The blog & portfolio of Matthew J. Rogers

Living in Harmony with Plex

January 11, 2009

Harmony 500

Plex, the fantastic media center software I’ve written about before, added some icing on the cake recently: out-of-the-box support for Logitech Harmony universal remotes.

Logitech Harmony remotes are great because Logitech maintains a massive database of all the codes for pretty much every consumer electronics device ever made (the Harmony 550 was my pick for the best gadget gift under $100). You (usually) don’t have to sit there “training” the Harmony with your original remotes — you just hook it up to your computer, type in the model numbers of your TV, receiver, game console, etc, and you’re off. It vastly improves (and simplifies) control of your home entertainment center.

However, while Logitech did have remote codes for the Mac Mini (which is what I’m using to run Plex), the six buttons of the Apple remote aren’t enough to control a full-featured software suite like Plex. So I wound up buying a piece of software called Remote Buddy that interprets signals from remote controls and turns them into keystrokes. Basically, I spent 2 hours having my Harmony learn IR codes from 7 “virtual” Apple remotes (7 distinct sets of 6 IR codes) to give me 42 effective buttons, but then I had to create keystrokes for each of those 42 IR codes in Remote Buddy so that the proper commands would be sent to Plex (as keystrokes). It was extremely tedious, and I wound up having to do most of it over again because one of the learned IR commands was corrupted (resulting in double-presses).

Not happy with this solution either, a few users over on the Plex forums got together and decided to do something about it. An special IR profile could be added easily enough to the Plex code by the developers, but the catch was that Logitech would have to create a Plex “device” in their massive database. When I found that out, I pretty much lost all hope because while I love Logitech’s hardware, they’re a big company and I didn’t really expect them to pay attention to a little open-source project run by some home entertainment geeks.

Fortunately, I was wrong. Within a few weeks, Logitech was working with the Plex team to establish an expanded set of IR codes that a Mac could receive and that Plex would specifically listen for. Right around Christmas, the Plex device was added to the Logitech Harmony database. As soon as we got back from visiting our relatives, I eagerly updated Plex on the Mini, plugged in the Harmony to my laptop and fired up the Harmony control software. I found and added the Plex device, flashed the remote, and within minutes I was successfully controlling Plex just like any other device in the Logitech database.

Plex treats the Harmony remote as just another type of input device, so you can customize the key mappings using an XML file just like you can with the keyboard. I tweaked a few of the buttons to my liking, which only took a couple more minutes. All told, I had everything configured exactly the way I wanted in less than 10 minutes — compared to almost 2 hours I had to spend before learning IR codes and configuring Remote Buddy.

With the addition of Plex to Logitech’s device database, Plex now integrates as nicely into your media center as any other device. In my follow-up after my first couple months with the software, the one big drawback I mentioned was the struggle to find a good way to control it. That concern has been solidly dealt with. Considering how much we use this to watch archived video, I want to give a big thank you to the Plex enthusiasts who initiated this crusade, and the folks at Logitech who cared enough to listen to the little guy. From the comments on the Plex forums, it looks like they’re going to sell a lot more remotes because of it!

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