Plex and its alternatives

However, due to a number of reasons, as of lately I am hooked to a brilliant open source Media Center initiative that is unique to Mac OS X called Plex. Triggered by my new Harmony One remote, of which I wrote in great detail in my former post, I had a closer look at the Plex software because of its unique capability to work brilliantly with the Harmony, bypassing many of the limitations of the 6-button Apple Remote. And what I found was that this software greatly enhances my TV watching choices, and on top doing so in a slick and very well designed manner. The reason for my shift? Online content.

Plex is derived from the well-known XBMC media center initiative. This open source project aims to provide a rich media interface for a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and even a number of modified game consoles, like the X-Box that gave the project its name. Since its inception, a number of independent new projects have derived from XBMC, so called “forks’. A well known XBMC-offspring is Boxee, available for a large number of platforms, including the Mac and even AppleTV.

I do think however that Plex fits my needs best, for a number of reasons. For starters, the project is focused solely at Mac OS X. While this is no guarantee that it is better than any of the others, my experience with multi-platform projects that get compiled for various operating systems, is that they generally do not support the features unique to that OS (have a look at OpenOffice or even Firefox to see what I mean). In Plex, we find this OS X specific behaviour in its integration with local and network-located iTunes and iPhoto libraries, among others. Plex easily works with these program’s naming conventions, albums and events, keywords and ratings, to name a few.

The modular video plug-in approach

But what really makes Plex special to me, is its very modular approach to watching online video. Although a lot of media center software supports the playback of Internet video in some way or another, Plex offers a plug-in structure that allows developers to create a hook into the software to support practically every video service out there. And because the software is running on a “generic” computer, it is not limited in any technical way to only support specific codecs or streaming formats, as is the case with proprietary media players (like the AppleTV). Plex provides a consistent wrapper around the video (including Windows Media, Quicktime, Flash, or heaven forbid even Silverlight), and plays it back in full screen, with its own on-screen information displays and user controls.

What really strikes me is the effort that the Plex developers have made to make the addition of new plugins to video sites as easy as possible. For this, they have added an App Store, as explained in this short video. Just select any of the available content sources, and install with one click. And just what kind of video sources are there to choose from? This ranges from the CNet technology videos and live video feed from TWIT, to TV series available for online viewing like South Park and The Daily Show. Of couse I found that having these videos available to me on my TV screen, selectable using my remote control, makes me much more willing to watch them compared to viewing them on my desktop computer.

Access to media from other people

But Plex not only lets you connect to any of these video services on the Internet, it can also use the network connection to access the media libraries from your friends. What’s more, your friends don’t even need to run Plex or any other media server software, as among many of the protocols supported by plex is plain old FTP. When simply allowed FTP access to the folders containing media files like movies, music and pictures, you can easily browse all content from your friend using Plex and the remote, and stream the video directly to your screen (even over FTP!). No lenghty download or any manual configuration is required.

I tried this with my friend, who has quite a large video collection stored on his home server, mainly to provide video content for his kids. Some of the videos were in iPod resolution, others were full HD transfers. We found my 10 Mbit/sec internet connection to be sufficient for streaming these 1080p videos to my Mac mini, however an occasional hickup did occure. Our best guest is that these minor problems could be resolved by allowing a greater buffer to be filled before starting playback of the video. All in all, having access to other’s media libraries also greatly enhances my viewing opportunities.

Superb control using the Harmony One remote

The whole interface of Plex is designed to be operated using a remote control. It works out of the box with the Apple Remote. Being a standard accessory for some Macs, or a $19 option from Apple, this forms an affordable option for most people to control the software.

However, the Apple Remote, originally designed for use with Apple’s Front Row software which offers far more basic user interface, quickly becomes limited. With its 6 buttons, navigation is not always easy, as it involves longer key presses to initiate different commands, and still then cannot offer access to many different functions at once. What’s worse, Apple designed the infrared receivers in its Macs to just receive commands from an Apple Remote, the receivers wouldn’t work with any other remote.

But here comes in the very clever thinking on the part of both the team resposible for Plex, as of Logitech. They utilize the fact that a single Mac can be paired with up to 6 remotes, each being able to uniquely identify itself to the computer. By programming all commands of these individual remotes into a single new remote, and by mapping the “keep pressed” state of the buttons to seperate buttons as well, several dozens of infrared commands can be send to the Mac.

