Plex starts testing its big redesign on Apple TV

After getting started on mobile back in November, Plex is ready to test its “reimagined” app experience on much bigger screens. Today the company announced that the preview has expanded to included tvOS. “Please keep in mind this is nowhere close to perfect, but we want to get feedback from the community as early as we can,” Plex wrote in the blog post.

Live TV and on-demand rentals are prominently shown in the navigation bar, but if it’s anything like the mobile version, you can disable those if you only care about enjoying your personal library. Note that you’ve got to opt into this preview; the regular Plex app isn’t going anywhere just yet. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

Plex is also getting more social: movie and TV show reviews can now be viewed by everyone across the platform — if you change your privacy settings to allow this, that is. You can comment on reviews by others, so Plex seems to be leaning into all the success around Letterboxd with this one.

“By making your profile publicly accessible on watch.plex.tv you can easily share a link to your profile with others so that they can see what you’ve been watching, what’s on your Watchlist, and more,” the company says.

Last, Plex is making HEVC hardware encoding available to all Plex Plus customers. “HEVC encoding offers a better visual quality at the same bit rate, allowing for a higher-quality video over the same (or lower) bandwidth usage for streaming from your Plex Media Server,” the company says. Another benefit is that HDR metadata is fully preserved. HEVC encoding is supported on macOS, Linux, and Windows “when using hardware encoding with Apple, Intel, or Nvidia devices,” Plex wrote back in September.