Plex on the Roku

Plex is now on the Roku. If you follow me on Geeknews Central you know that I have a Roku XD|S and that I liked everything about it, except you couldn’t easily stream media from your internal network. There were ways but, they were complicated and unreliable. Well Plex just saved me $100 (the cost of an Apple TV). If you aren’t familiar with Plex it is a fork of XBMC and one of the best way to view your media on a Mac. I actually prefer it over Boxee for watching video. Boxee does have more channels and sharing options that Plex does not have, however I like the Plex UI better. Plus Plex is available on multiple devices, including all OS devices, Mac, PC and Android devices.  It is how I consume most of my media on my Mac and my iPad, including stuff I download from the itunes Store or from Amazon.

Well, this morning I woke up to a post on my feeds, that Plex had been added to the Roku. It is still in beta so you have to add it as a private channel. You do have to have the Plex media server running on a computer on the same network for this too work, Mac or PC, (sorry Linux) . Once you have added it to your Roku channel listing it will stream media that is on your Plex server. Right now it is only streaming video, but according to the Plex blog music and images are coming soon. When you first add Plex it does take sometime to update, so be patient. Once it updates it works fine. I finally have everything I want for now on my chosen media device the Roku XD|S. This makes me very happy, I hope that the Plex team continues to improve on this application. I think this is good for both Plex and Roku.