How to access your media
Details are addressed in a lot of places but I could not find any place with compact information about all the ways of remote-controlling the plex media center. Spend some time trying things out myself and want to share my experience + gather more input.My most important requirment: accessability!
My Setup:
- PMS + PMC on a macmini running osx attached to a Sony TV for video + digial audio on an Onkyo for music
- Classic infrared remotes
- Web Browser Clients for streaming (used them with a test-setup on the windows version of PMS; suppose it's the same on the Mac/Linux versions)
- iPhone + iPad with PlexApp for remote controlling + streaming to places far far away
Classic remotes like Logitech Harmony and Apple Remote work. Nothing spectacular, you just have the downside that you need to turn on the tv to select music and either spend some time programming the universal remote or having 2-3 remotes (for tv, receiver and plex). Not my favorite.
Web Browser access ... great! The best interface on the market to find+play your media with whatever device your holding right now (compared with apple tv, boxeebox, wd-tv live, windows 8 mce, xbmc). Excellent streaming possiblities especially in combination with the myPlex option. Only thing I really miss is a way to say "play that on that device/pmc".
iPhone + iPad (and probably Android) clients .. these are really great! Originally I thought these were only excellent streaming clients (an alternative to the web) + the classic remote-buttons for controlling a pmc. Wrong. Just by accident I found the setting for default-media renderer - play on the iPhone/iPad or on the pmc/tv or ask every time. For me that's a killer feature - as convinient as the Logitech Squeezebox but now for music and video. It's a shame it's not (jet) properly promoted.
And finally I tried the hdmi remote control feature (consumer electric control-cec, aka bavaria sync, ..). Was really disappointed that it's not possible out of the box to have driver support for hdmi cec on windows/osx/linux and even not on the rasperri pi or cubox. Forum posts say that the hardware has to support it to be hdmi compliant but the drivers don't offer any way to access it. That's a shame but the front-line between computer industry and consumer electronics is too tough. Plan B: The hdmi cec-usb adapter from pulse-eight. Works really good in the current xbmc distribution but no support in pmc 0.9.5.3 jet. A really painfully missing feature - I don't want another classic remote or a bluetooth keyboard and the mouse-support is currently broken.
And finally, finally tried to use the cec-controlled xbmc with plexbmc. Works. But plexbmc is not a full pmc client so you don't have the ability to alternatively remote-control via iPad/iPhone. No-Go for me.
