I just did my first steps doing some Plex plugin development over the weekend. I put a plugin bundle for an Austrian TV on demand web site together and have the basic xpaths for information scraping working. I then hard coded the url for the WebVideoItem (all the videos on the site are wmv’s (wrapped into asx)) and Plex refuses to play (‘Error while opening file’) from the plugin.
On the Plex Media Server log I can see that it’s complaining about a missing site configuration in the asx case and ‘Could not find configuration’ in both (asx an wmv) case.
If I put the exact same url in a strm file and select that file in my video source, it plays just fine (both the mms://.wmv or the http://.asx version).
If this plays fine via a strm file, shouldn’t it play the same way as an url in a plugin’s WebVideoItem or what am I missing?
I searched the forum for asx and/or wmv and found some entries indicating same/similar issues, but haven’t found a slution [yet …].
I created an entry for my plugin bundle on the ‘unsupported plugins’ wiki. I did not manage to upload my bundle as of yet (the wiki was complaining that it does not allow application/zip mime types …) but I can certainly share my bundle any other way (or somebody tells me what I did wrong when uploading the zip …) if you want to take a look.
WebVideoItems are for Flash or Silverlight players embedded in a web page. Try using a VideoItem instead 
Thanks Jam for the lightning fast response!
Aaah - and there is also a WindowsMediaVideoItem, I see ... I tried both and the VideoItem one seems to work better (in terms of buffering/stuttering) than the WindowsMedia one - which is completely opposite to what I thought - which is that the WindowsMediaVideoItem would be optimized for, er, Windows media data. So how does that actually work?
It's slightly confusing, but I'll try & sum it up :)
[list][*]**VideoItem** - Simply passes the given URL to Plex's internal video player.[*]**WebVideoItem** - Converts the provided URL into a Plex WebKit URL, then attempts to play it via the WebKit player. You must have a matching Site Configuration file for the target site, defining which player to lock onto, actions requred to pause, seek, etc.[*]**RTMPVideoItem** - Still uses WebKit, but uses a specially designed Flash player on the Plex server. This can be used to play rtmp:// links that Plex's built-in player has trouble with (the built-in player can't seek using RTMP, for example).[*]**WindowsMediaVideoItem** - Similar to the above item, but uses a Silverlight player for Windows Media-based streams. Again, use this one if you have problems with VideoItem.[/list]
Hope that covers everything :D
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