 Let's uh, all right. So the next thing that I will take us to is Plex and so I use Plex to manage my all of my local media, right and and so the the I Think it's important to talk about two things with Plex. The first thing is price Plex is free We'll dig into the details here, of course, but I want to make sure everybody knows Plex is free for the most part They do have a Plex pass which is either five bucks a month 40 bucks a year or currently 120 bucks for a lifetime That adds some additional features and I'll make sure to highlight which features those are you can definitely get started for free And that's how I recommend you get started. So what is Plex? Well, what Plex says is Plex brings together all the media that matters to you Your personal collection will look beautiful alongside stellar streaming content Enjoy live TV and DVR a growing catalog of great web shows news and podcasts It's finally possible to enjoy all the media you love in a single app on any device No matter where you are. I think that Plex buried the lead because the very last thing they say is the key No matter where you are, that's the key to what makes Plex work, right? All your media No matter where you are now there's an asterisk there. It's all your non DRM to media So if you've got DRM media inside your Netflix app inside your Apple TV 8 plus app or whatever or Apple TV up on Apple TV Plus that doesn't work with Plex. It needs to be non DRM media. You need to either rip it yourself or acquire it however you choose So when you went and I and I will explain how to get Plex set up a Little bit later here because there's a couple different ways But we talked so much about Plex on the show I just wanted to go through what I do with Plex. So here's my home library. It is You can see things that I've added here You can see things that I've added to movies and TV shows You can also see different playlists that I've created if we go to the movies list You can see my entire movie library or it's currently organized alphabetically These are all stored on my Synology disk station, but you can install Plex on your Mac You can install it even on a Raspberry Pi if you want although be aware that the CPU that runs it will define whether The Plex server can do transcoding or not and that's an important thing to test and check with But if you've got a Raspberry Pi and you want to try it out. Hey, nothing's stopping you and it might work out just fine Plex allows me to just have my media Anywhere I want right? That's what we said no matter where I am and that's the key here So you can see that I was Taking our TV shows from the TVO and slurping them into Plex I can't do that anymore because I don't use TVO anymore as I mentioned But I have TV series in Plex actually I've got some that I ripped from DVDs that we enjoy And so I can watch my TV shows wherever I want if there's a movie that I want to watch I just go and tell it I want to play the movie and then you know it and what's cool is when you pull your media into Plex all the metadata that you're seeing here the the title well the poster image the Description the actors the trailer all of that stuff that is on Plex They pull all of that stuff together when they pull when they see when it sees the movie file So you put the movie file in a folder that is your Plex library You name it a certain way and it's pretty flexible with how you name it But I generally name it movie and then year in parentheses and then dot whatever the format is so usually dot MKV If I've ripped it from a DVD or dot MP4 if I want to convert it into that format or whatever and then from there Plex looks and says ah, okay I'm gonna check my databases pull in figure out what movie it is pull in all that metadata and then organize it for you And that's it and that's how it works then you can take these things and sync them to your iPhone iPad now Plex like like we were talking about with YouTube TV and Fubo Plex has apps for all of your devices so your iPhone your iPad your TVs your Apple TV Roku right all of that stuff there are Plex apps available So you can just stream your content directly streaming content from your Plex server Either locally or remotely so I go to an Airbnb I launched the Plex app on their smart TV I log into my Plex account and boom now I have access to my library over there works Just fine. That is all included in the free version of Plex if you want to download content to sync To your device to watch offline that requires a Plex pass if you want to use the Plex amp app in your car To listen to your music that you can also store in your Plex library that too Requires a subscription and I will pull up the music thing here so that we can all see it But pulls in, you know all of your stuff and And you know again put the metadata pulls it all together They like I said they have an app called Plex amp you can play music In your web browser and on the Plex apps on your various devices That's part of the free version the Plex amp app, which is a new car play Specific iOS app. They might have an Android and Google auto version of it too That requires a Plex pass subscription, but again It's you know 40 bucks a year 5 bucks a month or currently 120 bucks for a lifetime It goes up when I bought my lifetime pass for Plex it was 70 So if you I again test it use it for free, but when it's time to move I would I recommend the lifetime thing so That's Plex. That's what I got Can you explain? So you talked about transcoding yes earlier Why is that important good question so your you may choose to store your Content it at super high quality right so if you rip it from a Blu-ray you probably want to keep it at Blu-ray Resolution right so you get this big 26 gig file or something for a you know, whatever two-hour movie And that's what you saw on your Plex server when you watch it on your TV Whatever format that movies in may or may not match what the app that you're running on your TV Can display natively It may or may not want match what your iPhone can display natively your Apple TV your iPad Apple's devices are notoriously restrictive in the formats that they can display so Plex and the the Plex server and the Plex app negotiate this when the When you start playing something and then they decide can I send it natively if I can I will because that way the device gets all the data and It can display it the best that it can if it can't then it's up to the Plex server to Transcode to convert either the audio or the video or both into a format that's usable on that client device And that is where transcoding comes into play the other time transcoding comes into play is if you want to download to your iPad for example, I don't need to download a full 4k movie onto my iPad I can't see a difference to be perfectly honest on a little you know 11 inch screen Some people may and then you can choose to do that But I choose to save things in what Plex calls medium quality on my iPad so that I don't fill the stupid thing up with movies With only just a few movies and so then it's up to the server to transcode it and the faster the server can do that the better off I am Obviously if it needs to transcode it for real-time playing then it needs to be able to do that in real-time so yeah