You will find (unofficial) add-ons to support streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, Disney Plus, Netflix, and more. It is not the most user-friendly home media software out there but it supports an absolutely insane amount of add-ons, making it one of the best options for those who want to host downloaded content alongside their favorite paid streaming services. Kodi is an open-source media center that has been around almost as long as HTPCs (home theater PCs) have been a thing. Can provide cover art, music videos, trailers, and more.
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These include access to some nice features of the otherwise free Plex mobile apps, the ability to sync a cloud storage system, and much more.
While the bulk of Plex’s features can be enjoyed for free, you do have to upgrade to a Plex Pass if you want to enjoy some nicer features. During my testing, I had no trouble with streaming wirelessly over my gigabit router and mid-tier Internet service, nor did I encounter any codec errors from playing an incompatible file. Like other options, Plex also transcodes on the fly and automatically adjusts its performance and quality for available bandwidth. Plex transforms your library, adding metadata like cover art and IMDB results to enhance your viewing experience.
If you have multiple terabytes of media content with metadata, cover art, etc., it will only populate this information as fast as your connection permits.Īside from this folder-specific issue, the menus are beautiful, fast, and easy to navigate from every platform I tested. The menus were fast and easy to navigate, though I did run into some hiccups trying to browse my stupidly large music collection. One of the first things you’ll notice about Plex is that its menus are beautiful on every platform. Remote access is ready out of the box and does not require any port forwarding or additional setup. Setting up your Plex server is a largely automated process, and getting a stream set up on the other end is usually as simple as downloading the free app for your chosen platform, be it a smart TV, web browser, XBox One, PlayStation, or Apple TV.
Plex can be set up on any hard drive, ideally a NAS (network-attached storage device), but since my PC is on pretty much 24/7 I had no problem making my main machine the host for my own Plex server. Plex is possibly the most popular media server software out there, as it offers an easy setup and a highly flexible system for managing different types of media libraries. Menus might not handle large media collections well (depends on connection quality).Some features require a subscription or lifetime pass.Provide cover art, music videos, trailers, and more.If the file is not there, hit the start button and it should be there.ģ: Create a text element in OBS or Xplit, then point the text source to the current_song.txt file. Or choose your own directory in the Configuration Window A file called ‘current_song.txt’ will be created in the Items in italics are web-apps, and are currently supported by chrome and Firefox.Īll web music players require the groovemarklet, downloadable here.Ģ: Run SMD.exe. Media Player Classic Home Cinema (mpc-hc).
So I made SMD (For All your "dirty mind"ers out there, I know haha). It's based off of SMG, SMG was not working for me and it looks like the development was dead. This is a tool made for streamers who want to display their music on their stream. This project is no longer supported and does not work!