Here's my account on
how I went about configuring the Plex Home Theater with FLIRC and a harmony
ultimate.
I decided to have a
look at PLEX since i'm going to be moving to an apartment where the PC will be
connected directly to the TV. Since it will be directly connected, I won't be
using my streamer, and I thought I should look into using a nice looking media
player/server.
Already having a
harmony ultimate remote, I looked around for various ways to get it to control
the PLEX Home Theater, and i decided on FLIRC.
FLIRC is a cool piece
of USB driven hardware that translates IR (Infra-Red) signals to keyboard
clicks. Since it does the translating for you, it means the PC/Streamer or
whatever you're using it on doesn't need to know anything about IR translation,
It gets normal keyboard inputs as if from a regular keyboard.
In order to configure
the harmony remote to control PLEX I used the old approach that doesn't include
the FLIRC-PLEX profile in the harmony remote. Using this approach, we configure
the harmony with a device that has a lot of IR codes that are different from
one another. This approach lets me do all sorts of things with keyboard
shortcuts, namely using AutoHotKey (AHK) to configure commands not in the PLEX
command list.
Here's a word document
with my mappings using the Panasonic TC-P65VT30 device in the harmony remote:
About the AHK scripts:
The script that
directly affects PLEX, and is aptly named StartPlex.ahk, always runs on the PC
(it is in my startup folder) and the extra keyboard shortcuts in it do this:
Alt-Shift-F10 - opens
the plex client (theater)
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=DE479D93705AAEF!179&authkey=!ABvxiRhjSLez6Dg&ithint=file%2cahk
It expects the PLEX
Home Theater to be in:
“C:\Program Files
(x86)\Plex Home Theater\Plex Home Theater.exe”. if it is not in the same
location on your PC, change the ahk file and recompile it to create the
executable (literally 2 clicks once you have AHK installed).
other than this one
script, i urge you to have a look at my other scripts since they may fit your
particular case as they did mine (posted here: http://programming-headbanging.blogspot.co.il/2015/06/awhile-ago-i-wanted-to-find-way-to.html)
. Things such as changing the PC volume automatically when starting PLEX, or changing the PC resolution with a keyboard click.
. Things such as changing the PC volume automatically when starting PLEX, or changing the PC resolution with a keyboard click.
All my scripts are
updated in this post:
Now, all that's
left is to sit back, click the PLEX activity on the remote and watch TV till we
drop.
