How to Install Plex on the Apple TV For Free

Plex is a simple way to access both local media stored on your PC or networked drives, along with online media on a variety of devices.

There are Plex apps for the Mac, PC, iOS, and even Android devices. Being the ubiquitous app that it is, it’s not surprising that it runs on a jailbroken Apple TV.

Inside we’ll show you how to install Plex on your jailbroken Apple TV for free…

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPW2D9oC_rA[/tube]

Important: You will need a jailbroken Apple TV 2. If you have yet to jailbreak your Apple TV, see our Apple TV jailbreak guide. You will also need Plex Media Server installed an configured on your local computer. I go into that a bit in the video, but you will need to configure that on your own. You can download Plex Media Server for Mac or Windows.

Above all, watch the video, as it will make the following instruction make a lot more sense.

Step 1: Verify the IP address of your Apple TV. It must be on the same network as your computer.

Step 2: SSH into your Apple TV 2, by opening a terminal and typing SSH root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where x = your Apple TV’s IP address. Your password is alpine, unless you have changed it.

Step 3: At the terminal execute the following commands one by one:

  • echo “deb http://www.ambertation.de ./downloads/PLEX/” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plex.list
  • apt-get update
  • apt-get install com.plex.client-plugin
  • dpkg -l
  • killall AppleTV

The dpkg -l command is there for you to verify that the necessary packages have been installed. Look for packages mobilesubstrate, org.tomcool.smframework, com.plex.client-plugin and beigelist. For more help with these commands, visit Plex’s help page for the Apple TV.

Step 4: Your Apple TV should reboot, and you should now have the Plex menu item. Under Plex go to Settings > Manage Server List > and you should see the name of the Plex Media Server running on the same local network as your Apple TV. Add that server.

Step 5: Explore! Go to Movies, and find all of the movies that you configured using the Plex Media Manager running on your local computer. You can also add various channels to access online content similar to XBMC’s plugins.

Plex is an extremely easy to install and easy to use app for the Apple TV. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you must have the Plex Media Server running on a local machine as the same network in order to find your content. Be sure to watch the video for more details.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can also install Plex without using command line commands by using aTV Flash (black). Plex is one of the pre-configured packages that comes with FireCore’s jailbreak tool.

Have you ever used Plex? How does it rate in your book?