Blank a second screen on Windows in PMP TV mode

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Users of a 2 or more monitor-setup know this situation:
Trying to watch a video on the main screen is disturbed by that nasty glare of the other screen(s).
Here we have a quick way to make them go dark, with the press of a button.

Requirements for this tutorial:

  • Plex Media Player is running on Windows
  • Plex Media Player is not an umbrella term for all kinds of Plex clients.
    I am talking about the software for Windows, Mac, Linux and ‘PMP embedded’ which you can download free of charge here from the plex.tv website.
    Neither am I talking about the Plex app in the Microsoft App Store.

This is a workaround and requires still one button press by the user on his keyboard or remote control!
This will only work in TV mode!

  1. first, we need this excellent little tool Multiscreen Blank - Blank, dim, and mirror your screens in a multi-monitor setup
    Download and extract it into a folder on your computer.
  2. then we need a text editor. notepad.exe is sufficient, but I recommend you to use https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
  3. go to the folder %LocalAppData%\PlexMediaPlayer\scripts
    (copy this path and paste it into the address bar of Windows file explorer)
  4. in there, create a new text file and copy these 2 lines into it:
@ECHO OFF
start C:\MultiscreenBlank2\MultiscreenBlank2.exe /minimized /toggle id \\.\DISPLAY2

If you extracted the MultiscreenBlank tool someplace else, adapt the path to it.

  1. save the file
  2. rename the file to blankscreen.cmd
  3. test it by double-clicking on it. If the wrong screen is dimmed, double-click it again, then adapt the monitor ID number.
    For more details see the website of the Multiscreenblank author
  4. if the test was successful, go to the folder %LocalAppData%\PlexMediaPlayer\inputmaps
    If you have already created a custom inputmap, you should see it here. If you didn’t yet, copy one from the subfolder examples. For most users, the keyboard.json is the one to start with.
  5. open the just-copied .json file with your text editor and insert the following line somewhere in the middle
"D": "host:script blankscreen.cmd",

This tells PMP to start the script blankscreen.cmd after the user has pressed the d key on his keyboard.
To un-dim, press d again.

If you are using PMP with a different control method, pick a different .json file in step 8)

If you have found a way to achieve the same on Macintosh or Linux, please post it here!

A big Thank You! to @hopper886 who gave me the final tip how to do it. He has the script method with ‘PMP embedded’, to achieve something different btw.

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