CloudSync is built on top of the wireless device syncing capabilities that Plex introduced back in November, and will be available to paying users of the PlexPass subscription service later this month. Plex has said that it wants to add the ability to sync to other cloud storage service over time.

The ability to easily upload media to a Dropbox account is a good way for Plex to deal with one of its key weaknesses: The Plex client is now available on a number of mobile and connected devices, but the app has traditionally relied on a separate server application to get access to media.

That works fine if you do have a powerful NAS or an always-on PC at home to send you streams of your movies amd music. But more and more people rely on a laptop for all their computing needs – and chances are, that machine is turned off and tucked away in a bag when you’re using your iPad on the go to watch a movie. With the new feature, users can stream that movie straight from their Dropbox account.

Check out a few screenshots of Plex cloudSync below:

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Optimize your home network

Got a Roku 2 XS? Then make use of that Ethernet port, and connect the device directly to your router

Here’s one way to mess with anyone’s holiday spirit: Imagine you’re streaming a movie with your new Roku – and suddenly, it starts to buffer. Again and again. Even though your Internet connection should be fast enough. In many cases, issues like these are caused by problems in your home network. Maybe your baby monitor is interfering with your wireless router. Or maybe that wall between your living room and your home office is just a bit too solid for a good Wifi signal.

The easiest remedy is to use a wired Ethernet connection instead, if at all possible. An Ethernet cable connecting your router directly to your Roku will always get you the best signal possible. Unfortunately, that’s only possible with the Roku2 XS. The XD, HD and LT models as well as the new Roku streaming stick don’t have any Ethernet port, and have to rely on Wifi instead. You could always try to move your router closer to your living room TV, or upgrade to a newer router if nothing else helps.

Watch YouTube

Roku has plenty of channels to keep you busy over the holidays and beyond, but there’s one big one missing: you won’t find any YouTube channel in the Roku channel store. But no worries: You can still watch all your favorite YouTube clips with your Roku, as long as you also have an iPad, Android tablet, iPhone or Android mobile phone. Just install Twonky Beam on your mobile device, use it to navigate YouTube’s catalog, and beam the clips of your choice to the Roku, AirPlay-style. Take a look at our demo video below:

Get Plex

Plex is great to access personal media stored on your home PC – including your music collection.

Want to watch home movies and downloaded content on your Roku? Then get the Plex channel, and install the Plex Media Server on your Windows PC or OS X computer. Not only does Plex do a great job at organizing and displaying all your local media, it also offers access to a number of additional content channels. And with MyPlex, you can even share media with other Plex users and access their shared content libraries on your Roku.

Get the official mobile app

The Roku app for Android and iOS doesn’t just have handy shortcuts for your Roku channels, it also lets you beam content from your mobile phone.

It’s bound to happen: sooner or later, you’re gonna lose the Roku remote between your couch cushions. That’s when the official Roku remote app for iOS and Android comes in handy. The app not only lets you navigate through Roku’s menus, you can also quickly fire up your channels through dedicated shortcuts. And you’ll even be able to beam any music and videos saved on your mobile phone straight to the Roku.

Install third-party channels

Roku has more than 600 channels available through its channel store, which should keep you busy for some time. But there’s more: A few hundred private channels, including adult content and offerings that aren’t quite ready yet for prime time, can be accessed through special channel codes. Check this description to learn how to add private channels, and then browse the catalog on Roku-channels.com to find more channels for your new Roku box.

Want to use your Roku to get rid of cable? Then check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

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Miro has been offering its video converter as a standalone, one-click conversion tool for some time. However, previous versions only supported the conversion of one file at a time, which made it pretty much unusable if you had a larger collection of files. The new version makes it possible to drag and drop a number of videos onto the app and then simply start to convert them all with the same settings.

Of course, Miro Video Converter isn’t the only tool helping you to tweak your videos to play on mobile devices. Recently, Plex added an option to sync videos onto iOS devices for offline playback, which includes automatic transcoding, and apps like doubleTwist support similar functionality for Android users as well.

However, the beauty of the Miro Video Converter is its simplicity: If all you want to do is convert a few videos, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

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I’ve had a chance to play with the new sync feature a little bit over the last few days, and have to say that it makes the Plex app on my iPad a lot more valuable for me. Plex traditionally relies on a media server application. The idea is that you have the server up and running on your Mac or PC at home, and then access your media anywhere – either in the living room, or on the go.

However, I often find myself in situations where I have the iPad in my bag, but no way to access my server. Think road trip without cell phone coverage, for example. That’s when the ability to download a few movies beforehand is great. And having the really slick Plex UI to select the media I want is an added bonus.

It’s worth noting that sync is only available to paying PlexPass subscribers. Plex introduced PlexPass as a paid subscription tier this summer; subscribers who pay $4 a month or $30 a year get access to some premium features. Right now, this includes sync as well as early access to a web-based Plex client.

Check out a few screenshots of the new Plex iPad app below:

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The Plex web client will offer users access to their own media files as well as online content from sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Users will also be able to access any media shared with them by other Plex users through the MyPlex cloud service, and can manage their media libraries with it. “In short, this new web client is the most powerful Plex client around,” wrote Plex developer Elan Feingold in the announcement blog post.

Feingold added that the client is still in beta. That is one of the reasons it’s only made available to a select group of users, which brings us to Plex’s other big announcement: The company rolled a subscription service dubbed PlexPass Wednesday that will give paying users first dibs on features like the Plex web client.

Subscriptions cost $4 a month, or $30 for the whole year, and Feingold promised subscribers further exclusive premium features. The post also mentioned that other paid-for features will come to the general Plex user base, and that PlexPass uers would be able to access these at a discounted rate. It’s unclear yet what these features will be, but one could imagine that Plex could at some point offer advanced transcoding features or even cloud media storage.

