XBMC or Plex?

The first thing I'd recommend for anyone interested in their own HTPC is a top-notch media player front end. Even before forking out for the right kind of hardware to run this on, I'd suggest heading over to xbmc.org or plexapp.com and try the software on for size on any kit you have handy. Plex and XBMC are two very slick, polished media players who share a lot of DNA. Plex is Mac-specific, whereas you can get a build of XBMC for pretty much any piece of hardware you might have lying around already.

Welcome to XBMC:

and Plex:


The first thing to say when comparing these two is that Plex is an offshoot from the XBMC code stream and has been diverging ever since. The Plex team have done a fantastic job of polishing up third party application support, installing plugins for streaming services such as YouTube & iPlayer (to pick the two most obvious examples). It's possible to install similar plugins in to XBMC of course (and I think perhaps the plugin library for XBMC is larger), but XBMC hasn't put so much time and effort into making it a slick process. While Plex hides any technical detail behind a simple, searchable interface not unlike Apple's own App store (in fact the Plex team also use the name App Store for their interface), XBMC happily shows its SVN backend to the user and leaves them to navigate a deeply nested file hierarchy to find the plugins of interest.

The clunky XBMC plugin system:

And the smooth as silk Plex approach:


On the downside, in my experience XBMC is by far the more responsive UI to use, which is such an important factor of any living room equipment. When I click a button, I want the system to respond immediately. XBMC does... Plex not so much. I often found an irritating one or two second delay when interacting with the Plex UI. Now admittedly this was on my old generation kit (more on the hardware in a later post) and perhaps the UI is perfectly responsive on my brand spanking new Mac mini, but for now XBMC is doing a nice job for me.

So I'm in the XBMC camp right now, but I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming release of Plex 9 which is set to bring a whole new decentralized media server implementation to the party. That might just be enough to make me switch back :)