Section 01

Plex Guide

K's Plex Journey

Why Plex

Getting a movie off your computer and onto your TV sounds like it should be simple. Add subtitles to the mix, and it stops being simple almost immediately. Here's the trail that led somewhere better.

Problem 01

Subtitles

Personally, I like having subtitles on. But the only way to make them play consistently across devices is to have them hard-burned directly into the video file itself.

Solution

VLC Player — plays nearly any media file, and lets you pick a subtitle track on the fly instead of baking one in.

Problem 02

Casting

That only works locally — on the computer running VLC, or a mobile device running VLC. I tried casting VLC from a PC to the TV over the same network and ran into issues. Could be a TV software problem. Could be a VLC software problem. Either way, it didn't work.

Problem 03

Setup

Tedious to set up. You'd have to copy the file into VLC every single time — it isn't readily available. Even with the movie sitting on a cloud drive, you'd still have to import it into VLC, per device, every time you wanted to watch it.

Problem 04

Marvel Movies

I always wanted to have a day to binge the Marvel Endgame series. Unfortunately, when I had the free time it was difficult to find a good stream with good quality without intrusive ads. I mean, that is just the way it works if you want something for free.

Anyways, beyond finding a good source — I wouldn't even know what order to watch it in, and it would require setup per-movie anyways. Secondly, there was a time where I did subscribe to Netflix just to see they only have one part of a franchise, and HBO MAX having the other movie, etc.

That got annoying. So to get the true experience I would have to pay subscription for multiple streaming services when I literally only have 1 day free to watch movies. There have been months where I just pay Netflix and don't use it too.

So — if I had a movie on my PC, how do I play it on my TV, with the option to use subtitles?

Found it

This is when I discovered Plex.

One server, one library, subtitles included — playable on anything in the house without the copy-paste routine. Next: getting it installed, and figuring out what hardware should actually run it.