Our big screen apps are focused on helping you view and access the content you want, when you want it—all using an interface that you’ll find familiar, even across different platforms. You can add, remove, or reorder the sources available on your Navigation Sidebar to help you see all the stuff you care about, and none of the stuff you don’t.

Related Page: Customizing the Big Screen Apps

The following big screen Plex apps currently run this interface:

• Amazon Fire TV
• Android TV
• Apple TV
• PlayStation
• Plex HTPC
• Roku
• Smart TV supported models
• Xbox

Home Screen

Your Home screen is your starting point for Plex, whether it’s finding recently added content or letting you choose a particular type of media to view.

Recommended Content

From the Home screen, you can view recommendations for content to which you have access.

Some types of content you might see on your Home screen:

• Continue Watching: If you recently left off in the middle of a movie or TV episode, you can quickly resume from where you were.
• Recently Added: The Recently Added areas let you see what content was added for different media types and provides quick access to that content. You can see recent additions for movies, music, photos, home videos, or television. Television content will even be intelligently stacked for you so that if you add an entire season of content, you’ll just get a single “season” entry displayed rather than a dozen individual episode entries.
• What’s On Now: See shows or movies that are currently airing on live TV channels to which you have access.

Customizing the Home Screen

You can customize the home screen to choose which content is visible and most easily accessible for you. You can find more information in the dedicated customization article.

Related Page: Customizing the Big Screen Apps

Navigation Sidebar

While the Home screen is often great for an overview of things or quickly getting back to something, sometimes you just want to look at something specific. To do so, you’ll use the navigation sidebar to select the desired source. Access the sidebar from the left edge of the screen, almost anywhere in the app.

You can customize which sources are visible on the menu and their order (see the customization information above).

When you choose a particular source to view, you’ll be able to see different types of information, depending on the tab you choose at the top.

• Recommended
• Library
• Collections
• Playlists
• Categories

By default with new app installs, you’ll land on Recommended when visiting a source. However, if you would prefer that the app remembers which tab you chose for each source previously, you can adjust that behavior in your app settings. With that app preference enabled, you might leave a movie library set to Library, while you like the discovery aspect of Recommended for your music.

Recommended

The Recommended screen is intended to help you quickly access interesting content by displaying several suggestion areas.

Each Recommended screen is crafted for the type of content you are viewing. Be it movies by a particular director, most played music in the month of June, TV shows from a genre, or photos taken this year, these dynamic displays help you find content. For personal media libraries, the Plex Media Server admin can also manage which rows appear for each library.

Related Page: Manage Recommendations

A few examples of the types of content suggestions you might see:

• Movies
  • Recently Released Movies
  • Top Movies by Ridley Scott
  • Top Movies in Action
• Television
  • Recently Aired TV
  • Start Watching (Shows that you haven’t begun watching yet)
  • Rediscover (Shows that you started, but haven’t recently watched)
• Music
  • Most played in May
  • More by Journey
  • Top Albums from 2005
  • Artists on Tour

Library (Browse the Media)

Of course, you may wish to simply view the content directly and browse around, which you can easily do by choosing the Library tab at the top of the screen.

When browsing the media source, you can filter or sort the content as desired, via the controls near the top. For instance, you could filter by the genre “Drama” or sort by “Release Date”.  Similarly, you can change what you’re viewing (e.g. Artists, Albums, Tracks, or by Folder)

Collections

If you have Collections created for a library, you’ll be able to switch to a view where you can browse all of the Collections directly.

Playlists

In cases where you’ve created a playlist that includes content from the library in question, the Playlists option will be available. There, you can access any playlists with content from the library.

Categories

Here, you can access genre categories for the content. Easily view “comedy” movies or “anime” TV shows.

Tip!: For personal media libraries, the Categories option does require an active Plex Pass subscription for the viewing account.

Live TV

The Live TV source includes guide information from any DVR/tuner device you have access to on a Plex Media Server as well as Plex’s own free, Live TV streaming channels.

Related Page: Live TV & DVR
Related Page: Free Live TV Streaming on Plex

What’s On

Along the top of the screen you can select “What’s on [Server Name]” to see a grid of posters of what shows are on currently that the server can tune into. There will be multiple if you have access to more that one Plex Media Server with a tuner set up.

Tip!: This option only appears for users who have access to a DVR/tuner set up on a Plex Media Server.

Guide

The default screen is a tuner guide with a channels on the far left column showing what is on now and in the future on the channels from a Plex Media Server or Plex’s own free, Live TV streaming channels which you can choose from the top of the guide grid. If you have marked channels as Favorites that will also be an option.

If you open to the guide while watching a show, the playback will continue in a “mini” player on the top right, on supported platforms. In such cases, selecting any channel will restore full screen playback with the selected channel.