I already have my videos and music tracks organized in my pc file system. As a newbie, I’d like to know whether I can use plex to simply browse the filesystem. I am not interested in plex’s own classification of my tracks.
What does this mean?
This is what a file explorer is for (like Windows Explorer), Plex is a media SERVER application, that allows you to remotely view and listen to your content both locally with devices on your home network, as well as remotely from other devices connected to the internet. You can also use its DLNA Feature on your home network, which I think is closer to what you may be asking for, but there’s 1,000 other DLNA server softwares that will be better suited for just that task.
Apologies for my ignorance. I don’t know how to use plex from my tivo, really. When I go into it, I get a lot of different pictures on my screen and some kind of search function. What I looking is something simple that can access a shared file system on my PC and play mp3’s and videos from it. I guess I really need to RTFM, but is there a plex manual or tutorial that tells me in more detail what are plex’s capabilities and how to access them? The tutorials I have found online only tell me how to download and install plex, but nothing about its capabilities. And if plex under tivo is not the proper DNLA for my purpose, how can I get this functionality on my main AV setup, which is tivo based?
Plex can do that. It will assign posters to your movies and TV shows on your PC, as well as album art for your music. Plex does not re-organize anything, it leaves it where it is, however, you need to re-work your media library in most cases to get plex to work properly. Things have to be named right, and folder structures (especially for TV Shows) have to be done the PLEX way for you to have a seamless and good user experience.
