These are what you will need to use to play the content from your Plex Servers and there are quite a few of them, Desktop Apps, Mobile Apps, Smart TV Apps, VR Apps and Game Console Apps. As well as a Plugin for Kodi. But beware they are not all in active development, and not without issues. Plex do have a habit of launching things with great marketing buzz and then they just fall by the wayside or get removed. (I know they have limited resources and need to make the best use of what they have available.)
Desktop Apps
Be Careful there are now 2 Plex Desktop Apps, the original (and best) Plex Media Player and the Plex App
Plex Media Player
Plex Media Player is my preferred app as it still provides the choice to use the old pre UNO interface, which I find much easier to deal with, especially for you Server Administration Tasks. It also has a TV Mode which was designed to be use with HTPC Setups. Back in August 2019 Plex did threaten to end support for Plex Media Player in six months, but that announcement caused such a backlash, they have promised to keep it around for a while longer. But with Plex you never know.
Sadly although they have agreed to keep Plex Media Player around Plex have decided to make Plex Media Player much harder to find. (Which makes for very confused users, downloading the newer app and not finding the features they were looking for.)
You will not find it on the Main Downloads page. If you download the Desktop App from there you will end up with the feature restricted Plex App (I will come to that next.) Instead you have to hunt around the forum for it, even a search for PMP Download does not provide an easy link to it.
Although to be fair you can find a link to it in the main Announcements Thread.
https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-media-player/120475
There is also a new Beta Version available here:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-media-player-3-0-windows-and-mac-forum-preview/476401
If you are a fan of the old interface I would advise keeping your own backups of the downloads, as you never now when Plex will remove it.
Plex App
Why they called it this, no idea. As it’s really not a helpful name if for example you are looking for support.
But anyway that is getting off the point. It (appears to me) just to be a rehash of the web app (UNO) that might support a few more video and audio codecs and will allow you (and your users if you allow) to relatively easily download the media from a server. It will download them without conversion. And although it stores them in a hidden directory, it is not hard to find this directory should you want to play them back with something else like VLC.
So compared to Plex Media Player
What it does have… Positives
- Easier Downloads
- errm… anything else?
What it does not have… Negatives
- No TV Mode
- No Audio Passthrough
- No Non UNO Interface
- No support for older MacOS Versions