lacking /proc/1/comm. (#5300)
  • (QNAP) Issues restarting PMS after unclean shutdown. (#5309)
  • (Trailers) Plex Movie agent 'Use red band (restricted audiences) trailers when available' preference was being ignored when downloading trailers. (#5298)
  • Enabling network logging in clients could cause the server to hang. (#5277)
  • Spurious "Streaming session doesn't exist" errors when playing synced content on certain clients. (#5264)

What is new in version 1.1.3:

  • New:
  • (Media Flags) Update bundle.
  • Fixes:
  • (NAS) Non-ASCII characters were being encoded to XML incorrectly on certain ARM devices. (#5255)
  • (Android) Enforce h264 profile limitations correctly. (#5233)

What is new in version 1.0.3:

  • Crash handling certain requests from PS4 clients. (#4984)
  • (OS X) Don't prevent the display from going to sleep.
  • (Metadata) Issues obtaining data from TVDB, requiring server restart.
  • (Metadata) Fallback to English TVDB searches when searching with another language fails. (#4933)
  • (Metadata) Tracks and disc numbers in premium music libraries could be affected by bad tag data. (#4437)

What is new in version 1.0.2:

  • New:
  • Save track offsets in music libraries that have opted in. (#3370)
  • Updated Media Flags bundle.
  • Fixes:
  • (OS X) Startup failures on some older versions of MacOS. (#4969)
  • (Windows) DLNA server process might not have a firewall exemption. (#4136)
  • (Claiming) Better error message if server claiming fails (#4907)
  • (Linux) Fix migration script for users with custom app data directories. (#4808)
  • (Linux) Improve Fedora/Ubuntu SELinux support. (#4808)
  • (Metadata) Issues fetching metadata for Pokemon TV series. (#4966)
  • (Metadata) Handle multiple directors returned from TVDB. (#4960)
  • (Metadata) Fetch localized titles correctly using Plex Movie Agent. (#4963)

What is new in version 1.0:

  • New:
  • Update Plex Web to 2.7.0.
  • (Chromecast) Use opus instead of mp3 when transcoding music. (#4805)
  • (Sync) Changed Sync database format. Downgrading to older Plex Media Server builds may cause Sync problems. (#3959)
  • Fixes:
  • (Sync) Synced content wouldn't show up on iOS in some rare cases. See https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/175998/planned-features-known-issues/ (#3959)
  • (Media Analysis) Crashes analyzing certain .wtv files. (#4789)
  • (Network) Update plex.tv server information when port mapping fails. (#4758)
  • (Metadata) Speed up album refreshes in some cases when using Last.fm agent.
  • (Transcoder) Playback failures skipping to near end of video. (#4803)
  • (Transcoder) Rare crashes with unreliable internet connections. (#4803)

What is new in version 0.9.16.4:

  • New:
  • Update Plex/Web to 2.6.0
  • Fixes:
  • (Media Optimizer) Episodes from shows whose titles have trailing periods might be repeatedly reprocessed (on Windows).
  • (Media Optimizer) Transcoded special episodes weren't following the naming convention.
  • (Media Optimizer) Optimized versions could be automatically deleted while being watched.
  • (Transcoder) Transcoder process crashes weren't being reliably detected on non-Windows platforms.
  • (Transcoder) Issues transcoding music files with high sampling rates.
  • (Transcoder) The highest quality audio encoder wasn't always selected with Direct Streaming disabled.
  • (DLNA) Crashes entering movie sections with Samsung Smart TV DLNA client.
  • (Windows) Show tray icon on recent Windows Insider Preview builds.
  • (Windows) Overwrite older files more reliably during setup.
  • (Metadata) Download higher quality artist posters from last.fm.
  • (Metadata) Fix top tracks for music libraries.
  • (Metadata) Missing Rotten Tomatoes metadata when movie has no trailers and language is not set to English
  • (PS4) Certain images weren't being cached while browsing.
  • (Web) Plex Pass privileges weren't being recognized on first sign-in.
  • Issues with .plexignore files.
  • Issues with playback from some unofficial Plex Channels.

