Things I Learned in Quarantine - Part 6: Building a Home Media Center for your old iTunes Movies, Music and Music Videos collection

One of those projects that had been sitting on the back burner for a bit was a question of what to do with a huge library of music and movies that I had sitting in Apple iTunes all these years. My library was on an external drive connected to a MacBook, but any time I thought to use it I had the hassle of booting up the Mac and getting it connected to the network. It was too much of a hassle most of the time and I didn't do it. The last night I had done this I spent at least 30 minutes dealing with the ridiculous login requirements placed on Apple TV units to your Home Sharing setup (granted my Apple TVs are first and second generation) and that just damped my desire to bother with it. If it's not getting the password correct, its a silly pin requirement that causes me to run back and forth between the machine and my TV and the popup that goes with it that I had to deal with. I was over Apple's iTunes Home Sharing and it needed to go.

So the question was - how could I easily access my vast library of movies and music videos around my home and even remotely?

I ended up selecting Plex.TV and the reasons are pretty simple - it's a home media server that can be used on any device where you load the Plex TV app and it's free. What I found most appealing about Plex.TV was that even my old Samsung smart televisions had an app for Plex.tv and could run the client to my server. Also, with the app, it's easy to connect to your home network while outside your home even when you have dynamic IP addresses on your home network - Plex.TV takes care of that (with a small manual step of enabling Port Forwarding I'll cover later).

The best resource I found for installing the app is on this link: imore.com

Now for the downsides of Plex.tv. For starters, it cannot read and sync your iTunes playlists. You can try, but overall the process was cumbersome and did not work for me. Part of the reason for this is I am on Catalina and the new iTunes database format was not import-able - I did try the export options for get an XML file but the attempts did not work. I may or may not revisit this later if support becomes available. These days I mostly use streaming services for music anyways so this was not a deal breaker for me, but I do have over 10,000 songs on iTunes.

The second downside is the interface itself - I assume to generate revenue Plex.TV puts an emphasis on a whole media experience - offering integrations with TIDAL music service and video on demand services. To get to "your library" you have to flip the tab to your library and have the checkbox to retain the selection checked in your options so that it defaults to that page when to relaunch the app. I only use the app to watch my movies and music videos, I do not need all their add-ons. There is an option for a 30-day trial of their PlexPass setup with a TIDAL subscription and I did try that, but did not keep it and actually never even tried the TIDAL service since I prefer Spotify and Pandora.

Finally, there was an issue with my router that I had to resolve. Plex.TV would open a port on the router for remote access, but it would disappear after several minutes. To make the port always accessible, you need to assign your media server a static IP (I already had because I used it as a DNS Server in my article - Things I Learned While Quarantined - Part 1: piHole + Docker (macOS) - running a local ad-blocking DNS server in your home) and then you need to enable port forwarding for the Plex.TV app which I used this article to help with that - StreamingAdvisor.com

With a static ip on the server, the server installed and the port forwarding setup - now you can start the work to import your library into the Plex.TV database (it will use the iTunes locations for the media - it does not move or copy the content). One benefit here is that if you add files to your iTunes directories then Plex.TV will automatically pick them up and add them to its library.

It was helpful for me that the Movies and Music Videos I did have were in folders under iTunes with those respective names already. So when I did my media import, I just set up a scan for Movies and Music Videos in their respective folders. I was able to import all my music (but not playlists), but that required more effort as my music was not all under the Music directory. I did go through the work to move everything there by using the iTunes "consolidate music library" function.

With everything setup, you can start to install the Plex.TV clients on your smart TVs and mobile devices. Signing in to your Plex.TV server is pretty simple - either by using your email/password or by using the scan code displayed on the server. It really is very simple.

After several weeks I can say this is a much better setup than trying to use the limiting and frustrating experience of Apple TV. Besides, Apple TV is not an app on your televisions or mobile devices, Apple does not want you to have that much flexibilty, but Plex.TV lets you access your library from anywhere. (There are Apple TV apps, but not to connect to your Home Sharing videos/music.)

I hope you all are staying healthy and safe and if you have any questions on this subject, please do not hesitate to ask.