Product Review

Love your digital collection of movies, TV shows and music, but hate using clumsy interfaces to play them on your TV? It's time to check out Plex, the ultimate media center program. It's amazing at what it does, but a little complex to use: you need a server and a client for it to work. If you need help figuring all this out, it's time to download "Plex, a Manual: Your Media With Style", the latest guide from MakeUseOf.

If you're anything like Lachlan, you've got a lot of media - music, recorded TV shows and DVD rips, all meticulously managed on your computer's hard drive. You've also got a TV and sound system all set up, ready to go. It's just sitting there, dying to play all your media. But how can you play the content from your computer on your TV?

You could just plug your computer into your TV and use a media player like VLC, but even with a wireless keyboard and mouse this would be a pain if you're sitting on the other side of the room. Alternatively, you could buy an Apple TV or other media streamer. This isn't ideal either, though, because they typically have terrible interfaces or awful codec support. Wouldn't it be great if you could have access to all of your media from pretty much any device on your network, supporting almost every file type and presenting it with a beautiful, easy to use interface? You can. It's an app called Plex, and it's free.

This amazing free guide will teach you:

-How to set up the Plex client and server on your computers
-Organizing your media with Plex
-Accessing your media from anywhere with Plex
-Using your smartphone as a Plex remote
-Understanding Plex's playback settings
-Finding channels for online content
-Customizing Plex to look however you want