What is new in version 0.9.16.0:

  • NEW:
  • (Metadata) Support local artist posters and fanart.
  • (Metadata) Support local album fanart.
  • (Metadata) Support 'short', 'featurette' and 'other' sidecar movie extras.
  • Log files are now versioned as .X.log instead of .log.X.
  • (OS X) Log files are now stored in a dedicated "~/Library/Logs/Plex Media Server" directory
  • (PMP) Support remuxing FLAC audio for video transcodes.
  • (Prefs) Move advanced Update Channel pref to non-advanced section.
  • Improved startup times on multi-core systems.
  • FIXES:
  • (Lyrics) Handle lyrics files with CR linebreaks.
  • (Media Optimizer) Improved default sorting of items for Media Optimizer, Playlists, and Sync.
  • (Metadata) Show correct release date for MP3 music files.
  • (Metadata) Read metadata from MP4 movie files without audio track.
  • (Metadata) Don't strip dots from song titles.
  • (Metadata) Artists with trailing dots weren't showing album metadata in music libraries using the Last.fm agent.
  • Generate thumbnails with correct aspect ratios for anamorphic content.
  • Reliably find local assets for multi-disc music albums.
  • Improve reliability of .plexignore handling.
  • Improve reliability of library cleanup during scanning.
  • Incorrect playlist durations when items have multiple versions.
  • Prevent scheduled tasks from starting and ending at the same time.
  • Don't label media items as "Original" when there's only one.
  • Enable uninstalling manually installed plugins.
  • (Transcoder) Improve performance transcoding video to MP4 containers.
  • (Transcoder) Prefer transcodes of stereo sources to AAC over other multi-channel codecs.
  • (Transcoder) Improve compatibility of HLS transcodes with some older Samsung TVs.
  • (Transcoder) Failures transcoding audio with low sampling rates for the Roku.
  • (Transcoder) Failures copying invalid chapters when transcoding to streaming MKV.
  • (Transcoder) Failures burning DVB subtitles.
  • (Transcoder) Incorrect name and language attributes when transcoding subtitles to WebVTT.
  • (Transcoder) Online content requiring a specific user agent wasn't transcoding correctly.
  • (Prefs) Removed obsolete "Offer higher bitrates over 3G connections" preference.
  • (Prefs) Removed obsolete "Enable Dolby Digital on Apple TV" preference.
  • (Playlists) Sorting playlists by duration wasn't working.
  • (Windows) Failures installing when Windows Firewall service is disabled.
  • (Windows) Automatically launch the server after auto update.
  • (Windows) Incorrect Windows version listed in installer logs.
  • (iOS) Failures playing MP4 video with MP3 audio.
  • (DLNA) Connect to remote media servers securely.
  • (DLNA) Crashes when video has no audio stream.
  • (Roku) TV play queues weren't advancing.
  • (Bundles) A number of small service fixes.

What is new in version 0.9.15.6:

  • Multiple subtitles in a single file could be lost after a metadata update.
  • Auto-update could require a manual install in some cases.
  • (Roku) Improve stability resuming video over HLS.
  • (Windows) Simplify auto-update experience.
  • (Windows) Never reboot after a media server auto-update.
  • (Windows) Fix license link in 'about' dialog.

What is new in version 0.9.12.4:

  • Enable remux on PPC platforms.
  • Tweak for HTTP request timer (thanks, sa2000!)
  • Improvements to filesystem watching functionality.
  • A rare issue where the transcoded video became extremely low resolution.
  • More improvements to search with non-latin characters.
  • Improved sorting by duration.
  • (Linux) Fix for Ubuntu with Kernel earlier than 2.6.33
  • (Sync) Various bugfixes.

