Plex Home Theater (PHT) vs. Plex Media Player (PMP)

General Discussions
1

I’ve been using Plex since 2009, I even bought a Mac Mini for use in my home theater so I could use it. Currently I am using Windows Media Center (WMC), with PHT, and hack to get PMP to launch from WMC. I use WMC for Plex and DVR only, nothing else. Now that PHT is no longer supported, I’ve been forcing myself to use PMP more often. I still use PHT more than PMP for several reasons.

  1. Lack of WMC support (my hack is does not 100% work, such as PMP not closing correctly, or video drivers left in an inconsistent state)
  2. Large collections don’t work well when browsing (movies for instance). Only being able to scroll left and right to see 2 new items at a time when I have close to a 1000 movies is painful. I already have my collection split out by having a library for each genre to minimize this issue. This library for each genre is also an issue since there is no cross reference between libraries, such as looking for Jason Statham movies, it will only show Jason Statham movies in the library that I currently have selected.
  3. Back button with remote just does not work as expected. To back out, I have to navigate to home.
  4. I miss the ability to just hit a button on the remote and skip forward in a movie. left/right for short skip and up/down for longer skips. I can live without this feature. Needs a long skip or track forward.

#1 and #2 are my biggest issues with PMP, #3 and #4 I can live without. Yes there is a desktop interface that would solve the problem, but it has the issue of text being too small, no keyboard support, no remote support, and only works in windowed mode (I can make full screen work if launched from command line).

I loved the PHT interface, but due to it no longer being supported, I cannot use some of the new features such as HEVC without transcode. I know Kodi gives me some of the old PHT interface that I liked (i.e. #2), but I get transcode with HEVC, so may as well continue using PHT.

Even with my complaints, I like PMP. I like the look and feel of it and would love to fully adopt it with my HTPC. Please add more layout options for how we scroll through our libraries. A vertical scroll where we can see 6 to 8 new items per button/key press would be optimal.

2

Have you tried OpenPHT? Community-driven fork of PHT.
https://forums.plex.tv/categories/openpht

3

I have not. I will give that a try tonight.

4

@vegright said:
I have not. I will give that a try tonight.

It’s great. It also runs on unusual platforms like Odroid’s C2!

5

clnr, thank you for pointing this out. It worked flawlessly.