An easy setup option for adding Movies and TV shows that are already in iTunes would be great. The current way of navigating to a folder is really kind of confusing for many of the people that I have talked to who have tried tried setting up PLEX.
And while for the more technical savvy person who likes to manually organize all their movies and TV shows themselves manually selecting folders for PLEX to use is fine.
However MANY MANY people love the simplicity of letting iTunes organize things for them.
I would love to see a option in PLEX set up to simply choose add movies and TV shows from iTunes, and then have PLEX simply look at the iTunes library for them.
When I manually added my TV shows form iTunes inside my iTunes library location PLEX saw the TV seasons I had but never actually recognized any ov the episodes I had. It showed I had like 10 TV series but absolutely no episodes available to watch.
The only problem with this is that Plex can’t play video files purchased from the iTunes store and the chances are really slim of that happening. They lock up those DRM files tight.
So? You just don’t end up playing those. I know the vast majority of my music, videos, etc in iTunes is non-DRM, and I’d love to access it in Plex. Of course, I’m also serving it over the network using UPNP, so if Plex’s support for that standard were more robust (i.e., worked) then I for one would have no problems.
One of our goals is to definitely make the transition very easy for those who want to make the switch from frontrow to Plex. To “just don’t end up playing those” is not at all user friendly.
So Plex doesn't see the Movies and TV Shows sections of the iTunes library is what I'm gathering from this, correct?
How exactly is that user-friendly? I was planning on picking up a Mini in a couple weeks and using Plex on it. This is making me re-think that. Do I have to add each folder manually then? And if I do that, Plex will be able to see my (non-drm) files in those folders, correct?
The feature to see your iTunes video files has not been added to the media server yet. All you would need to do to add those files it to add the root folder of your movies and the root folder of your tv shows. Inside Plex there is a help section with several screencasts that will take you step by step through the process. We are currently in the process of redesigning the library. When the redesign is done there will be an easier way for users transitioning from iTunes/frontrow to Plex.
Thank you... saw that later in the night while toying with plex on my laptop. Can't get it to work for me though. I'll investigate further, but i just took some sleeping aids so it's night time for me. Thanks for the help and the clarification.
i guess some things has changed now with the arrival of iTunes 9 since everything is now nicely ordered in the correct subfolders
so my sources are pointing there, i turned off the option in iTunes to automagically keep the files arranged as it will keep following the files no matter what name i give it… also easier to ad avi and mkv files later on. i could also had gone with the option to hack the “advancedsettings.xml” file to make a regexp for finding the files. directly reading the iTunes library file would be an option but also something i would turn off if given that option… no, i am also not using the Plex Media Server as it really ads nothing to it, for me anyway.
One of the biggest problems though is the protected content from the iTunes store… it’s a bunch of DRM blablabla that holds no ground
why? because i can play those files in Quicktime (7 and X) without any problem across several Macs. and yes, i am talking about movies and tv shows here.
can’t wait to see Plex becoming a real native OSX app
A snappy attitude is not helping your case sir. Do you really think that the Plex developers are lying when they say that the files are hard to play in Plex because Apple has added a DRM protection?
Quicktime can play those files because Apple is developing Quicktime.
To branch off what Atrus has stated, Plex uses FFMPEG as its video engine not Quicktime. Our developers have spent an enormous amount of time trying to get iTunes DRM video to play using the quicktime framework. Apple has this locked down so tightly that as of yet we have only been able to get iTunes DRM music to play and not video. I think your statement is based on a little bit of ignorance. If Plex was based solely on quicktime we would have the same problem that Frontrow users have which is only being able to play the codecs that Apple wants to include in quicktime, which is why Perrian even exists. If being able to play iTunes video is your #1 priority then Frontrow is your best option. Otherwise it would probably be best if you got the facts before making statements like that.
I’ve been curious about iTunes video too. I don’t know what changes Plex 0.9 will bring, but I would just like the ability to view and play all my media in one place, including the free stuff I get from iTunes. Until Plex becomes capable of playing DRM videos (fingers crossed), is there some way to display these files in Plex, but direct them to open via Front Row/iTunes/Quicktime when they’re selected to be played? It might not be pretty, but it would make my day.
The chances are not good that Plex will ever be able to play any iTunes DRM video. The only hope for us is for the content providers to come to their senses, like the music studios did, and allow Apple to stop using DRM. Currently there is no way for Plex to know which files have DRM and which do not. The only option now is to use Frontrow. You can manually launch it from Plex's applications section and then when you close it, Plex will re-open.
just remember that the inability of plex (and other 3rd party apps) to play these files is an Intentional Feature of apple’s DRM, not a bug on our part or something we can do anything about. however, what you can do is simple: stop buying drm’d video, hopefully eventually the content providers will get the message like they did with music.
It would be great to add directly iTunes library (non-DRM Movies and TVShows) added with VideoDrive, and that all metadata added to the .m4v file be “readable” in Plex.
for me having the movies show up in the library would be king, if actually playing them was like opening an app (closes down plex and opens the movie in quicktime) then that would be just fine with me, quitting quicktime after the movie would send you back to plex, same way quitting anything else does.
thanks for a great piece of software, looking forward to Alexandria
I pointed Plex to the TV Shows folder in iTunes and many of the series appear properly but some are missing episodes that are in the folder in iTunes. As an example, one series has two seasons with 10 episodes in season 1 and 6 episodes in season 2. Plex shows the two seasons with one episode in each season. When I select season 1 it shows one episode with a “10” in the upper left corner. What does the 10 mean?
