[pecinko]

Funnily enough, if I had developed this on my own (rather than with Harley) I was going to call it "Group Hug"....

I vote for "Family reunion" .

[Harley Hooligan]

PlenceXt

[jmarshall]

Thanks for keeping things (relatively) civil guys

Nice work on the plugin - while may not end up in the official repo (I'll start a discussion internally as to what sort of things we want to allow or disallow, to ensure we stay as consistent as possible for addon devs), it's a nice stop-gap solution for those who want to use PMS against a decent front end.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[RckStr]

harley: any plans on getting the plugin to work with home menu sections in confluence?

[hippojay]

New Release... Version 1.7.7
* Fixed transcoding
* Improved fanart
* Added some skin message passing to allow integration..
* New settings screens inc. configure multiple servers

https://github.com/downloads/hippojay/pl...-1.7.7.zip

Also - I've modded a version of Confluence (which I have called confluence.plexbmc v0.3) which:
* Adds access to PMS media on home screen
* Access to Plugins/Plex Online from home screen
* Multiple server identification
* Enable/disable integration in skin setting (switches on/off XBMC menu items)
* Basically I've tried to make accessing media just like Plex
* Full credit for stock Confluence goes to Jezz_X and Team XBMC. I've only modified two files....

https://github.com/downloads/hippojay/sk...mc-0.3.zip

And Finally, PleXBMC repo..

[*] Download, Update..blah blah blah - you know what a repo is....

[*] provided by Erlis on Plex Forums (not sure of XBMC username)

http://erlandssson.nu/repository.plexbmc...-1.0.0.zip

[anarchintosh]

(well, it was a close run thing with inPlexst)

but seriously have you not considered "Put your powerful proprietary Plex into XBMC's open source and make the developers scream" ?


i don't really care for Plex for many reasons, but well done on such a clever addon

[RckStr]

New Release... Version 1.7.7
* Fixed transcoding
* Improved fanart
* Added some skin message passing to allow integration..
* New settings screens inc. configure multiple servers

https://github.com/downloads/hippojay/pl...-1.7.7.zip

Also - I've modded a version of Confluence (which I have called confluence.plexbmc v0.3) which:
* Adds access to PMS media on home screen
* Access to Plugins/Plex Online from home screen
* Multiple server identification
* Enable/disable integration in skin setting (switches on/off XBMC menu items)
* Basically I've tried to make accessing media just like Plex
* Full credit for stock Confluence goes to Jezz_X and Team XBMC. I've only modified two files....

https://github.com/downloads/hippojay/sk...mc-0.3.zip

And Finally, PleXBMC repo..

[*] Download, Update..blah blah blah - you know what a repo is....

[*] provided by Erlis on Plex Forums (not sure of XBMC username)

http://erlandssson.nu/repository.plexbmc...-1.0.0.zip

Amazing. Im gonna give this one a go shortly. Sounds like a great release! thx a bunch!

[jelockwood]

I have experimented with both Plex and XBMC but until recently mainly used XBMC. The Plex PMS approach is why recently I have been using Plex more so this plugin seems heaven sent as a way of having my cake and eating it.

I do have a few questions though that reading through this thread I could not see mentioned.

I would be planning on having my media (as now) on a NAS server mounted on each client device.

1. Will XBMC with this plugin access the media 'locally' rather than streaming or transcoding from the PMS server?
2. Will XBMC still be able to play VIDEO_TS and/or ISO media? (This is something I am particularly concerned about as the Plex iOS app does not support using this type of media from a PMS.
3. If the network path is different on the XBMC client to what the PMS server is using, will this break things? I use a mixture of a Mac mini running Mac OS X, and Apple TV1 units, and while standard Mac OS X has paths like /Volumes/Sharename Apple TV1 pretty much makes it necessary to mount at a different location.
4. Do you have to have a specially modified skin? I prefer using Alaska is there a modified version of that if needed?

Many thanks to the author of this addon.

[saskwatch]

I just wanted to share something. I us a PC at work. I was able to download XBMC & connect to my Plex server at home with a tweaked version of this script. I modified the C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\plugin.video.plexbmc\resources\settings.xml and hardcoded the ipaddress to the ip of my home. For some reason, using the settings screen for this addon through XBMC would always reset the ip address to 127.0.0.1 when I tried to use my home ip address. At any rate, manually modifying the xml fixed that. The next thing I did was to modify the C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\plugin.video.plexbmc\default.py. I did a search and replace to change the default plex portnumber (which is hardcoded throughout the script) to the forwarded port I have at home. Once I did that, I can watch all of my library while at my desk at work. Just sharing ;-).

It would be nice to be able to set the port via the app, and I am not sure why the IP address was not able to be kept via the settings. If the author could take a look at those things - I would appreciate it.

[hippojay]

I have experimented with both Plex and XBMC but until recently mainly used XBMC. The Plex PMS approach is why recently I have been using Plex more so this plugin seems heaven sent as a way of having my cake and eating it.

I do have a few questions though that reading through this thread I could not see mentioned.

I would be planning on having my media (as now) on a NAS server mounted on each client device.

1. Will XBMC with this plugin access the media 'locally' rather than streaming or transcoding from the PMS server?

Plexbmc will only transcode if you enable the option, otherwise it will attempt to play the file as-is. There are some options to control how the file is delivered:
* auto - plexbmc decides
* stream - file delivered by PMS web server ( via http)
* smb - file delivered by an smb:// which needs to be accessible from client

Auto attempts to locate the file locally, first checking the file path to see if it was available - so if you mount via samba/nfs/afs then it needs to have exactly the same location. If it can't then it falls back to web server http (which is the safest option and always works)

2. Will XBMC still be able to play VIDEO_TS and/or ISO media? (This is something I am particularly concerned about as the Plex iOS app does not support using this type of media from a PMS.