Asking users to pay for access to beta versions is a bit of a risky bet, but Plex is one of those products with a strong and very active community. The company is clearly hoping to tap into that community to bring in some revenue, and in the age of Kickstarter and crowd-funding, that strategy may just pay off.

Plex originally launched as a media center solution for people who connect their PC to their TV, but has since branched out to become a media center ecosystem with apps for Google TV, Roku, Samsung, Android and iOS. The company also introduced a cloud video sharing solution called MyPlex late last year.

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A customized version of the Plex Google TV app surfaced on Google Play a few days ago, and the Plex team added a few words of explanation after some of its users were confused by the fact that this new app isn’t compatible with any of the Google TV devices currently available. The new app description now reads:

“This application is ONLY available for download on late model 2012 Sony Internet TVs.”

The Plex team confirmed that this app will in fact be pre-installed on Sony’s next-generation Google TV devices when asked about the listing, but wasn’t available to provide any further details at this point. Sony announced at CES that it will ship a Blu-ray player and a set-top-box with Google TV on board this summer in the U.S. and several other countries. New reports indicate that the devices will go on sale in Europe in September.

Getting selected as a pre-installed app on Sony’s new devices is a big deal for Plex, which currently has between 10,000 and 50,000 active Google TV users, according to publicly available Google Play data. But Sony should benefit from this partnership as well. Most notably, Plex allows Sony to add media sharing to its devices, making it possible for Sony Google TV owners to access each others’ photo collections as well as share music and videos through the MyPlex service.

Plex has been on a tear ever since early last year, rolling out apps for the iPad and various Android-based tablets as well as Google TV and the Roku. Recently, it also added support for DLNA devices. Check out our video reviewing Plex on Roku below:

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Show notes for this episode:

• Plex for Roku is now available for free in the Roku channel store. More information can be found on the Plex blog.
• To use Plex on Roku, you need to install the free Plex Media server on your Mac or Windows PC. The software can be downloaded here.
• Check out our previous Plex coverage.

Have you used Plex on Roku, or do you prefer a different media server? Please share your thoughts in the comments, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com.

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Show notes for this episode:

• Plex is media center software that offers access to both local and online media. It can be downloaded for free on the Plex website.
• DLNA stands for “Digital Living Network Alliance” and is basically a way to move media around your home network. The DLNA standard is supported by Sony’s PS3 and WD TV devices as well as numerous connected TVs from manufacturers like LG, Panasonic, Toshiba and others. The DLNA alliance website has a detailed database with all the supported devices.
• Plex’s server software with DLNA support is slated to be released within the next few weeks. Check their Twitter feed for updates.

Are you a Plex user? Or are you using a different DLNA server? Please share your thoughts in the comments, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters@gigaom.com.

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The company announced the move late last year, and Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen confirmed Monday that the company is going through with its plans, despite some criticism from Boxee’s early adopters.

Boxee released the last version of its software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux at the end of December, and Kippen wrote at the time in a blog post:

“We believe the future of TV will be driven by devices such as the Boxee Box, Connected TVs / Blu-Rays and 2nd screen devices such as tablets and phones. While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives. People will continue to watch a lot of video on their computer, but it is more likely to be a laptop than a home-theater PC and probably through a browser rather than downloaded software.”

The most recent PC version of Boxee won’t be supported by the company going forward. Boxee will instead concentrate all of its efforts on the CE market, where it’s been selling the Boxee Box manufactured by D-Link for more than a year. It recently released a USB dongle that brings live broadcast TV to the Boxee Box and also released an iPad app last year.

Still, some of Boxee’s early adopters are pretty upset about the company’s decision to cease support for PCs. The blog post announcing the change provoked hundreds of comments, most of them negative. Boxee may be able to win some of those users over, but many are likely going to look for other solutions. Benefiting from this could be two media center products:

• XBMC is the open-source media center software Boxee is based on. It originated on the Xbox and focuses mainly on local media playback, but can be extended to play online video from various sources through a number of add-ons.
• Plex is, like Boxee, also based on XBMC, but has been going a slightly different route, focusing on a client-server architecture that makes it possible to play media on many different platforms. Plex most recently introduced an app for the Kindle Fire  as well as a personal cloud service.

As for Boxee, cutting its losses and concentrating on its CE platform should help the company keep up with an emerging market that pits it against much bigger players like Google and its Google TV platform. Boxee currently has 45 employees, and the company has raised a total of a $28.5 million in funding.

Check out our video review of the recently released Boxee Live TV dongle below:

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The version of the Plex app that will be available for Nook devices will be familiar to Android smartphone users; it’s the same app, but the Nook Store has an additional layer of approval process for software titles. Plex has already received approval from the Barnes & Noble app review team, so it should be available soon.

If you’re new to Plex, it’s essentially a centralized media hub you can use to access content from one or more computers on a variety of devices; installing a server application on your Mac or PC allows you to specify folders to share music, movies and video from, as well as making it easy to access your iTunes music library across platforms. Plex also offers a number of web video plug-ins, simplifying the process of delivering media from a range of sources to your tablet or smartphone. Plus, it automatically transcodes various file types, so that you don’t have to convert video to watch it on your mobile device.

Plex arriving in the Nook Store is actually a big boon for Barnes & Noble and its users, since it helps leverage users’ own existing media libraries, providing access to more video and music content, an area where the Nook lags behind Amazon’s Kindle Fire(s amzn). Plex is also available for the Kindle Fire, of course, but its new presence on the Nook tablets is still definitely something users will welcome.

We’ll be sure to let you know when Plex goes live for Nook users. In the meantime, check out these screenshots of the app in action:

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