If you’re running more than one Plex Media Center client in your house, then it can sometimes be hard to identify which one is which. Let’s take a look at the not-so-obvious setting you need to tweak to give each of your Plex clients a unique name.
In a lot of cases, the name of any given Plex machine may not matter. But if you have multiple Plex clients on your home network and you want to take advantage of Plex’s built-in support for sending media from control applications, like Plex for iOS or the Plex Media Server web dashboard, you’ll run into a problem really quickly.
For example, recently outfitted our whole house with Raspberry Pi units running Rasplex attached to every TV. But when we want to cast a video from our Plex Media Server dashboard, this is what we see:
Should we watch the movie on RasPlex, RasPlex, RasPlex, or Rasplex?
With every client sporting an identical label, we have no idea if we’ll be sending our selected video to the bedroom, the guest room, the living room, or the movie theater in the basement. If you’re in a similar situation then this tutorial is for you. Rather than play the video casting lottery, let’s take a moment to rename all the clients so they’re easier to identify.
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Surprisingly, renaming a Plex client is not particularly intuitive. You can’t rename them from the server dashboard; instead, you must rename it from each individual client.
While the client software is slightly different on each platform (so you’ll need to poke around in the settings menus), we can show you how to change in on RasPlex to give you a general idea. To do so, simply open open the “Preferences” menu, accessible when using the default RasPlex skin by simply pressing the arrow key to the left while at the main menu.
Within the preferences menu, select the gear icon on the side for “Change Preferences For System”.
There, you can select “Services” and you’ll see an entry for “Device name”. Change that entry from the generic “RasPlex” entry to a clear one which indicates where (or to what) the Plex client is connected like “Living Room” or “Projector”. It’s worth noting that this name change will only affect how the Plex server sees the client software, and doesn’t change the network host name or any other identifying information about the hardware.
Restart the device and the change should appear immediately in the casting menu for your Plex software. By the time rebooted and opened up our dashboard “Living Room” was already listed as one of the destinations, seen below. The listing in the actual Settings > Devices menu takes a little bit longer to update, but don’t worry—it’ll refresh in 10-20 minutes without a server restart and has no impact on the casting function.
Once you’ve changed one entry, power through the rest of them and you’ll have a unique name for each of your Plex clients—no more guessing required when trying to cast a movie to different screens around your home.