Plex begins testing its major redesign on Apple TV

After debuting on mobile back in November, Plex is ready to test its “reimagined” app experience on much larger screens. Today, the company announced that the preview has expanded to include tvOs. “Keep in mind that this is nowhere near 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 displayed in the navigation bar, but if it’s anything like the mobile version, you can disable them if you’re only interested in enjoying your personal library. Note that you have to select this preview; The regular Plex app isn’t going anywhere yet. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

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

“By making your profile public on watch.plex.tv, you can easily share a link to your profile with others so they can see what you’ve watched, what’s on your watchlist, and more,” the company says.

Finally, Plex is making HEVC hardware encoding available to all Plex Plus customers. “HEVC encoding offers better visual quality for the same bitrate, allowing for higher quality video over the same (or lower) bandwidth consumption for streaming from your Plex Media Server,” the company says. Another advantage is that HDR metadata is fully preserved. HEVC encoding supported on MacOS, Linux and Windows “When using hardware encoding with Apple, Intel or Nvidia devices,” Plex wrote Back in September.