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Several years ago, I was using Plex as a way to watch movies. I had my TV connected to my iMac as a second monitor and used Plex as the interface to control the content on my TV.

When I first started using it, Plex was standard Mac app, somewhat like a cross between Front Row and iTunes. It was an offshoot of XBMC, and it has really evolved.

When I got an Apple TV, I started focusing on getting all of my content into iTunes and the Apple TV kind of replaced Plex and I stopped using it.

I had a Roku box on the TV in the basement and I had tried several things to stream local content to it and was never really happy with the results.  I had installed an early version of the Plex client and it was a little buggy.

This week, I wanted to use the Roku, so I checked out the Plex client and saw that it had been updated with a release version.  As I was downloading the latest Plex channel, I went to my Mac and downloaded the latest Plex.

Wow! It has changed a lot (in a good way) since I last used it.

It is now basically a server and a web interface. It’s amazing how much better it works. I had it up and streaming to the Roku in record time.  I knew there was an iOS client, so I figured while I had it set up, I might as well check that out too.

I had tried to use my iPad to watch content on my computer from iTunes, and it really pretty much sucked. It took forever for the shows to start.

The Plex client is unbelievable in how much faster it is.

Today at work during lunch, I streamed a show from Plex on my Mac at home to my iPhone over LTE. It worked great!  It was a little pixellated because I selected a relatively low bitrate, but it worked. At home on WiFi, it’s much better quality.

If you are looking for a good way to get access to all of your content on just about any device (except, ironically, appleTV) you can’t go wrong with Plex!  Give it a try.