For this to work, Logitech co-operated with the Plex team and created a new device called “Plex” in their online database of devices, so that it can easily be added to a Harmony remote, such as my Harmony One. There is no need to do any additional programming to the remote, apart from the normal customzing to make it fit your needs.

Using the Harmony remote with Plex gives you instant and always available access to things like bringing up the on-screen info display, transport controls (play/pause/search), navigation controls, aspect ratio selection, etc. But one of the best examples of the fine integration between the Harmony remote and the Plex software can be found when browsing long lists (for example with TV show episodes). By clicking any of the number buttons, you immediately jump to the letter assigned with that button (SMS-style, the letters are also printed on the Harmony remotes). Needless to say, this greatly improves operation, and makes the Plex software a breeze to use.

Getting access to Hulu and iPlayer using VPN

Those in the US, and to a lesser extend the UK, are blessed with an innovative and competitive market place in the field of video distribution over the Internet. Hulu, a joint-operation of NBC and Fox, is a very popular site that offers access to literally hundreds of TV shows and thousands of episodes, ranging from decades old sitcoms like Alf, Knight Rider and Who’s the Boss, up until recently aired material from such hit shows like Heroes, 24, ER, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad and The Office. In the UK, the BBC offers a similar service for its content trough a service called iPlayer.

There is one major catch, however. Hulu and iPlayer are not available to viewers from outside the US and the UK, respectively. The services determine your location based on your IP address, and provideyou with a message indicating that you cannot play the video because your watching from an unsanctioned area.

Luckily, there is a way around this. It does involve some skills, but getting access to this wealth of TV programming makes it more than worth the effort. In order to get approval from the video site to play the video, you need to visit using a valid IP address. There are services out there, usually requesting a small monthly fee, that can access the sites with a valid IP address, and then redirect the data to you. This technology is called VPN, or Virtual Private Network, and is commonly used to set up a tunnel to a company’s network for employees accessing this network while on the move.

I used the service from a company called UKiVPN, which costs about 6 Euros per month with a 1 year membership. They provide both a number of US-based IP adresses, as well as several UK-based addresses. They provide easy installation instructions, which require no additional software at all, as all the VPN stuff that is needed is already built into Mac OS X. Enterting your details and connecting the VPN is all that is needed to let Hulu and iPlayer do their tricks.

The finishing touch: VPN selection from the remote

Selecting the appropriate VPN connection, or closing the VPN connection again, would normally require you to close Plex, as the software does not have any VPN-features built-in. This would be cumbersome, as you probably would need the mouse and keyboard to do so, making things unpractical in a media center setup.

Luckily, and due to some very clever trickery from people on the Plex forums, I managed to completely control my VPN connections using the remote, and get some notification feedback on screen to boon.

For this trick to work you have to create an AppleScript for each of the VPN connections, that start the connection when it is not yet active, or disconnect from it when it was active. Then, you can assign these AppleScripts to the function keys within Plex. And since all function keys are available from within the “Plex” device in the Logitech Harmony software, you can assign these function keys to a button on the remote. In my case, using the Harmony One, I have created two virtual buttons on the remote’s touch display, called “VPN UK” and “VPN US”, that let me simply select either one directly from within Plex.

But how to make sure that the VPN connection was established? Since Plex is unaware of any VPN business that’s going on behind the scenes, it cannot tell. Well, even for this the clever guys on the forum came up with a solution. Simply install Growl, the well known universal notification system for Mac OS X, and let Growl display a “VPN UK connetion established” window on top of Plex after the connection is initiated by pressing the appropriate button on the remote.

Brilliant. (As far a hackery and home-brew media center customization go, that is!)

In these days, with an ever growing pile of eletronics devices that can be remote controlled, it is not hard to imagine that many people are looking for a single universal remote that can replace them all. The idea seems easy: just put all functionality of the seperate remotes into one new device. However, in practice, it seems to be very hard to turn this idea into a well executed product. This is due to a number of reasons that I try to explain in this article.

Although early remote controls in the 1950s used ultrasonic sound to communicate, the consumer electronics industry moved almost entirely towards infrared by the late 70s, early 80s. Using infrared has a number of huge disadvantages, the most prominent of them of course being the fact that you have to have  a clear line-of-sight between the remote and the device. If the signal gets blocked, the command will not arrive. (Imagine how things would have looked today if instead of light, the remote used a radio signal. There would be no loss of signal, and a device could be operated even if it was locked up in a closet.)

