Tried Alexa skill called My Media and that does work on my echo dot. Unfortunately, MY Media still needs some work on the voice commands it has trouble selecting the right song. Plex selects the right song but doesn’t work due to Nat Hairpin. Plex will work when I Teather the dot with my cell phone but that’s not a solution.
Hope either Plex or My Media figure this out really want this to work.
still hoping someone with Plex will weigh in… those of us who have gotten it to work with NAT … .that isn’t a mass market solution and given that Plex has been marketing this “feature” now… I’d hope there is some direct support to resolve it. The solution I did with setting the routing manually has been holding and for the most part, the Plex skill is reliably working (sometimes stalls on next song in the playlist and would have preferred a “Genre” option). It has a lot of potential and seems to be only there… Plex Support? Can you weigh in?
I have spent hours this evening trying to diagnose this.
I have an echo and a plex server, I am able to get plex to play to any active client running on my amazon fire tv sticks. The problem is trying to get it to play on the echo its self.
It goes through all the motions but always defaults to any client it can find that’s active (as seen in the logs) (fire TV sticks or the app on my phone or any running web clients) not that they always play the music anyway, sometimes they do sometimes not.
I would love to know how you get it to play on the echo it’s self the posts on facebook indicate this is now supported with the latest version of the skill however I have checked all my NAT and IP settings including the DNS rebind and other issues and it still refuses to play.
When changing client the echo is not listed as an available client and I can’t see any way to make it play the music on the echo even though this is now (???) apparently supported.
To any plex members I would love the following answered:
* Does the skill now allow us to play on the actual amazon echo device its self and if so how do you make it the client.
* Is the skill in the UK amazon store on the same release as the US one.
I must admit I am technical but its highly frustrating !!!
@cardy. You cannot make the Echo the client like other players. You simply say “Alexa, ask plex to play music by…” or “Alexa, ask plex to play the album …” and it should play through the Echo.
See https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/236324808-Alexa-Voice-Commands for the commands available.
Having said that you will see from the discussions that many people are having issues. For some the music does not play, although the Echo will say that it is playing. Others, such as myself, experience the music starting to play but then stopping about a minute into the track.
We are hoping the the Plex developers can fix these issues soon.
So how do we file this as a bug? or is there another way to get developer attention?
@brpostma said:
So how do we file this as a bug? or is there another way to get developer attention?
No idea. @vanstinator was trying to resolve issues a few weeks ago but I’ve not heard from him for awhile. No updates or word that the developers are addressing the issue.
An update would be very much welcomed.
Hi, I’ve just taken delivery of an Echo version 2 and have just updated my Synology Plex server to 1.10.1.4602. I was hoping I could get Alexa to play my music to my Chromecast then I realised how stupid I was to think that (D’oh!)
However, I have a question: does the music data go from my local server, via my wifi network to my Echo, or does it go out over the internet and then back into my local network?
Thanks
@mamvcivm said:
Hi, I’ve just taken delivery of an Echo version 2 and have just updated my Synology Plex server to 1.10.1.4602. I was hoping I could get Alexa to play my music to my Chromecast then I realised how stupid I was to think that (D’oh!)However, I have a question: does the music data go from my local server, via my wifi network to my Echo, or does it go out over the internet and then back into my local network?
Thanks
the music stream itself goes from server to echo locally. only the voice command itself needs the internet net to talk to skill.
Thanks Bigwheel! I was concerned that it would otherwise eat up my broadband allowance.
@BigWheel 1st thank you for all the support. I was able to follow this thread and get my local Plex server running, internally and externally accessible (even through double NAT), got the latest versions of plex and echo app. Got app working with plex… I can now say “alexa ask plex to play playlist christmas” and it plays on the local echo. We have multiple echos… one of which is connected to a whole house audio system. and is in a group called “speakers” So if I just tell alexa : “play christmas music on speakers” it will play from pandora over the whole house… … but if I try to do the same with plex… "alexa ask plex to play playlist christmas, on speakers " it still only plays locally… no to the echo group…
are there any plans to add this feature? I did see a post where you mentioned that it worked…
What am i missing? SO close…
-Ken
@Kleach said:
We have multiple echos… one of which is connected to a whole house audio system. and is in a group called “speakers” So if I just tell alexa : “play christmas music on speakers” it will play from pandora over the whole house… … but if I try to do the same with plex… "alexa ask plex to play playlist christmas, on speakers " it still only plays locally… no to the echo group…are there any plans to add this feature? I did see a post where you mentioned that it worked…
What am i missing? SO close…-Ken
I think this is an Echo limitation - they only let you play “native” music services to groups. Third-party skills aren’t allowed to send audio to groups, just the local echo.
I wonder if Amazon could be convinced to treat Plex on-par with the built-in music services…?
Yeah It can only play to the specific Echo you are talking to.
I wish I could get it to do that because at the moment it says its playing but all I get is silence.
@BigWheel I also see that when I play on echo it just stopped playing… plex shows it is still playing but the music cuts out… it randomly seems to pick back up at some point … but maybe not for 5 min or so… I did see some forum info that people were having playback issues like this based on weak wifi signals but I have very strong wifi and I tried both 2.4 an 5GHz… any idea why it would cut out?
@kleach you are not alone! I started a discussion on this weeks ago and as yet no update from Plex developers.
If you look at https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1574897#Comment_1574897 you will see the discussion about this issue.
Had a brief discussion with Plex via facebook chat they said two things: 1) no support via facebook chat email please use the fourms, and 2). in regards to nat hairpinning = “In general, we don’t have control over how Alexa performs network requests or what is required.”
#1 While I understand, I am not seeing much support here on this issue.
#2 “My media” skill works just fine without any change to my network or NAT hairpinning etc. So there must be a way to configure the skill to not require this.
Your move plex, anyone listening?
Yea…my only comment to Plex regarding #2 is that THEY themselves trumpeted Alexa playing their music…so I really hope that they aren’t going the route of saying this is an unsupported hack.
Hi, I keep getting “The Plex Skill needs to be able to remotely access your Plex Media Server in order to work properly”. Now, I have enabled Remote Access on the (Synology) server but it keeps defaulting back to disabled…
As you can see from the picture, the button says Disable Remote Access, so it must be enabled, even though it says Not available outside your network…
I have had it showing a green tick but more often than not it defaults to this state.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Andrew
@mamvcivm - have you set up port forwarding in your router?
Hi Geoff555, no, not yet, I’m a bit confused as to why this is necessary, if it works sometimes but then stops working…
