Most of you geeks will probably agree with me that the most frustrating part of watching a great movie is finding a way to keep it in your collection somehow. We started off with betamax tapes, then Laser discs came, then DVDs and recently there came Blu-Ray. But the thought of dusting countless blue plastic containers containing optical discs week by week somehow just doesn’t fit “The Collection”. There must be some other way. A better way of saving up the movies you love without much effort of keeping them on alphabetical order every time. Without having to wear gloves each time you use them for fear of scratching.

You know, like your computer files.

I know, I know… Pirate Bay is for thieves and ripping your own DVD after buying it is as normal as buying a new BMW only to take it to China to get an almost exact copy. Keyword being ‘almost’. But admittedly, after years of saving up these AVI’s and MPG’s, you almost feel inclined not to delete any of them – even that shoddy copy of Jerry Maguire. This is how it should be – digital copies of movies saved on a massive server made available to any computer that connects to it within your household or even remotely. It was never a question of how wrong you acquire those files. It was a question of how you store and play them afterwards.

That’s why Plex works so good for me. The XBMC-based Mac Media Server application works so flawlessly that I only care about the quality of the stuff I put in. It gets all the saucy stuff from the net automatically – Album Covers, IMDB Ratings, Movie Info – it even gives you an option to hide the summary of the movie if you haven’t watched it yet. Very cool stuff. It was so good that I’m solely running Plex on a Mac Mini built to be a media server at home.

So when I got an iPad and was browsing through the apps while trying to watch an episode of Top Gear from my Plex machine, I saw this curious little $5.99 app that claims to control any XBMC server from your iPad. Plex runs on XBMC and it was terribly frustrating to juggle a wireless keyboard and a mouse to control it, so to be able to control almost everything from the new tablet that I cannot put down seems to be such a tasty treat. Why not?

THE EXPERIENCE

So impulsive as I am, I immediately bought the app and fired it up right away. It showed me this interface with movies and remote control on it which got me thinking – is this up already? Obviously it didn’t work so I ended up trying to get the settings right which means putting in your hostname ( which later on turned out to be my IP address ) and the server port of your xbmc server which can be found under your network settings in Plex.

After about 15 minutes of fiddling I finally got it to work. Thank god. Now to the good stuff (or so I assumed).

The first launch after it says connection successful went to a loading screen saying connecting to server. The time it took the app to load the movies and all its info on to the iPad was enough for me to get up, take the keyboard and mouse, click a few times, scroll to play a video, get a drink and go back to the sofa. I mean seriously? Its not like the app is trying to save everything on the iPad. Its just reading the database from the server and (probably) trying to get the info from the net afterwards. It took the damn app almost 10 minutes to show me something other than ‘connecting to server.’

Ok, I thought to myself, it will redeem itself after my fingers touch the cover flow of movies. Sure enough, the app started showing the movies stored on my server on my iPad in cover flow fashion. But I noticed something odd. The movies aren’t arranged as they arranged on my server. My collection starts with the movie ’9′. XBMC Remote started with something else. What. The. Fuck.

Fine…its still ok, its cover flow godammit. It’s meant to make any geek pee in awe once they see this puppy running on my iPad while watching Avatar on HD. Now time to switch to another movie… scroll.. scroll… huh. No more scroll. The app just froze there. Had to relaunch the app a few times to be able to load all my movies’ info. This is beginning to sound like a dud.

Ok then, let’s move on to watch my other videos like TV series, cartoons, etc. Oh. You can’t. Just the movies. So what’s the remote GUI for? Apparently to replace the scrolling you do with your arrow keys with something on your iPad. That’s it? For $6 I was expecting it to show my entire GUI on the iPad that I could actually scroll with. How is this better than using say, a REAL Apple remote?

THE VERDICT

The XBMC Remote is FAR too early in development to be even launched as a stable app. You could tell that the developers just wanted to make money straight away when you flip your iPad from portrait to landscape and notice that the coverflow is not centered anymore. Not too many features, very, very buggy and very shoddy looking interface, this by far was my most serious buying mistake. Not even showing off that shiny Cover Flow of movies will save you from smashing your iPad out of frustration from this app. Do. Not. Buy.

XBMC Remote iPad App – $5.99