What is new in version 0.9.12.1:

  • New:
  • Enable iTunes importing code for UNIX; set advanced preference with path to library XML.
  • Support for decade-based filtering for movies and albums.
  • Add a hidden preference for sorting albums (AlbumSort, with default value "year:desc", you can set "year", "title", etc.).
  • Add a new library preference to tell scanner to respect media tags (for new libraries).
  • CentOS 7 support.
  • Fixes:
  • A crash shortly after startup.
  • (Linux) Crash on start.
  • (Windows) Scanner might not pick up new media, or might stop in the middle.
  • A few other crashes and minor stability issues.
  • Fix install/uninstall issues on Ubuntu/Mint.
  • Fixed possible issue locking out an alternate admin user on Synology

What is new in version 0.9.12.0:

  • New:
  • Korean and Hungarian translations.
  • Massive speedups for HTTP server.
  • Keep music in the library automatically refreshed via scheduled task.
  • Added Similar Artists feature.
  • Match and download metadata as we scan for movies and music.
  • Added Recently Viewed Episodes hub.
  • Add upcoming concert dates for artists.
  • Music videos for tracks and artists. Vevo videos for Plex Pass.
  • Plex Mix (Plex Pass only).
  • Capture album year, and artwork (Plex Pass music scanner only) during scan.
  • Added Continue Watching hub for home videos.
  • Add sorting for TV shows based on number of unwatched episodes.
  • Added multi-disc support in music libraries.
  • Add two music video hubs for music libraries.
  • Add a "throwback" hub for artists you haven't listened to in X.
  • Add track filter for moods (Plex Pass only).
  • Add Track rating filter.
  • Support for PS3/4 audio transcoding.
  • Allow artists to have countries, allow filtering by country.
  • Allow filtering albums by studio.
  • Scan new media first.
  • Improve background on-the-fly media analysis. Analyze albums on-the-fly.
  • Add sorting by "Played At and "Play Count" for artists and albums.
  • Strip diacriticals and macrons from sort titles and use for searching.
  • Use filesystem times for "added at" during first scan.
  • Import play counts during iTunes import.
  • (API) Add director search provider to global search results.
  • (API) Add group=X feature to the filtering language.
  • (API) Support for batch editing, field autocompletion.
  • (API) Support for deleting composite types (e.g. albums).
  • (API) Support for computing common fields between multiple items.
  • Fixes:
  • Be smarter about when to merge identical albums and when to separate.
  • Fix recently played hubs to not return things with zero play count.
  • (OS X) Fix an issue where App Nap could affect server performance.
  • (Windows) iTunes latest 64-bit release was broken.
  • Improve searching to start at word boundaries.
  • Clear playlist composite when clearing playlist.
  • Order various artists albums by name, other artists by year descending.
  • Speed up various endpoints, including play queue creation.
  • Fix a few hubs crashes.
  • Don't scan right away on filesystem changes when starting up.
  • Delete unused tags and taggings during database maintenance.
  • Many performance and stability improvements.

What is new in version 0.9.11.7:

  • New:
  • Added translations for Swedish, Croatian, Chinese.
  • Fixes:
  • Some translations weren't enabled correctly.
  • In some cases, duplicate "hubs" could be returned.
  • (Windows) Subtitle fonts weren't loaded correctly.

What is new in version 0.9.11.6:

  • New:
  • Added a sort option for "release date" for albums.
  • Fixes:
  • An issue which prevented upgrading from very old version of the media server.
  • Improved reliability around publishing public IP to the cloud.
  • Allow partial matching on locales.
  • Occasionally extras could come back with width/height of -1.
  • Fixes for unRAID distribution.
  • FLAC files were not playing on iOS.
  • Improved quality of Arabic and Hebrew subtitle rendering.
  • Improve cloud Cinema Trailer selection.

What is new in version 0.9.11.5:

  • New:
  • Serbian translation.
  • Fixes:
  • Multiuser wasn't working correctly without a Plex Pass (e.g. duplicate On Deck).
  • A few issues upgrading from very old media servers.
  • Numeric share labels didn't in Plex Home.
  • Some packaging fixes for Thecus NAS.
  • Many search requests in parallel could hang the server.
  • Don't restart plugins as aggressively.
  • Cloud Sync didn't work when in a Plex Home.
  • Fixed an issue where Cloud Sync files over 2GB may fail to upload.

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