James Andrews

Since I was a child I have loved the drums. Whether it be pots and pans from under the cupboards, beach pales and other odds and ends out in the yard. It is an instrument that I always wanted to play. When I was in the 4th grade, when we had the ability to join “band” my parents wouldn’t let me get a drum. Instead they allowed me to get the trumpet. When I became interested in playing rock music, I didn’t have the money to afford a kit, and as an adult I really have never had a place to keep a kit.

Fastfoward to New Years Even 2008. I went over to my friend Bridget’s house for a NYE party. Much of the night was spent playing Rock Band on the Xbox 360. Though I was enthralled with their drums. They don’t have the crappy plastic that easily breaks piece of garbage that comes with the game. Instead her husband had purchased an “ION Drum Kit”. The ION Drum Kit is pretty incredible. It is designed and sold by Alesis, a manufacturer of high end electronic drum equipment. It was designed to give you flexibility, but more importantly it was designed to allow you to disconnect your game system, plug in one of their drum brains, and PLAY the drums. Allowing a potential drummer to start with a basic kit, and move up as he/she outgrows the game. The best part is it’s a reasonable price. $200 for the core system. A little bit more for the electronic symbols. When the game is outgrown you can buy a basic brain for $150, or a more advanced brain for $350.

I want one badly….

The other day I went over to a friend’s house who I hadn’t seen for a while. During my visit he went to show me some video. He grabbed a keyboard and start media player application on the PC attached to his TV. The application was XMBC an open source media player. I am a mac user, and a while back XMBC forked and Plex was created for OS X. Yesterday I downloaded Plex and started looking at it’s potential to be my multimedia app, instead of buying an AppleTV.

If you have used XMBC you will be happy to hear that the interface is identical. You can add your movies, music, photos, pretty much whatever media you have you can play, and it does it well. One of the things about XMBC and Plex is the ability to add plugin bundles. These bundles allow you to play videos from Comedy Central, Hulu, BBC and a slew of other online video resources. There are even some questionable un-supported bundles for “mature materials”. I tried a few of the different bundles and they worked pretty good. I did have issue with Comedy Central’s pluggin. Some videos listed didn’t play at all, and I am not sure if it was my internet connection or something wrong with the content, but I was slightly disappointed with that.

Plex also allows you to change the skin of the media player, but most of them are piss poor at best. The Best of the bunch is called Mediastream and is the default one that loads with it. You can change the background images to be what ever you want. Images from your favorite TV show, pictures you took on your vacation, or video. It’s all very cool and customizable. Though there seems to be no way to fas tforward through video, It always seems rewind. If you get to the beginning it will go to the end and rewind. I’ll have to investigate more.

I have an XBox360 and some time ago I bought the Harmony Remote for it. It so happens to support Plex, so I also programmed Plex into the remote. I took a little figuring out, but you can easily navigate through the menu items. Though there is still a lot they could do better. For example the VCR controls could actually control the video properly. play, stop pause etc. They don’t act correctly with the remote. Same problem exists with fast forwarding. You click on the right arrow expecting it to fast forward, and it rewinds instead.

I also think it would be real neat if it played mp3+g media (mp3 based karaoke). I need to get a mac mini so I can create a dedicated machine, but that’ll have to wait until later this year. early next year. I would have used an old iBook G4 I have, but Plex only works on Intel based macs.

For more information you can check out http://www.plexapp.com/

I give Plex 4 out of 5 remotes.