Some interesting news has made its way online this morning, and that is that if you have a 3rd generation Apple TV, you can now access your Plex media center using a simple hack named ‘PlexConnect’. In essence, it allows you to run the Plex software on your Apple TV, giving you the ability to watch a huge variety of content from your local network on your TV.
If you’ve never used Plex, it’s essentially a media player made up of two parts: an app and a server. The app gives you access to the server, and your library of files.
The service already has apps out for iPhone and iPad (and jailbroken 2nd gen Apple TV), and has done for a little while. Now, however, thanks to the hack, it’s now available to ATV3 users. Plex announced its availability on its blog earlier today:
Enter PlexConnect. The brainchild of Baa, roidy and f00b4r, it’s a super clever little hack which allows a rich, fully-functional Plex client on un-jailbroken ATV2 and ATV3 (1080p!) devices. Essentially, you run a program on your computer which masquerades as the Trailer app. Next, change one setting on the ATV, and you’re up and running. It took me less than 2 minutes to install and get it running. It already uses the new transcoder (which means great support for subtitles), and I suspect it’ll support myPlex soon as well. In the PlexPass preview release of the media server, it also supports AC3 5.1 (remuxing and transcoding from DTS). Another cool thing: it supports iTunes DRM’ed video files.
It’s really rather clever, and simple all at the same time. If you want to try it out, head on over to the Plex blog to get all the details.
