The problem
Currently, the Shield official remote works, but more than 50% of the buttons, five out of eight total, do not have any specific function in Plex while playing a video. Up/Down/Left/Right/Centre all do one and the same thing: open the on-screen menu.
The problem is that the Shield remote does not have a designated “menu” button at all, so there should be one button reserved for bringing up the menu without stopping or interacting with the video playing at all. If you map up/down and left/right to different skips, that only leaves the center button, which should logically be play/pause.
An added reason for the importance and urgency of this problem is that currently the on-screen menu is slow. It sometimes takes as much as 1-2 seconds after pressing a button for the on-screen menu to appear at all, meaning that not only do you have to press twice to pause, between those presses you also have to wait for a significant amount of time. This doesn’t happen every time, but more than often enough to warrant the request for a dedicated pause button.
My recommendation is this:
In video playback mode:
- Up: Bring up the menu without pausing video
- Down: Optional. It could bring down an Info overlay á la Apple TV, or it could open the menu and insta-focus on the chapters list (since it’s already below the menu, it makes intuitive sense)
- Left: Skip backwards 30 seconds (or a configurable amount)
- Right: Skip forwards 30 seconds (or a configurable amount)
- Center (while playing): Pause video, and bring up menu with focus on play button. This way, pause can still be used to interact with the menu immediately while still always allowing for being a Play button again
- Center (while paused): If menu has timed out, play video instantly. If menu is still active, press highlighted button
In menus:
- Longpress on item: I recently noticed there’s a built-in long-press action available, that currently goes unused as well. If we assume the current navigation scheme remains unchanged (single-press enters item card view), a long-press could be made to trigger playback immediately. This way we don’t always have to navigate into an item before being able to play it.
I can’t really think of a more universally compatible layout, given the available buttons on the remote. Feedback is appreciated, however suggestions to “just buy another remote” should be avoided. I’ve already bought this remote. Now I want it to work.
Interface interaction
If we posit that the above suggestions are implemented, and the remote now has direct actions that don’t require the on-screen menu to be visible and interacted with, it should be changed in a few ways to match, and to minimise confusion and distractions:
- When pressing pause in a running video, the on-screen menu should appear as usual. Whether it should disappear after X seconds, or stay visible throughout, is debatable. Personally, I favor the alternative where pausing shows a simplified status view (progress, total length, time, maybe some video info and art) and the on-screen menu is totally separate, but that’s another suggestion slightly outside the scope of this post.
- When pressing play in a paused video, it should not trigger the on-screen menu. The assumed purpose of pressing play is to resume watching the video, not to further interact with an on-screen menu. As the menu is also rather large, it becomes very distracting.
If either pause or play are triggered by first summoning the on-screen menu, consider these options:
- Pausing remains unchanged. Opening the menu and pressing pause suggests the user wants to further interact with the menu, and it should stay up either a short period, or even indefinitely. The direct action of opening the menu first could be enough to suggest the user wants more than just 2-3 seconds to perform interactions.
- Playing could, in this scenario, allow the on-screen menu to remain. Again, since the direct user action was to bring up the menu, it’s less clear what the ultimate purpose is. In this case, the menu could be permitted to stay visible for X seconds, before disappearing.
(Originally posted here, but re-posting it for exposure, as this forums seems a better fit)
