No.

It's not built for you at all.

It's built for torrenters (and usenetters) who download massive collections of files, have them sit on local hard drives, and want easy ways to organize them and play them back. and it does an amazing job of that.

I used to have a large legally obtained CD and DVD collection. Getting a home media server, ripping everything, and using Plex to access is an awesome upgrade compared with physical media. In particular, avoiding physical media that will break for stuff like kids movies is great.

Also, managing all the photos we have and take so that they are available on all our devices is great, especially since we are a mixed iOS and Android household.

So no, it is not only for downloaders with massive collections of files.

> It's built for torrenters (and usenetters) who download massive collections of files

It's also nice for us who have had a physical media collection (video & music) converted into a pure digital collection and want to be able easily to consume that anywhere, anywhere and on any device with zero friction.

Especially local media-sync is useful for long trans-atlantic flights and works much better (and space-efficiently) than just copying the full-fidelity files to the device, which in the end may not be capable of playing them properly at all.

Basically Plex is very good at completely eliminating issues regarding playback format and compatibility and ensures whatever is in your library always plays back correctly at whatever target-device you have.

I'm not going to deny that torrenters etc probably represent a big portion of the Plex user-base, but I'd like to remind people that actually owning your own media-collection is a still a thing, and I don't see any reason to make software managing such collections a suspicious category to be in.

Yep. I used to be one of those guys with two 250-CD binders full of all sorts of music. I went to the used CD bin weekly through high school and college because they had deals with 3 discs for $10 so most weeks, I'd use my paychecks to pay the bills and tip money for CDs. Later on, I amassed quite a collection of DVDs as well.

Later on, I realized I was watching and listening to just about everything via my computer or mp3 player so I began the process of ripping everything to my RAID (now just a standalone NAS).

Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward so that's just about as legally dubious as downloading unlicensed copies. I just figured I didn't need the stacks of plastic circles laying around anymore and could use the cash.

Either way, between rips and still occasionally buying mp3 albums on Amazon, I've got a load of digital media and Plex is an excellent way to stream it all to devices in my house. I use my phone or a laptop as the "remote" and the Plex server streams to my Chromecast, Xbox, or other computers from the NAS. It's a great setup. For people who want to use an Apple TV as their media extender, it looks like they have the option to use Plex as well.

Honestly this is a bit of a surprise since I thought Apple typically wanted to steer you toward iTunes for local media streaming but as someone who really doesn't like iTunes and generally avoids it whenever possible, Plex support makes Apple TV an actual option now.

> Of course, I did sell those CDs and DVDs on craigslist afterward

Personally I just threw them away because I was fed up with them taking storage-space (which in my flat is limited).

This means I can't prove ownership, but at least I don't feel like I'm having some sort of moral dilemma around my digital collection.

This, but I also have lots of completely legit video and audio (audiobooks and music(mostly from bandcamp)).

That makes sense, thanks!

Plex manages videos on your local network drive and streams them to your TV or computers over the network. It can transcode different format of the videos on the fly into the one your player recognizes. It downloads metadata (thumbnails, title, summary, review) for the video automatically. It tracks your viewing of the videos - new, in-progress (remember where in the video), and played. It groups videos in dozens of way as playlists to let you browse them.

I usually just dump the videos into my NAS and points the Plex server to it. The TV player points to the Plex server and streams the videos from there.

Doesn't Kodi(XMBC) do all that, for free, and without installing any software ?

Plex is significantly better than XBMC, it's night and day.

Plex is significantly different than XBMC. Plex is a media streaming/transcoding platform and organizer. XBMC (or Kodi) is a local media player and organizer.

A properly configured Kodi setup is far more flexible than Plex and offers a lot of significant advantages (PsuedoTV, for example) as well as a larger set of supported formats and playback options.

I use both pretty extensively and the idea of trying to replace either one with the other is distasteful. Different tools for different jobs.

kodi has pseudoTv too.

Plex is the one that doesn't have PsuedoTV

Huh? Is it? Every time I tried Plex is was more limited and clunky when it came to media library organization. And it required me to install software on my NAS.

nope it isn't. Kodi is more customizable.

Plex is easy to install, but Kodi is much more advanced and powerful. Atleast it is for my fire stick and home network

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

It's for people who DVR shows and collect tons of BluRays and rip them so they don't have to hunt down the disc and wait through "you wouldn't download a car" every time they want to watch a movie.