If I understand correctly , the reason that plex need media server client is to do transcoding and to watch your content outside your local network , why there’s no option to use plex without media server to play media direct from your connected hard disk or your local network like nova video player or infuse without transcoding or remotely watch your content outside your local network??
Plex is intended to be a one-stop shop for video metadata and sourcing. If you have multiple clients (a phone, a TV, your computer, etc), it can be a pain to maintain the metadata for all these clients and keep them synchronized. With a central server for all the clients to connect to, each player can be a dumb program that lets the server handle it.
And as long as you leave your media on a server in a single spot, it makes sense to have it support changing the format of the video (transcoding) to optimize the video for the player itself. Phones can have pretty bad support for some video files/codecs, so Plex handles not only turning it into a file that the phone can handle, but also at the resolution the phone runs at. No point in playing a 4K HEVC video file on your phone if the resolution of the screen is 720p.
Kodi (which I hear Plex is based upon), is a standalone player that will do what you want. It can get all the metadata for your media, and can access it from a local drive.
2 Likes
I think most people can’t understand meaning of media server and why they may need one for just play movie or series from there hard disk or local network , maybe plex can make option for those
That makes zero sense.
I’m pretty sure that anyone who goes to the trouble of installing a media server rather than a media player will (or at least should) know exactly what they’re installing.
So what you are asking is for this conversation to take place:
Person A: I have no idea what this program I installed does. Can you have it do something different instead?
Plex: Okay, sure.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
