GoKawiil
Tech News
Plex has rolled out social discovery tools to its Android TV app, including Discussions, Lists, Reviews, Reactions, and Follows, allowing users to interact around content instead of relying solely on algorithmic recommendations. The update also moves the app's primary menu to the left side of the screen. This follows a similar rollout on Apple TV in mid-September.
Xtream Player has released version 1.7.50, adding Plex Live TV streaming and better movie/TV categorization for premium users, plus a full-screen mirror mode for the car display. The update also fixes M3U streaming bugs, improves YouTube playback quality, and resolves an issue where the ad-skip feature left videos stuck on a gray screen. According to Reddit comments, the new Plex Live TV feature is currently broken, though the developer says a fix is coming soon.
The guide explains how to repurpose an old computer as a home media server by adding storage (ideally with redundancy like RAID) and installing server software such as Plex or Jellyfin to stream content across devices. It compares the two platforms, noting Plex's simplicity but paid features versus Jellyfin's free, more customizable but technical setup, particularly around GPU-based media transcoding.
An independent developer has released PlxNative, a free open-source Plex client built specifically for LG TVs running webOS, aimed at fixing the sluggish menus that plague older sets. Rather than running inside a browser like the official app, it renders its interface natively using Rust and OpenGL while still handing off video playback to the TV's built-in hardware decoder. It can be installed through the Homebrew Channel or sideloaded using LG's Developer Mode and webOS Dev Manager.
Security researchers found more than 36,000 internet-facing Plex Media Server instances that have not applied fixes for previously disclosed security flaws. These unpatched servers remain publicly reachable, leaving them open to exploitation by attackers.
Plex is urging all users to immediately update Plex Media Server to version 1.43.3 and Plex Desktop to version 1.115.0, both released earlier this year, to fix multiple unspecified security vulnerabilities. The company emailed affected customers directly and said CVE identifiers have been requested but not yet published, though the flaws are known to impact Media Server v1.43.2 and earlier.