Windows Media Center is a 10-foot interface for a PC that lets you control your music, movies, photos, and other media from the comfort of your couch — provided your PC is plugged into your TV and you have a Media Center remote control. But here’s a little secret: Windows 7 Home Premium and Ultimate both come with Windows Media Center functionality baked in, whether you plug in a remote, TV tuner, or HDTV or not. And if you don’t feel like investing in extra hardware to take full advantage of Windows Media Center, you can just use your Windows Mobile phone or PDA like a remote control.

xda-developers forum member oishiiunko whipped up an application for Windows Mobile 6.0 and up that lets you navigate menus, control media playback, and control the volume using your phone.

The app is called Windows Media Center Mobile Remote Control, and what it lacks in creative naming is makes up for in simple functionality. You can play and pause media, hit the next or previous buttons, and there’s a position seek feature as well. There’s haptic feedback for supported touchscreens, which means you should feel a little vibration when you press a button — making it easier to confirm that you’ve pressed a key without looking at your fingers.

Right now only QVGA devices are supported, but the app is still a work in progress.

In order to use the app, you’ll need to install VMC Controller on your PC, install the mobile app on your phone or PDA, connect to your PC over WiFi or an ActiveSync connection, fire up the mobile app, hit the connect button, and enter the IP address for your computer. All told, a dedicated remote control is probably easier to use. But that wouldn’t be as cool… or as cheap. Windows Media Center Mobile Remote Control is available as a free download from the xda-developers forum.

via xda-developers

The iTunes App Store is filled with applications that let you control desktop media players from your phone. There are remotes for iTunes, Boxee, VLC, and other apps. And then there’s RemoteX — a single application that functions as a remote for all of those apps, plus 9 more.

RemoteX is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7, and requires you to download a small server utility on your PC.

Then you fire up the RemoteX app on your iPhone or iPod touch, connect to your desktop (which should automatically show up in the list of servers), and choose the media player you want to handle. The remote control functions change for each app. For instance, the VLC controller has FullScreen and DVD butons, while the Winamp controller has an Equalizer and Playlist button.

All of the remote controls feature basic playback controls, such as play/pause, fast forward/rewind, and skip.

Here’s the list of applications that RemoteX works with: Windows Media Player 11, Winamp, VLC, KMPlayer, Pot Player, XBMC, GOMPlayer, Media Player Classic Home Cinema, AIMP2, Windows Media Center, and iTunes.

RemoteX is available for download from the App Store in multiple flavors. The full version costs $1.99 and has a few features that appear to be missing from the free RemoteX Lite including the ability to turn off, reboot, or hibernate your PC by pressing a button on your iPhone.

Update: It looks like RemoteX Lite has been discontinued. The full version of RemoteX now costs $1.99. There are also $0.99 versions for controlling single applications such as Windows Media Center, GOM Player, KMPlayer, or XBMC.

I shot a brief video overview of RemoteX Lite in action, which you can check out after the break.

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