Plex releases beta update for Apple TV, among other updates

Plex is rolling out a few updates today – chief among them is the ability to write and leave reviews on Plex. You can even comment on these as Plex looks to get a little more social.
What excites me most is the new Plex beta for Apple TV, which brings an updated app and visual experience to the big screen. The company says that more platforms will join the beta soon. I’ve been using it for a little over a day right now, and so far, it looks quite clean, but it’s still a little buggy.
The new interface uses cool logo fonts, like those in the mobile app preview released at the end of 2024. It’s well designed, but personally, I liked the adaptive colours in the old Apple TV app compared to the new experience’s more persistent use of green, burgundy and blue.
This is the experience that was released in preview on mobile in late 2024. The mobile app looks stunning, but I was less impressed with the tablet version. The TV version seems to be similar to the tablet, and I hope Plex brings more colour-adapting features in the future.
Everyone’s a critic
In a post-letterbox world Plex is looking to get a little more social. This means that all users can start writing their own movie reviews on the service and other people on Plex will see them.
People can comment on these posts and you can view other users profiles to see what they’ve been watching and what else they’ve reviewed. All of that said, it’s worth pointing out that you can still use Plex with out the social features if you’ve locked down your privacy settings.
An encoding upgrade
For Plex Pass owners, the service will start supporting HEVC encoding, which will allow for higher-end video without increasing bandwidth usage. The company also says that this new encoding has the ability to preserve HDR metadata which can allow for more colour-accurate movies and shows when your display works with it.
This encoding process needs a CPU/GPU combo that supports 10-bit HEVC encoding. However, this isn’t supported on AMD hardware, so Plex server builders with AMD hardware are out of luck. The toggle for the new feature will only appear on supported servers.
The Plex forum post on HEVC encoding also mentions that enabling this feature might take more processing power.
Overall, it’s exciting to see Plex continue to move forward on its new build and it will be interesting to see how it works when it finally lands on lower-end TVs and devices like Roku Sticks and Android TV.
Source: Plex Blog
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