The battle of the free media players Attention, would-be cord cutters: If you’re going to tell the cable man to shove it, you’re going to want a full-featured media center app to make browsing your digital movies, music, and pictures as pretty and painless as possible. Two of the top no-cost contenders are the open-source XBMC and Plex, a partly proprietary fork of XBMC that focuses on streaming media to multiple devices. Which is the blockbuster and which is the dud? Let’s find out. Round 1: Setup XBMC, formerly known as Xbox Media Center, identified the music, movies, and TV shows in our massive 200GB collection in minutes, quickly dishing out accurate file details, episode summaries, and album/show art with next to no fuss. Plex, on the other hand, was a nightmare. During our initial setup of the Plex Media Server we ran into a crippling bug that wouldn’t let us add anything. After stumbling around the Plex forums for two hours we managed to fix the issue. Plex’s plodding browser-based media manager took over three additional hours to scan our media, and when it was done, the video library was full of incorrect information. Note: Before you scan your library, rename your media according to specific (yet for some reason, unadvertised) Plex conventions (see here). Also note: Plex’s newbie documentation sucks. Winner: XBMC XBMC correctly identified our videos and used the information to provide episode summaries and filters by actor, genre, studio, and more
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