Best Plex Plugins
Milan Skidmore
Finding the right plugins for your Plex app can be difficult, especially considering that Plex no longer supports many plugins it used to. I picked out the 10 most popular plugins that still work. However, I recommend using a reliable VPN like ExpressVPN while downloading these plugins to stay secure.
You can also connect other services to track, including Netflix, Kodi, VLC, and Emby. It then uses your watch history to recommend what to watch next and even tells you where to find this content.
Plex sometimes has difficulty loading the right metadata or cover art for badly-named media files. FileBot is a separate app from Plex, but you can load it up with your Plex-linked media files and it will rename them to have a better naming scheme. It also has an integrated subtitle downloader if you prefer that option with the same app.
I find this especially useful for downloading high-quality posters and subtitles that were fetched through Plex for use in other video players. You can also use it in reverse to curate metadata yourself and then upload it back to your Plex library!
ExpressVPN provides over 3,000 servers across more than 105 countries, making it one of the best and my go-to VPN for streaming and torrenting. ExpressVPN performed exceptionally well on my speed tests, providing no speed drops on nearby and mid-range servers and a negligible speed drop of 4% on distant servers. I could stream my favorite movies and shows without any buffering.
ExpressVPN is compatible with all major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. You can also configure it on your router so you can use it on streaming media consoles, such as Apple TV, PlayStation, Xbox, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV.
Overall, ExpressVPN has all the nuts and bolts that make it a VPN only a few can compete with. It provides the perfect balance of performance, security, and usability. I highly recommend you try it out for yourself with its 30 money-back guarantee.
CyberGhost is a great choice for using with Plex because it packs a ton of streaming and downloading-focused features. It has streaming-optimized servers, which provide low latency and minimal speed drops so you can enjoy buffer-free streaming. Although there are no optimized servers for Plex, you can use any optimized server located nearby to increase your speeds. CyberGhost also has P2P-optimized servers to make your downloads faster and more secure.
After extensive testing, CyberGhost delivered excellent speeds on nearby and mid-range servers. On distant servers, I got speed drops of around 15%, which is still pretty good. Either way, I could stream content without any buffering. If your internet is slow, I suggest connecting to streaming-optimized servers for optimal performance.
After rigorous testing, I found that it delivers great speeds on nearby servers. However, when I connected to a distant server in Australia, I got frequent speed drops of up 25%, which is concerning if you have slow internet. Fortunately, it comes with streaming-optimized servers located around the world which will help you boost your speeds while streaming on Plex.
Surfshark offers the best value for money out of every premium VPN on the market. You can connect an unlimited number of devices with a single subscription, which means you can use Surfshark on all your devices without getting logged out.
PrivateVPN supports up to 10 simultaneous device connections and is compatible with all major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, and routers. Overall, PrivateVPN is a decent option for budget-conscious users looking for adequate security and good speeds. You can try it out risk-free using its 30 money-back guarantee.
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Lastly, this add-on allows you to use custom scripts. These let you expand the functionality considerably. For example, you could kill a stream if a user is outside of your local network, or automatically add a label to recently added library items.
It includes the popular Unsupported Appstore (which includes a host of unofficial Plex channels and user-generated content), as well as logging tools, a subtitle management module, a playlist management module, and a tool that can scan for missing or unmatched media.
It will automatically scan eight repositories to find the best subtitles for your video, it can scan your media for missing subtitles files, and it offers many customization tools such as color, timing offset, and the removal of HI tags for people with impaired hearing.
Unfortunately, there is no way to watch Netflix from within the Plex app. However, Plex2Netflix does offer an easy way to see how much of your existing library is available on the popular streaming service.
For each library item, the add-on will tell you what percentage of the show is available. For example, perhaps you have five series of your favorite comedy saved locally, but only the first three series are available on Netflix.
Would you like to show other people what content is on your Plex server without giving them access to the server itself? Plex Export is the add-on you need. It lets you produce an interactive HTML page that anyone can browse.
Your media is shown by section, and the HTML page includes live filters so viewers can quickly establish what's available. You can filter by most metadata fields, including genre, actor, year, rating, and more.
Some people like to try and make their Plex server replicate the movie-going experience as closely as possible. A big part of that is watching pre-movie trailers for films that haven't yet hit theaters.
The TheaterTrailers add-on can pull in trailers that are currently airing in cinemas and broadcast them before your video starts. When the films eventually become available to the public, the app will automatically delete its trailer.
Plex-Sync lets you automatically sync the watched status between multiple Plex servers. It's useful if you have separate servers running in different locations---for example, at your house and in the office.
The tool can also sync between different users. If you and your partner watch some episodes of a show together but others when you're apart, it will ensure you're both on the same page when you next log in.
The app supports on-screen program guides, channel categories, and custom channel logos. If you've never used IPTV before, make sure you check out the add-on's wiki. It has all the information you need to get started.
Kodi has a Trakt add-on, so if you split your time between the two popular apps, this is an essential tool to keep on of what you've been watching. It will sync your watch history between the two apps so you don't become confused.
Like Last.fm, Trakt will also make recommendations based on your viewing habits. It can even tell you which services and apps offer the show or movie you want to watch. Other features include a TV calendar and customizable watchlists.
Of course, installing these plugins or addons won't suddenly make you a Plex power user. If you want to get the most out of Plex, you'll benefit from reading some of the other articles we've previously published on MakeUseOf.
Your mileage may vary with sports depending on whether individual events can be found in Tmdb or TheTVDB. UFC fights for instance are recognized if you set them in a movie library. Relevant reddit threads:
For long music videos I use a Movie library, which works well for most operas and concerts. If you want to collect short MTV-style music videos, your guess is as good as mine, possibly look into the Shorts section later in this entry.
This turned to be a manageable but not entirely satisfying workflow in the backend, and the end result in the frontend is a decent but not optimal user experience since navigating a large library will mostly have to be done via the Collections tab. There must be a better way!
For the best result with custom cast members, save square .jpg pictures of close-up mugshots in a dedicated web folder. Common cloud services such as Google Drive or OneDrive make this way too hard for some reason, I serve these images via a local web server on one of my Synology NASes.
Dedicated support for audiobooks is one of the top open feature requests but so far, they still require that you jump through similar hoops as tutorials for the most part, except as a Music library and using a special-purpose agent. The main drawbacks of using Plex for audiobooks are that:
That changed in March 2021 when the author of Plex-Meta-Manager (more on that tool further below) added support for filtering by audio_track_title at my request, which takes care of the commentary track. In your Movies.yml metadata file, have a section like this (be careful with indentation as the dastardly YAML language is looking for excuses to fail):
When chapter information is not already available, you can add your own chapter information within videos with software such as Handbrake or Drax. In any case this needs to be done in the video files before importing them into Plex.
While plugins such as Web.Tools are no longer supported in the Plex UI, they still work in practice. As I just mentioned, one big piece of functionality they allow is free bidirectional integration with Trakt.
The GOOD news is that every few weeks I copy my entire Synology Plex folder onto an external hard drive and so I tried the trick of simply copying back the contents of Plex Media Server/Media/localhost onto the NAS. A quick optimise/clean to throw out the dead stuff I had transferred back and happily the process messed nothing up and clearly no bundle names had changed as the chapter thumbs were all reinstalled.
I think it is safe therefore to say, major Plex updates/overhauls notwithstanding, as long as you back up your plex database folders this does look like a robust way to change chapter thumbs: it is just a bit of a slog initially.