Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Advanced Custom Plex Unified Remote

Background:
A while ago I wrote a custom Unified Remote for Plex here is a blog post about that . It works great but lacks a few things that I really need. Since Unified Remote changed their Layout in one of the later releases the UI became much more compact and you can fit more buttons on one screen. This makes it possible for me to add in a few more functions.

The basic remote looks like this:
The simple Plex Remote
The advanced one looks like this:
The Advanced Plex Remote

As you can see the advanced remote now makes use of the full screen. I run it on a Samsung galaxy S3 and the buttons are big enough to press. It might be a different story on a device with a smaller screen.



Here is the Button Config:
1.1 Rewind
1.2 Full screen/Windowed
The Advanced Plex Remote1.3 Fast Forward
2.1 Decrease Plex Sound
2.2 Increase Plex Sound
3.1 Stop
3.2 Navigate Up
3.3 Play/Pause - Works globally not only when movie or music mode are  active
4.1 Navigate Left
4.2 Select
4.3 Navigate Right
5.1 Flip between full screen video or music and menu system
5.2 Navigate Down
5.3 Go Back
6.1 Brings up OSD when video or music is playing
6.2 Brings up the contextual popup menu if it is available.
7.1 Just a divider no function
8.1 Minimize all open windows, start Plex and switch the screen to the bedroom TV.
8.2 Update the Plex library. It will index and pull down meta data for all files that have been added  to your media folders.
8.3 Turns off Plex and moves the screen back to the dual monitor configuration in the study.
9.1 Decrease the main Windows sound
9.2 Mute all Windows sounds
9.3 Increase the main Windows sound

New functionality in the Advanced Plex Remote
The simple Plex remote works great but I found my self having to flip between different remotes just to start watching something.

This is why I added the new functionality to the advanced remote.
1. The popup menu. Sometime you want to use functionality in the browse lists. Before this option was available I had to switch to the mouse remote and right click. Here is an example:
Plex Popup

2. One click TV setup for Plex
This button(called bedroom) switches screen from the dual screen setup in the study to the HDMI setup in the bedroom. It also minimises all the open windows on screen. And finally launches Plex. With one click the beroom TV is ready for some Plex action.

3.  One click tear down of Plex
This button(called study) kills Plex and switches the screen back to the study. Before I had to move in to another custom remote I made to do this.

4. You can now force your media libraries to be updated directly from the remote. Let's say you have added  a movie to one of your media olders and you are about to watch it. For some reason Plex has not updated your database with the new file. Now you don't even have to go up to the computer to fix this. You can do it with one press of a button. Very handy!

5. Change and mute the main windows volume
Now you can control the main volume on the computer as well as the volume in Plex. This can be extremly useful if someone changed the Windows volume. this way You don't have to leave the Plex remote to fix this problem.

How to install it:
  1. First of all you need an Android phone running the paid version of Unified Remote https://market.android.com/details?id=com.Relmtech.RemotePaid&hl=en. It has to be the paid versions since the free version doesn't support custom remotes.
  2. Then you need the latest version of the Unified Remote server http://www.unifiedremote.com/  installed on your PC . 
  3. Now download this file https://github.com/br0sk/Custom-Unified-Remotes/zipball/master. It contains the custom remotes I have implemented.
  4. Extract the file and copy the files plex.png PlexAdvanced.xml and Plex.xml to the unified remote custom remote directory. You can find that here directory here C:\Program Files\Unified Remote\Remotes\Custom on a 32bit Windows or here C:\Program Files (x86)\Unified Remote\Remotes\Custom on Windows 7 64 bit. 
  5. The Plex.xml file is written for 64 bit Windows. You have to change the path to the app in the XML file if you are running it on a 32 bit Windows version. You can easily do so in notepad.
  6. Stop the Unified Remote server by right clicking the task bar icon and selecting quit.
  7. Start the Unified Remote server again.
  8. Now launch Unified Remote on your phone and there should be a new Plex remote available.





5 comments:

  1. Hey, I have been using your plex remote as a template for over a year now. Recently it broke, and so have my custom remotes derived from your. The up/down/left/right buttons don't work anymore, everything else does. The remote of the plex android app had the same problems until a recent update.

    Do you have any idea what could cause this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Actually I do. I had the same problem. It is the new beta mouse drivers that are included in the the later releases of Unified Remote. Just reinstall the server and untick the beta driver and it should start working again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks a lot, weird that mouse drivers mess with numpad keys tough.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well it is probably not only for the mouse. It is for emulating the keyboard as well. I actually reported this issue to Unified Remote, let's see if they will fix it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi John, old thread, but thought I'd ask. Any chance there is an iOS version of this. I love the layout and would love to use it on my iPad. Thanks Mike

    ReplyDelete