If you’re a Plex user who owns an Apple TV with tvOS 14 or later, you can now take the company’s new user experience for a spin. Previously only available to testers on mobile Android and iOS devices, the beta Plex app can now be appreciated on a TV — arguably the most important screen for the popular media streaming and organization software.
The expanded use of artwork throughout the app is the most noticeable change, but Plex says the entire flow has been re-imagined to make things like content discovery more intuitive. Thankfully, the beta app is just that — a separate app from the most current stable Plex release — which means that if you sign up to be a tester and hate what you see, you can jump back to the classic Plex experience anytime.
The folks at Plex are eager to remind testers that the beta app is very much a work in progress. The official announcement notes, “please keep in mind this is nowhere close to perfect, but we want to get feedback from the community as early as we can,” with the team promising that the app will get better over time.
Other changes are also coming to the classic Plex experience. When the company launched its user reviews in 2024, they were initially only visible to your Plex friends. At the time, the company said it would eventually give folks the ability to make their reviews public to any Plex user — that day has arrived.
If you’ve published reviews previously, your privacy settings for those posts remain intact, but now you have several new visibility options including, Private, Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Anyone signed into Plex, and Anyone. These options are also now available for other profile privacy settings like Watchlist, Watch History, and your Friends list. As part of the update, you can now add comments to reviews written by your fellow Plex users.
You can also choose to make your Plex profile publicly accessible via watch.plex.tv. “By default all Plex users are findable by other Plex users in the app via search (unless you’ve already changed this setting). By making your profile publicly accessible on watch.plex.tv you can easily share a link to your profile with others so that they can see what you’ve been watching, what’s on your Watchlist, and more.”
Finally, Plex has something for its Plex Pass subscribers: HEVC hardware encoding.
This is the kind of update that only a true video nerd could love, but it may have background benefits for any Plex Pass user. In short, Plex Media Servers can now use hardware encoding to transcode your videos into HEVC format before streaming to your Plex client. Plex says this not only reduces bandwidth while preserving detail, but it also maintains any HDR metadata that might be present, even if the transcoding process has to drop your resolution down e.g. from 4K to 1080p.
For those who primarily stream from a Plex server to a client within the same home network, this isn’t likely to be a game changer (hopefully your network can already handle 4K streams), but if you ever access your server remotely, HEVC could make a big difference as you can’t always count on a fast connection when away from home.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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