Al­tern­at­ives to Plex: an overview of the best media centres

Media centres are the perfect place to store col­lec­tions of images, music, and videos that people create on their computers, smart­phones, or other devices. Their primary function is to store this media, such as your latest vacation photos or your favorite film. However, you may find your patience being tested if you start searching for a par­tic­u­lar file, only to realise that nothing is organised properly.

If you’re looking for a suitable man­age­ment platform for your media files, you will no doubt come across Plex even­tu­ally. Launched as a freeware project in 2007, Plex has an im­press­ive range of features and is un­doubtedly one of the best media centres of all time. Thanks to various streaming portals and services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, or Vevo, Plex users can play online content directly through their media centre interface. However, Plex does have some for­mid­able al­tern­at­ives.

The primary function of a media centre is to organise all media files (audio, video, and image) on the selected computer system in a clearly arranged format. The user interface should make it easy for you to find and play back the content you want.

Plex al­tern­at­ives (as well as Plex itself) should not just allow playback on the original device, but should also be able to play through external devices. Streaming your own media content on a TV should be a standard feature, which is why most media centre in­ter­faces are also designed to be used with smart TVs.

The best Plex al­tern­at­ives should also be able to stream video and in­form­a­tion services. Of course, your personal interests are most important here: Netflix and YouTube are more widely supported than other services because of their pop­ular­ity. However, if you are not in­ter­ested in these main­stream platforms, streaming links will be ir­rel­ev­ant to you as a user. It is therefore advisable to check the ad­di­tion­al features in advance (often available as optional add-ons) that can be used as a re­spect­able al­tern­at­ive to Plex. It is also important that the selected media man­age­ment option allows multiple devices to access the library at the same time. If you want to enjoy a film while a flatmate or a family member is streaming music, your chosen Plex al­tern­at­ive must always be usable by several people at the same time.

In addition to the range of functions, cost and com­pat­ib­il­ity play an important role when it comes to choosing the best media centre. The latter does not just deal with which systems the media centre should be created on, it is also about what platforms you can access the media centre from. You should also consider how up to date the Plex al­tern­at­ive is when making your decision: since many media centres are in­ter­con­nec­ted with web services, timely updates to close security holes are par­tic­u­larly important.

To make finding a suitable Plex al­tern­at­ive easier, here are some in­ter­est­ing examples of the best media centres and a guide to their ad­vant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages.

Mezzmo is very easy to set up: after in­stalling the program, it auto­mat­ic­ally searches and organises all the films, video clips, music, photos, and stored subtitles saved on the system being used. These files can sub­sequently be played back on all devices in the network that support UPnP or DNLA, or that have the app installed (Android only) – Mezzmo transcodes the media content in real time to ensure optimal streaming quality. You can access the media col­lec­tion sim­ul­tan­eously with multiple devices at any time, so that sharing the media centre is no problem. If you are having technical problems with Mezzmo, you can contact Conceiva with a ticket or through the user forum.

Me­dia­Portal is an open source ap­plic­a­tion and therefore benefits enorm­ously from col­lab­or­at­ing with the community: plugins developed as a sup­ple­ment that provide ad­di­tion­al functions that can be installed and in­teg­rated just as easily as skins to give the user interface a new ap­pear­ance. This Plex al­tern­at­ive is only available for Windows and there are no separate apps for smart­phones, tablets, or smart TVs – but there are ex­ten­sions that allow remote access to your Me­dia­Portal library from these same devices. All skins and plugins are available at any time from the official download page.

Kodi delivers all the central features of a good media centre: you can organise all your media content easily and play it back through the user interface, which supports a variety of audio, video, and image formats. Im­ple­ment­ing new formats and tech­no­lo­gies (like video ac­cel­er­a­tion) is handled by the Kodi team in real time. The Plex al­tern­at­ive auto­mat­ic­ally retrieves metadata from the web to provide ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion about archived content. Kodi’s greatest strength, however, is that the software is platform in­de­pend­ent. There are not only in­stall­a­tion packages for Windows, Linux, and macOS, but also for Android, iOS, and Raspberry-Pi. Remote control apps for iOS and Android complete the range of options.

By in­teg­rat­ing various streaming providers, Stremio not only provides an excellent overview of when and where content is available, but also offers a good price com­par­is­on. In terms of com­pat­ib­il­ity, the open source platform is just as well set up as Kodi: desktop versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux are available, as well as free apps for Android and iOS. Ad­di­tion­ally, the developer plans to release a web ap­plic­a­tion for the Plex al­tern­at­ive, which will then allow them to manage and access their own library as well as the existing clients for desktop PCs and mobile devices.

The media centre is regularly updated by the developer team. Recent updates are often available as a beta version for download – however, users must expect that the software may not always work properly in these pre-releases. The Plex al­tern­at­ive has an optional web browser interface and is ex­pand­able with plugins. This can be used, for example, to integrate a link to Sound­Cloud. Further in­form­a­tion on the de­vel­op­ment status and useful links to in­ter­est­ing Universal Media Server websites can be found in the official directory for the project on Github Github.

If you start the Emby server after in­stall­a­tion, the web dashboard will auto­mat­ic­ally open, allowing you to configure all the necessary settings for your personal media server. This is not just about filling the library, but also about finding the perfect setup for transcod­ing the content. It is also possible to create different user profiles, including access au­thor­isa­tions. This way you can ensure that adult content is not ac­cess­ible to children, for example. If you subscribe to the monthly Emby Premiere package, you can use numerous ad­di­tion­al features like cloud and folder syn­chron­isa­tion, a cover con­fig­ur­at­or, and a backup function. In addition, you can stream videos and music to in­di­vidu­al devices, as well as save them when you take out a sub­scrip­tion so that they can be played without a network con­nec­tion.

TVersity combines your personal media col­lec­tion with useful web content like free video streams, RSS feeds, or podcasts that can be retrieved from the client on the chosen device. If you’re looking for a specific file, you’ll benefit from the media centre’s out­stand­ing per­form­ance, which is sure to impress even large libraries with more than 100.000 entries. A large part of their fast, un­com­plic­ated file retrieval system is the powerful search mask and in­teg­rated cache function, which caches transcoded content. The Plex al­tern­at­ive has a REST API that allows you to integrate the media centre into other tools easily.

Plex is one of the most popular ap­plic­a­tions for or­gan­iz­ing your own mul­ti­me­dia col­lec­tion on PCs, smart­phones, and other devices, but there are a number of good al­tern­at­ives that don’t have to hide behind the main­stream media centres when it comes to func­tion­al­ity and streaming quality. This article explains exactly what char­ac­ter­ises software that manages and plays back audio, video, and image files, and what Plex al­tern­at­ives are available.