Open source Plex media center to run on LG TVs

The Plex developers have announced a new partnership with LG Electronics. Under the terms of the agreement, LG will be integrating the Plex platform into its 2011 Netcast enabled High Definition TVs and Blu-ray devices. Discussing the announcement LG Director of LCD TV Research and Development Hojun Nam said, “After considering many alternative solutions, LG Electronics chose to utilize Plex’s media server platform technology as a part of its next generation NetCast enabled home entertainment products because of the breadth of available applications and content and the ease of developing new services.”

The open source Plex media centre is a skinable fork of the XBMC Media Center for Mac OS X systems that includes several customised additions to support a wide range of audio, video and image formats. Released last week, the current version of Plex, simply refereed to as Plex/Nine (version v0.9.0.21), is a major update and an almost complete, "from-scratch rewrite" of the library and client.

To date, the media centre application has only been available for Mac OS X systems. However, as part of the Netcast Connected TVs announcement, the developers also confirmed that a Windows version of Plex will be available "later this year".

Further information about the partnership between Plex and LG Electronics can be found in an official press release. Plex source code is hosted on GitHub and is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence (GPLv2), apart from the Plex Media Server which is currently closed source and connects to the GPL licensed client over the network.

See also:

• Plex media centre adds support for hardware-accelerated video decoding, a report from The H.

(crve)