Plex's new Kodi plugin lets you enjoy the best of both worlds

Plex knows you like Kodi, so it put Plex in your Kodi.

If you've dabbled with building your own media center, it's likely that you will have encountered Plex or Kodi. Both started life as offshoots of the famed XBMC software, but over time their propositions have diverged, with Plex embracing subscriptions and Kodi remaining open-source. In the past, that meant you'd pick the project that would best organize your media collection or utilize a third-party service that combined the two, but Plex has decided to embrace its streaming counterpart by launching an official Kodi plugin.

The new plugin includes most of the features you'd come to expect from Plex, which means it'll play back nearly any video or music format and cleverly categorize your media library. It simply lets you run the two media centers simultaneously without losing any of your customizations. It's currently only available to Plex Pass subscribers (it will be released publicly soon) and it doesn't yet work with Plex Companion remote control, but it does sport a brand new user interface (UI) that Plex says helps to "showcase some of our new thinking."

To please free users, Plex is making its Media Player app, which launched about a year ago, available to all. It's also integrated its "powerful" web app inside the Media Player, allowing you to switch between an easy-to-use desktop window and dedicated full-screen TV UI with the click of a button.