Still the first and the best…
Back when iPhones were a new deal, back before Plex got easier to maintain, people mostly used one app and one app only to maintain their private video libraries: And that would be VLC aka VideoLAN . Video LAN as in Local Area Network , where we could network several home computers, and share all of the media. Where we could network several home computers, share all of the media libraries, create multitudes of playlists and then have ongoing movie playback for days and days and years even. And wouldn't such an app require a remote control for us couch potato types? Enter VLC Remote. Now we could have access to every cool feature of VLC: change aspect ratio, language, alternate streams, we could play back DVDs, Blu - ray's, MKV, FLV, AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, and many other obscure formats that (OGG) all play back beautifully from one app . I had the privilege of beta testing this app for a couple of years and a lot of the cool features in this app I remember discussing, in fact the way that it is now is the direct result of a core group of us who used to bounce ideas back - and - forth between us and the developer . Who is a great guy and he even put out a "VLC remote classic " for me and one other person and I still have that installed in one of my devices. There was even a "headset mode", an EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE with skull and cross bones warning , which works actually pretty well except that you have to manually sync up the audio on the hand devices to what's playing on the TV, but it does give you a way of having a headset on from 20 feet away and you don't have to have a 50 foot headphone cable. Is headset mode still there? YES- I was just using it. These days most of the cool things that we were able to do with VLC we can now do with Plex media server, and so I feel badly that from my perspective this app has fallen along on the wayside to the point where my iOS 11 App Store automatically offloads the app on occasion But whenever I do finally fire up VLC on my home network, I still use this app to manipulate it rather than having to get off my rear end, drag my butt over to the computer and mess with the interface there, in fact the combination of VLC Remote and Mobile Mouse/Unified Mouse gives me the ability to fire up VLC from Mobile Mouse and then I can move to VLC remote to access the app. Lately the developer has been creating something called the ChillRemote which actually can give you a Remote for things like Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and it