Iso media should be ok but video_ts will only work for local or smb://. If video_ts is a needed, then I would probably use smb.

3. If the network path is different on the XBMC client to what the PMS server is using, will this break things? I use a mixture of a Mac mini running Mac OS X, and Apple TV1 units, and while standard Mac OS X has paths like /Volumes/Sharename Apple TV1 pretty much makes it necessary to mount at a different location.

Hmm, yes that will be a problem if you need to play video_ts. I might be able to allow a local override, so "volumes" is replaced with something else.

4. Do you have to have a specially modified skin? I prefer using Alaska is there a modified version of that if needed?

Skin is optional and came after the addon. I simply wanted a way of making access easier and more like plex. I haven't modded an Alaska skin yet, but if you do make use of plexbmc then I could look at it ( or give you some pointers to do it yourself)

Many thanks to the author of this addon.

My pleasure, I use this plugin myself to play plex media on windows.

If the author could take a look at those things - I would appreciate it.

for the benefit of those not following the plex forums, port configuration will be added to the next version.

[steve1977]

I really love the idea to have a central library and this one may be "better" than the current mysql solution. I tried the PMS some time ago and wasn't really happy about it. Development went on. Before giving it a new try and using the plugin, a few questions:

1) Can XBMC still looks exactly like it does today? Don't want to look XBMC look closer to Plex. Exactly the same (meta data, skin, recently added movies and tv shows, sort by actor, trailer, etc.)

2) I don't want PMS to do any scraping. I am using EMM and like to keep NFO, posters, fanart and trailer) locally in my movie folder. By doing so, I will stay independent to any changes. So, PMS would need to import those, but not do any additional scraping. Is this possible?

3) Someone said "music" is not supported yet? Is this a PMS issue or plugin-related?


One last comment: planning to use PMS for Windows.

Thanks for your help!!!

[hippojay]

1) you don't need to use any plexbmc specific skin - what's available for XBMC works fine. Only issue it that integration doesn't extend to the complete library system within XBMC. So PMS can track the recently viewed, display by artist/genre type stuff, and the addon can show this, but not directly from XBMC library.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure what the standard menu items fir the XBMC library are, so it's possible that PMS covers them all. I'll check it out tomorrow as I have some dev time.

2) not used the feature, but I believe that the PMS agent "local media assets" uses the nfo and folder art for metadata.

3) music is supported.

I'd just give it a try on a small number of files and see what happens, worse case is the loss of a hour or two - you aren't going to lose any of your existing XBMC library setup so you could just delete PMS and uninstall the addon and be back to original.

[steve1977]

1) you don't need to use any plexbmc specific skin - what's available for XBMC works fine. Only issue it that integration doesn't extend to the complete library system within XBMC. So PMS can track the recently viewed, display by artist/genre type stuff, and the addon can show this, but not directly from XBMC library.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure what the standard menu items fir the XBMC library are, so it's possible that PMS covers them all. I'll check it out tomorrow as I have some dev time.

2) not used the feature, but I believe that the PMS agent "local media assets" uses the nfo and folder art for metadata.

3) music is supported.

I'd just give it a try on a small number of files and see what happens, worse case is the loss of a hour or two - you aren't going to lose any of your existing XBMC library setup so you could just delete PMS and uninstall the addon and be back to original.

Thanks for your message. Just gave it a shot, but unfortunately, local files (nfo, posters, fanart, trailer) are not supported under PMS for Windows (yet). Also, it appears that PMS in general is not really suited for local files. For me, this is a deal breaker as I don't want to make myself dependent on PMS.

Also, just realized that things like "XBMC Commander" or other remotes that requires XBMC library would probably not have worked anyways.

Feels like I will need to wait for XBMC to come up with some improved central media database solution...

[hippojay]

No probs, you need to use what works for you best, although I'm not sure what you mean by PMS not being suited to local files?

I agree that the library system for XBMC needs a but more work, the fact that you heed to use 3rd party apps like EMM shows that there is an area that XBMC is missing.

I do have another addon that's in it's early stages called XonX (thread in this forum) which attempts to utilise a single XBMC instance as a central library - however it requires some extra functionality to be built into XBMC for it to match PLeXBMC/PMS in terms of maturity.

[steve1977]

No probs, you need to use what works for you best, although I'm not sure what you mean by PMS not being suited to local files?

Agree, I just try to avoid locking me into some specific software. PMS for Windows does not support "local files (nfo, poster, fanart, trailer) at all. PMS for Mac does, but it is just a workaround, which someone put together. I looked in the Plex forum and many users have problems with it. Also, it may break in every new release.

I agree that the library system for XBMC needs a but more work, the fact that you heed to use 3rd party apps like EMM shows that there is an area that XBMC is missing.

Agree. I love EMM, but of course ideally this would not even be needed. Let's see, giving increasing demand, maybe there will be some form of XBMC server (with transcoding function).

I do have another addon that's in it's early stages called XonX (thread in this forum) which attempts to utilise a single XBMC instance as a central library - however it requires some extra functionality to be built into XBMC for it to match PLeXBMC/PMS in terms of maturity.

Let me look into this. Thanks for pointing me there.