Recently I have decided to convert my entire media system to Plex from the XBMC/Kodi environment. The primary motivator for this was to have access to my media collection as I travel. There wasn’t a lot to the setup, everything pretty much just worked, with the exception of Plex Home Theater on top of Windows 8.1.

My Kodi environment, the media centers, were on older Intel Core 2 Duo machines that were relatively power hungry. I decided to upgrade to a Core i3 Intel NUC with a SSD installed and 8 GB of RAM and run Windows 8.1 instead of Openelec as it wasn’t/isn’t supported by Plex directly. The installation, as with about any Windows installation, was pretty simple.

I did come into a problem, however. I also purchased a Windows Media Center remote for $6 brand new on ebay. It synced up with the NUC perfectly without any configuration. I then decided to set Plex to run as a “Custom User Interface” within Windows, which launches Plex Home Theater at startup instead of explorer.exe. This isn’t usually a problem, except it prevents the remote from being able to access the volume controls as these are controlled via explorer.exe. Since I have a receiver this wasn’t going to be an issue, except it was. Repeatedly after restarting Windows, or the kids got ahold of the remote, the system would be muted and I’d have to go downstairs, grab a keyboard/mouse, quit Plex, run explorer.exe and then unmute the system. This became a nuisance and I decided to solve the problem.

Create a Batch File

To make this work, you have to start by creating a batch file. I create a folder in the C:\ directory called “startup” where I then created a blank file called “startup.bat”.

Within this file I wrote the following:

@echo off

start “” “C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex Home Theater\Plex Home Theater.exe”

start “” “C:\Windows\explorer.exe”

*The double quotes before the path to the file names is required.*

Point to Batch File

Now open up gpedit.msc and go to User Settings -> Administrative Templates -> System and open up “Custom User Interface.”

Select the Enabled box.

Put “c:\startup\startup.bat” into the box (assuming that’s where you put the batch file you created”

Enjoy

Now when your computer boots, it will launch Plex, as intended, and then run explorer.exe in the background. This enables the volume controls but doesn’t make you boot to the desktop first and then have Plex launched via a shortcut in the startup folder.