Feedback - Remote Play needs better UI Design

[Lighthammer 80]

I wanted to drop some feedback about the UI design for remote play. I think it might be more fair to qualify this as a universal truth, but I find it particularly problematic on the mobile app.

 

I've been utilizing MediaBrowser to help some people Cable Cut or at the very least, wein them off cable. While someone who is more tech orientated like myself has little problem figuring out how to do remote play, people who are less techy get extremely frustrated trying to figure it out. Even being able to figure it out relatively easily, even I have to admit it doesn't feel streamlined enough.

To make things feel more universal, I'd like to propose all remote play options be unified under Chromecast icon. I feel the Chromecast icon itself has practically universally emerged as a go to icon for any sort of screen casting anyway and as such, this feels like a logical step in unifying the design. 

Along with this, I'd also like to propose that all castable devices, once they have obtained an API key, should show up on the remote play options weather they are available or not. This will add more consistent overviews to more novous users and allow more adept users to troubleshoot a little easier on the fly; of course any implementation of this should look towards a slightly less roboust presentation model considering each user on each device gets it's own API key. A more unified design showing devices by IP or MAC might be practical. 

Finally, on the same tangent (though this goes more towards server with client options for all devices), I feel it would be highly practical to have options that allow clients to forbid remote play on specific devices and possibly, by default, determine said devices "out of the box". What I mean by this is there probably isn't a lot of call to be able to remote play from a web browser to an Android phone; therefor, by default, the phone wouldn't show up as an option to stream to unless a specific setting is made (IE a simple check box that states "Allow All MediaBrowser clients to stream to this device" or "Only allow web clients to stream to this device") There's probably a ton of use cases that can be played out from this ideal. 

[Redshirt 1487]

Merging remote play with CC is definitely on the to-do list. In fact it's #82 on my github issue list. It more than likely won't happen for this upcoming release, but will be in the next one.

[Lighthammer 80]

Thanks for the FYI. Glad we're on the same page.

I'm sad to admit (because I like how you guys generally operate) I might have to move my parents box to Plex for now just because its slightly more fleshed out and a little easier to understand.

That being said, from everything I see going on here, I think MediaBrowser has the potential to win out of Plex, especially since the team is so open to ideas; it's more the classic who started work first scenerio. 

 

My personal server no doubt is hanging on MediaBrowser to watch it grow and flourish though. Hell, if I had enough time and my head wasn't already spinning, I'd offer to help on the development end.