I previously have used other Plex clients (like Roku, AppleTV, iPad, etc…) to watch content served by PMS, so now that I am using PHT running directly on my QNAP TVS-473, I realize the UI is a little bit different than what I am used to from previous Plex UXes so I took some time to familiarize myself with the overall UX of PHT on QNAP Hybrid Desk and the use of the QNAP remote. I have to admit it’s pretty slick to work as well as it does out of the box. Granted, some codecs are definitely better than other and I still need to figure out why some media gets transcoded when added to the library and some doesn’t, but that’s another thread. Anyway, my question involves what appear to be some idiosyncrasies that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around yet.
For one, when you are playing some media and you “back out”, you can still hear the audio as it is still playing in the background, and I see that a little icon created from the poster of the media along with the familiar yellow Plex “>” that seems to reverse direction from pointing from right to left when I change the menu mode from making media selections to the menu “settings”, but I have not been able to figure out how to simply return to the media that I am playing. I tried practically every button on the QNAP remote but to no avail. The other thing I thought was odd was that you can’t even use the play/pause button on the media playing in the background as the context of that button in the menus is apparently equivalent to “OK” which I don’t think is particularly intuitive. Then again, maybe this choice was made because of some other dependency. Or, more likely, this is how it is supposed to behave but I don’t have the remote’s profile correct.
Regardless of all of that, how does one jump back to the media that is playing in the background? I can’t seem to navigate selection to that part of the screen using the arrow buttons (using the “ring” on the remote) nor do any other buttons seem to invoke it either. The only way back seems to be tracing back to the media in the media browser, hitting play on the media (which stops the media to bring up the “resume/start from begining” dialogue) and then selecting “resume”. This all seems like clumsy drudgery and not what the designers intended, so I figure I must be doing something wrong or that I need to change the remote’s profile as I mentioned earlier.
Any suggestions from those in the know?
That also brings up the matter of the 4 color buttons of the QNAP remote which don’t seem to have a function in Plex per-se, as the only thing that I have found that configures them is the Qbutton app, that appears to be limited to custom steps you’d configure only in the QMusic player which I don’t use, so I aborted. (That does seem oddly specific for an app that you’d think had more reach.) Anyway, is there another way to maybe configure these buttons to something useful to me, such as maybe being the “return to media playing in background” button?
Thanks again,
D
