I have had my Roku box for a little over a year now, I mainly use it to connect to Amazon Prime Instant Video, Netflix, and occasionally Pandora. Â I have always known there is more to do with a Roku but never took the time to explore.
Over the holiday season I was reading many of the “Got a new_____ Here are some tips” posts and found this one on Roku, which introduced me to the Plex Media Server.
Plex took 5 minutes to install on a machine at home, and less time to configure and point to my media library. Â For the most part Plex figured out what was what and displayed the right metadata, on a few items I had to perform some file name cleanup to get them to display properly.
Next up install the iPad app (or Android), and the Plex Channel on the Roku box and like magic I can access my library from anywhere.  The performance on both the TV and the iPad has been excellent so far.
Plex also offers Premium features, which I have not tried, though the upcoming Dropbox integration  looks interesting.
Plex Media Server (Available for Windows, Mac and Linux)
There are few words to describe how much I like plex. I actually didn’t have great luck on Roku – some videos seemed to crash it – but I need to get back to that. But I have plex hooked up to my Tv and projector and stream to iOS devices. love it!