Another major design limitation of the infrared remote control is the lack of a reverse-communication path. Generally, there is no way for a device to communicate back to the remote. This could be handy, because that way the device could “confirm” that it received the command. Naturally, this also prevents any “status” display on the remote, as it has simply no clue as to in what state the device it operates is currently in. The latter one was not that big of a problem, as up until recently, a remote control did not provide any means of user feedback in the form of LED indicators or an LCD display.

This design of the early remote control principles seriously limits the user friendlyness up until this day. The remote does not know if the TV is on or if it’s set to the correct input, and thus cannot issue commands based on the device’s status. Most universal and programmable remotes assume a “virgin” state when they operate a device (i.e. that it’s off), so it’s not hard to imagine that this often leads to problems if that’s not the case (i.e. turning off instead of on, or change to another input when the correct one was already selected).

Furthermore, since consumer electronics devices generally also don’t communciate their statuses (properly) to one another, this also limits a seamless operation of your entire home entertainment system. This means that the user has to select a large number of settings by hand (selecting the source input on the receiver, selecting the source input on the TV, setting the correct volume, setting the correct aspect ratio, etc.), that might otherwise be set by the interconnected devices seamlessly and invisibly. As a result, a universal remote needs to duplicate all or most of the buttons of all individual remotes to perform simple tasks.

It is very hard to make the perfect universal remote control, because of the lack of this return channel from device to remote, the lack of even the simplest intelligence between devices and because of an overwhelming and complicated set of commands for all devices.

A number of companies have tried to solve this problem in the past, or at least they made an effort to ease the pain. With varying results. Personally, I have tried several remotes, ranging from simple and relatively cheap programmable models to more expensive full touchscreen remotes like the Philips Pronto and Pronto Pro. They were complicated to program and proved to be ineffecient in daily usage. My latest remote seems to strike a good balance between intelligently dealing with the limitations of infrared, easing the complexity of programming, good ergonomics and design, welll executed functionality, and on top off all carriying a very friendly street-price of around $150. I am talking about the Harmony One from Logitech.

Programming the remote

Setting up a universal remote to control all of your equipment is by far the most complicated and frustating part of using one. Basically, there are three kinds of methods a manufacturer might have choosen to take care of this programming. In the first category are remotes can “learn” commands from another remote by pointing them towards each other and then storing the command in the universal remote’s memory. While theoretically this allows for any command on any remote to be duplicated, in practice it can be painfull, especially while learning keys that send a repeating command, such as Volume up/down. A big limitation of this method is also that you can only learn the keys from your original remote into the programmable one. While this seems obvious, many electronics devices can receive more commands than the supplied remote can send, to do specific things (for example, while the original remote may only contain a single button to toggle trough all inputs, the device might accept commands to immediately switch to a particular input).

The second type of universal remotes contain a library of commands for a multitude of devices. The obvious advantage here is that you don’t have to “learn” the commands into your remote, you simply select the brand and model number to assign the appropriate commands to the remote. Depending on the execution, this can be done by entering a string of numbers representing the brand of your equipment, or more user friendly by selecting the device from the remote’s LCD screen. The biggest drawback with these remotes obviously lies in the fact that the database of devices is static (and may be limited due to storage restricitions by the manufacturer), and new devices are possibly not included in the database. Most of these remotes have a “learning” method as well, to fall back to in the likely case that a specific model is not included in the database.

The third kind of universal remotes are the ones that need to be programmed using a computer. While this might sound complicated at first, it is in fact the most elegant solution. It allows the manufacturer to look up a database of devices online, which can always be updated with new models. It makes these kinds of remotes the most “future proof” (that is, assuming that the manufacturer keeps the online services running for as long as you plan to make modifications to the remote during its lifetime). Logitech in particular has made severe efforts to offer the largest online database of devices, now running into serveral hundreds of thousands of model numbers. In my testing, it even knew the commands of obscure and outdated equipment (like Philips CD-i players), and also contains a lot of “special purpose” devices like multimedia PCs. In fact, it enhances the possibilities of the Mac’s IR receiver by offering functionality way beyond that of the standard Apple Remote, which I will explain in the next post on this blog about the Plex Mediacenter Software.

