The developers of the popular Plex media center software for computers have released an Android app that lets you stream media from your from your computer to a mobile device. The Android app follows an iOS app which was released about half a year ago.

While the iOS version lets you use your iPhone or iPad as a remote control for your Plex media center computer, the Android app lacks this feature for now. What it does offer though, is the ability to start watching a movie on your TV and then pick up where you left off on your mobile device. Since your Plex media server is doing the heavy lifting, you can even switch between Android device,s or continue viewing on an iPad.

The Plex app also lets you view your history on any device, and if you change metadata on one device it will show up on all of your Plex devices.

In other news, Plex is now available for Windows as well as Mac computers.

The Plex Android app is available from the Android Market for $4.99.

via Engadget

Plex media center app now available for Android is a post from: mobiputing

XBMC is a highly customizable and powerful media center application that can run on computers and a number of other devices. In fact, the project started its life as Xbox Media Center, thus the acronym. But my how XBMC has grown in recent years. Last night the developers announced that the app has been ported to run on devices with Apple’s A4 chip. That includes the Apple TV2, iPad, iPhone 4, and 4th generation iPod touch.

You’ll need to jailbreak your iOS device in order to install XBMC, since it’s not available from the App Store. But if you do that, you can effectively turn a $99 Apple TV into a powerful media center with support for 1080p HD video playback. This will let you stream videos from computers on your home network without relying on Apple’s AirPlay service, handle almost any video codec you can throw at it, use XBMC skins, and run add-ons.

The version for the iPad supports drag-and-drop loading of photos, videos, and music from your computer. The XBMC developers say you can also run the app on the iPhone 4 (and presumably the 4th generation iPod touch), but that it’s “frustrating to use.”

You can find instructions for installing XBMC on an Apple TV2 or iPad/iPhone at the XBMC wiki.

via TUAW

XBMC turns your jailbroken Apple TV, iPhone, iPad into a kick-ass media center is a post from: mobiputing

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.

RemoteX: Remote control 12 PC media players from an iPhone is a post from: mobiputing