Plex Media Server Comes To The NVIDIA Shield

If you've got an NVIDIA Shield, then you already know that it's a useful device for both gaming, and watching movies. It already has apps for your favorite streaming services, as well as a 500GB hard drive for storing your own movies, but today it's getting even more useful.

Today, Plex has announced that that they are bringing their popular media server to the Shield. While the Shield has had the Plex app since launch, this is the first time users will be able to install the Plex Media Server on it. This turns your gaming/streaming device into a full fledged server, which can deliver content to any other device in your house.

You don't see the Plex Media Server on many devices, and for a good reason. In order to function as a server, you need hardware that can keep up with the transcoding demands of it. Since the Shield is designed for gaming, it already has an 8-core Tegra processor that is powerful enough to provide all of the functionality you need.

And if you're thinking that 500GB isn't enough space to store all of your media, you're probably right. Thankfully, the app will let you add libraries from a USB hard drive, or from another drive over the network. If you're already running a NAS box, but don't have a dedicated machine for Plex, then your Shield will be able to take care of everything for you later this month, when the 3.2 update rolls out.