Living in Harmony with Plex
January 11, 2009
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).
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