It's a transcoding media server. So, it's a media server in the usual sense that you can rip media to hard drive and it will pick up that media and get metadata for it.

It provides a client for various platforms that can connect to the server and stream media from the server. It's not a shared drive type deal, but I think they use the HLS protocol for streaming. The interesting thing about that protocol is that it breaks up media into chunks not based on size but on time. So it delivers chunks of a specific time length to the clients.

That means it can change the encoding on the fly without glitches because the clients just have to be prepared to change encoding at the start of any given chunk. So they can transcode the media to different formats, and start streaming from one file, then change to another by just jumping to the same numbered chunk, and pick up from there.

It also does on the fly transcoding if the client can't handle the format that the data is in. But that's a high overhead operation so you'd want a pretty chunky, dedicated server for that if you are streaming more than one or two streams I think. A gotcha is that it's hard to be sure you have created a setup where there will be no on the fly transcoding. So it could all be happy, then some client starts it and it starts the server transcoding, and that puts a strain on the performance.

There's a PC based client, and others for various mobile platforms. They are controllable, and our CQC platform supports controlling Plex clients and allowing browsing of the Plex metadata via our touch screens. The control protocols is a little rickety. It's obviously not priority one for them or anything.