Hi,
First of all, I'm not sure if the modifications that I'll describe are allowed by Plex or not.
The intended result was to have a personal modification only.
Here's a quick overview of the situation :
I have a LOT of physical DVDs ( which were all bought over the past years from local video stores that discounted them when they needed to reduce the number of copies when the film wasn't "new" ).
I store these DVDs in enumerated pouches in cases.
I wrote a small program that listed movies and pouches/index, I also integrated a limited metadata support ( from IMDB ) to perform search by genres and actors.
The program was working "ok" for the time being, but required a much needed update.
Instead of re-writing the whole thing ( let's be honest, no-one in his right mind would maintain a few years old codebase :P ) I've looked into Plex APIs and developer support and
figured out it could be possible to implement that kind of thing ( and also benefits from all the sweet features of Plex :) )
So here's where I stand:
- Created a scanner to parse a csv file ( dumps from the other program's database ) to create movies ; This worked like a charm.
- Altered the Movie metadata's model to include a pouch and an index field, both integer values ; Again, no real problem here.
- Created an agent that contributes to IMDB to fill-up the newly created field in the model's metadata. At that point, I now have an Info.xml file that contained the and values in the metadata per movie. ( files located at \Plex Media Server\Metadata\Movies\\Contents\_combined\Infos.xml )
- Altered plex.js to present a Pouch and an Index line ( Under the Audio and Subtitles section ) ; I managed to have the lines displayed but the data is empty.
And then I found out that the data was empty because the metadata received by the library/metadata service isn't the same content as the Info.xml in the _combined folder...
I tried to find out the schema or recipes to generate that metadata, I've lost a few hours trying things in \Plug-ins\Framework.bundle\Contents\Resources\Versions\2\Python\Framework\objects.py and MediaXML.py without any real luck.. :(
I haven't found a thread in the forums that relates to this.. but I'm reaching out anyway, has someone ever tried ( and was more lucky then me :P ) to modify the structure of the metadata ?
This is most likely compiled in the core of Plex ( understandably.... ) like the definitions of the base medias ( Movies, Tv Shows, Music, Photos and Home Video.. ) but if this could work, we would be able to create support to other kind of media that were discussed/requested in the forums ( e-books, etc.. ).
This could maybe even be extended to broader definitions of "media" like physical books, food recipes, etc...
Sorry if this was a spam of boring text !
Thanks a lot.