Remote ergonomics and usability

In the past, I have owned a number of remotes that include a full size touchscreen (comparable in size to the screen on the iPhone) as their sole method of user input. Particularly the Philips Pronto (b/w) and its successor, the color Pronto Pro. Logitech also offers such remotes, such as the 1000/1100-series. While such remotes look very cool at first glance, their usage on a daily basis is limited at best, or just plain frustating. While a big LCD screen gives you lots of room to re-create any possible button, in practice it makes it very hard to select these buttons due to the fact that you have to look at the remote at all times, and make sure you pin-point the desired button precisely. Things like zapping trough channels or adjusting the volume become painfull experiences that never reach the experience of using even the cheapest of remotes.

It was because of this experience that I decided not to buy an all-LCD remote again, which is when the Logitech Harmony One came in sight. This remote has very good design ergonomics (which might not be that surprising given Logitech’s long-term experience in designing human interface devices like keyboards and mice) and contains a lot of nicely layed-out “hard” buttons for all kinds of standard operations like menu navigation, number selection and transport control (stop/play/pause/search/etc.). But on top of this, the Harmony One also features a small, but beautifull colour touchscreen-LCD at its top, allowing you to assign clear desciptions and labels to buttons that don’t fit any of the hard buttons, it can show things like network logo’s for immediate selection of your favorite channels, but most importantly it can list all of the “activities” that you have set up to operate multiple devices at once.

As a nice touch of both design aesthetics and usabiliy, the Harmony One’s LCD is a capacitive touchscreen, rather than a pressure sensitive one. It reacts to finger presses by means of electic sensing, comparable to the iPhone. Logitech placed two arrows on both the left and right side of the display, and two selection options below it, all of which only lit up when available. This expands the touchable area of the remote beyond just the display, which both looks and works very nice.

Activities

Like most programmable universal remotes, the Harmony One allows for the creation of activities. Activities contain multiple IR-commands that are being send out in succession, for example to turn on the DVD player, TV and reveiver to start watching a movie. While most universal remotes can do this, a lot of problems arise due to the lack of feedback from the devices to the remote, as outlined in the beginning of this article. Most remotes assume a “virgin” state when beginning the sending out of commands, and most will not produce the desired results when for some reason one of the devices did not receive the commands properly.

Logitech seems to circumvent both problems as good as it can get within the limitations of the IR system. It will remember what activity you selected last, so when switching from say watching a DVD to using your media center, it will only turn on or off the devices based on their current state (and hence does not require the TV to be off for example). This is all pretty neatly implemented. However, it might still be possible to not get every device to react as expected, for example because the Logitech assumed a device’s state incorrectly, or simply because the signal of the remote got blocked. For these cases, the remote includes a “Help” button. Simply pressing this button will make the remote send out additional (or repeated) commands in a series of batches, each time asking you “if this solved the problem”. In my testing, in almost all of the cases a problem arose it was solved by the Harmony One’s effecting troubleshooting. Nice.

The missing link – Network connectivity

When doing research for a new remote, I also searched for a model with built-in Wi-Fi. I figured that having network access on my remote would allow for nice additional functionality, such as browsing a TV guide or getting feedback from some devices, like a mediacenter. I found that Wi-Fi connectivity could be found in the high-end (and expensive) all-touch screen segment of the market, which I already ruled out because of my past experiences with all-LCD remotes. I also found that some unknown manufacturer has made a reference design for a universal remote with Wi-Fi access based on Windows CE, but this one lacked all of the polish and computer programmability that I expect from a modern universal remote. In the end, I figured that having network access on my remote would centainly be a very welcome addition, but not something that I would sacrifice usability and ergonomics for.

In the end, my perfect universal remote would be one that combines all of the features of the Harmony One (great design, great execution of “activities” and macros and a gigantic online database containing every piece of consumer electronics ever made) with network access. Think of the Remote application that Apple created for the iPhone to control iTunes playback. Wouldn’t it be great to have this feedback of currently playing and upcoming songs on the display of the very same remote that you can use to control your TV and amplifier? I am sure that the folks at Logitech and other companies must be working on such a device. If this added functionality does not come at the price of reduced usability, I would be more than willing to trade in my remote once again.

Because remote controlling multiple devices via IR is so hard due to the inability of devices to talk to each other, or talk back to the remote, I don’t expect Apple to ever make a universal remote. It is just too unpredictable how the various devices of your home entertainment system will respond, and for a company that is so obsessed with controlling the whole user experience, this must be a nightmare. At least it gives me one potentional future remote controller to rule out.

In the upcoming article I will explain why I finally found any use for a Mediacenter-type of application on my Mac mini, and how Plex, the software of my choosing, works perfectly in tandem with the Harmony One due to special efforts on the part of both the creators of Plex and Logitech.