Using the API to retrieve Library metadata

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
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I'm playing around with parsing and manipulating library metadata in xml. At the moment I am retrieving a token from:

 

https://my.plexapp.com/sign_in.xml

 

and getting a list of sections from:

 

https://my.plexapp.com/pms/system/library/sections

 

This allows me to retrieve a list of all the Media in a section using the "key" attribute from the above xml. This is a url pointing directly to the PMS instance e.g.:

 

http://x.x.x.x:32400/library/sections/3/all

 

I have some questions about this:

 

1. is there a way to retrieve the listing of the Media in a section from the my.plexapp.com domain or do I always need to connect directly to the server using the provide key?

 

2. Is there a better, faster way of retrieving this information? Can I get it via the JSON api? I've been trying to find out how to make these calls and get json back but it isn't clear from the documentation I can find

 

3. Media objects include a bitrate integer. This isn't provided with a unit so it is hard to know whether it is in Mb, Kb etc. How is this number calculated and is there any logic I can apply to my parser to know what unit the bitrate value is?

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  1. You always need to make a GET request to the server with an access token to get the metadata. I’m not sure if you need the token if you’re doing the call locally though (http//localhost:32400 for example).

  2. As far as I know the server only returns XML responses.

  3. I don’t know, but I thought everything was returned in bytes?
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I have also tried to get the server to respond with json but haven’t found a way. The only thing I know you can get by json is the token at /sign_in.json

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1. You always need to make a GET request to the server with an access token to get the metadata. I'm not sure if you need the token if you're doing the call locally though (http//localhost:32400 for example).

2. As far as I know the server only returns XML responses.

3. I don't know, but I thought everything was returned in bytes?

Thanks for helping. For point 1 I know that I always need a token - I just noticed that the server list is retrieved by a call to my.plexapp.com whereas I have to ping the IP of the server itself to get the full media listing. I'm wondering if this is available through myplex.com instead....

On 3, unfortunately not. For example, I have one small Movie that has a bitrate of 1232 kbps which is reported as "128" whereas another with a bitrate of 6418 kbps is reported as 6418. For the most part it seems kbps is returned - however there are a few anomalies.....

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  1. myPlex does not store that information, so you really have to connect to the PMS
  2. If you send an "Accept" header with the value "application/json" in your request, you'll get json back (although I'm not 100% sure if this works for the myPlex request, it will certainly work for the requests to your own PMS).
  3. Bitrate is the overall bit rate afaik, in Kbps
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Thanks! Can you clarify regarding the application/json request to PMS. I am trying to get a full list of all the items in the section. I get xml if I request:

http://{server_ip}:32400/library/sections/3/all?X-Plex-Token={token}

If I add the application/json Accept header I get 405 method not allowed.

What else do I need to add to the request to get a full list of the section back?

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