Words On Wednesday

It’s that time of year. Not Christmas, it’s Plex Day. We’re now four years in since I  started using Plex in 2020, and my use case has certainly evolved in that time. It’s still my main music platform, and I’ve started using it more for video as well. We still have some streaming services (namely YouTube TV and Netflix), but I’ve gradually started shifting from Prime Video and Hulu after we canceled those subscriptions. Netflix has enough exclusives that the kids like, and until Plex gets college football, I’m going to need some sort of cable TV source. Hardware Last year , I was still up in the air about DVD piracy. The Surface Pro 6 I was using for the server didn’t have a disc drive, so I was considering buying a USB Blu-ray drive. I had also brought my old desktop out of storage, which I was considering migrating the whole server to, but I hadn’t yet booted it back up. My hand was eventually forced when the kids asked to watch something that wasn’t on any streaming services we...

I wrote about Plex on December 16, 2020 and again on December 15, 2021 . Therefore, the third Wednesday in December is Plex day from now on. I stubbed out a post for 2022, but I was at a weird point in my life then and never got around to writing it. Fortunately, I just finished school and now I have a little bit of free time again. Hence, Plex Day 2023. At the end of 2020, I was just getting started with Plex. I suffered through the issues with getting my music collection organized into a folder structure that plays well with Plex Media Server. At that time, it wasn’t that I was passionate about Plex as a platform, I was just looking for something to replace Google Play Music (Pour one out for the homies). By December 2021, I was a little more sold on Plex. In fact, I had purchased the lifetime Plex Pass in August 2021, I was just really ahead on writing posts and that post didn’t publish until December. In either case, I was making a gamble. If I bought a lifetime Plex Pass and ende...

Plex offers a premium tier for a paid subscription, the Plex Pass, and I’m almost tempted to bite because of their latest music app. Part of what drew me to Plex originally was the ability to listen to my own music, from the internet, without paying any sort of regular subscription fee. No ads like YouTube Music, no limited selection like Amazon Music, just me and my tunes. Sure, they offered a paid subscription for some fancy frills, but it wasn’t anything I needed. I used Plex for several months without any bit of interest in a Plex Pass. The web version on desktop worked perfectly. On mobile, it was a little less ideal. The first-party Plex app is fine for video, but it kinda chokes on music. It takes forever to actually recognize my library when I’m not on my home network, and will randomly stop playing after two or three songs if my screen is off. This is after I paid five bucks for that unlock, mind you. For whatever reason, the app continues playing just fine when connected to A...