Today I noticed that Apple have added a new app, Swedish TV4 Play. It seems that Apple now is opening up for third-party apps, I read about a developers toolkit that was used by Bloomberg when developing their app. This seem to be the clearly obvious way forward for Plex as well to improve integration compared to the PlexConnect / Plexify solution that I use at present. It works remarkably well, running PMS on a Core2Duo Mac Mini, but it would be far better if a specific app handled the control of Plex.
Is there any (un-)official plan or work going on in this direction? PMS on a Mac or even NAS and ATV3 is the perfect setup for me, it never fails!
I think you misunderstand how PlexConnect works.
PlexConnect works in exactly the same way as the "native 3rd party apps" do on the ATV, ie an external server serves up a combination of XML and JS in a form that the ATV understands.
The only difference is the DNS interception part to get PlexConnect on the ATV.
Those "apps" like TV4 do not really exist as an app on the ATV at all, they are not dissimilar to a browser page that gets called up when you boot up your ATV, this is how Apple "magically" pushes out those new apps.
The only difference with Apple allowing it to officially exist would be to remove the DNS component from PlexConnect and potentially fold the PlexConnect code into the Plex Media Server so it was transparent to the user (the latter isn't prevent from happening already but the unofficial nature of the hack makes it a bit more complicated).
Unless Apple totally changed iOS on the ATV to allow "proper" apps that run natively on the ATV itself; the problem with this though has already been seen in the memory issues and instabilities that can be seen on some of the native jailbreak applications (mainly down to the ATV's limited resources).
I know that PlexConnect mimics something that is understandable to ATV. The thing I have against PlexConnect (now, when I have it running - before that it was hell on earth...) is that because of the specific DNS adress in the ATV the whole thing stops working if Plex Server is down.
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