Why use a macOS Plex app instead of web?

General Discussions
1

I’m new to Plex, and haven’t found any discussion of what benefits (or not) a dedicated app provides over a web browser.

2

@DHK1 said:
I’m new to Plex, and haven’t found any discussion of what benefits (or not) a dedicated app provides over a web browser.

A web browser is not an ideal media player. It has very tight restrictions of what it can do and what it cannot…
The PMP on the other hand runs as a regular app.
So it supports these things a regular web browser doesn’t:

  • surround sound ‘bitstreaming’ (send the audio stream unchanged to your AVR)
  • surround sound decoding and downmixing (a web browser requests these operations from the Plex server instead)
  • frame rate switching (so e.g. a cinema movie with 23.997 fps is sent in exactly this frame rate to the display, which reduces micro-juddering)
  • PMP supports a lot more codecs than a web browser, so the server doesn’t need to transcode. Which 1) lowers cpu load on the server and 2) increases quality because every transcoding causes loss of quality.
  • PMP can be adapted more detailed to your particular needs. The web app is rather inflexible.