Plex : The Future of Home Theater

Over a year ago, I started to play around with using my MacBook Pro as a media center. I had bought a new HDTV a couple of months prior, and wanted to see how I could get the most out of its display capabilities.

I started with VLC, which worked OK, but at the time it was incapable of 5.1 surround output. The next application I tried was MPlayer (using the GUI version), which did everything I needed but all the commands required a keyboard, using arcane commands.

At some point I came across an application called Plex, and was blown away. The interface was gorgeous, well beyond even Front Row from Apple. Like Front Row, however, it was built to be controlled using nothing more than the simple Apple remote, with only six buttons. Here are a couple of pictures to give you a sense of the interface:

More recently I realized that the Plex developers have worked with Logitech to create a custom profile you can load into your programmable Harmony remote, which takes the integration of Plex into your home theatre to a whole new level.

What really go me thinking recently, however, was a Plex release which incorporated plugins or "apps" that allow you to pull in streams from the internet. They offer easy integration with popular services like YouTube, Hulu, Joost, and the BBC iPlayer, but you can also use it to access material that will probably seem more exotic to most people, including TED Talks, and some photo streams.

One that fascinated me was a stream from a Toronto photographer. Clicking through the beautiful images reminded me of our years living in the "big smoke", but it also got me thinking about how this kind of technology could ultimately close the loop in how our media consumption is changing. Statistics show that we're spending more and more time online reading blogs and social media, even while more and more homes are getting HDTVs that can easily display digital content from a variety of sources.

Already a number of sites are trying services that aspire to provide traditional, broadcast-quality media using the distributed, online model. I think the missing link is something like Plex that is site and stream agnostic, that allows you to mix your consumption of live video streams, your local music collection and personal pictures and videos. Plex even pulls in RSS feeds, and even uses the internet to enhance use of local media, for example by querying IMDB and similar online databases to provide rich information and graphics to make navigating through your local media much more powerful than simply scrolling through a series of directories.

I'm not saying that Plex specifically is the future of the home theater (though I'd certainly like it if it were). But I'm certain that this type of flexible, interconnected rich media interface is the kind of thing we'll all be using before long, maybe even occupying the space currently occupied by PVRs and cable boxes. If you want to take a peek at the Tivo of the future, take Plex for a spin.

Introduction to the Plex App Store, and a demo of a few plug-ins.