Experienced software engineer but PLEX/DLNA noob looking for advice.

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

Hello everyone!

I just looked at PLEX and I really like it!

The only thing I’m missing is an easy way to deal with internet radio streams. Shoutcast doesn’t include any of our local radio stations. TuneIn Radio would include those stations, but it isn’t supported. Even if it was, it still wouldn’t be optimal however, as I have no interest in navigating through hundreds of channels. I couldn’t find any 3rd party channel bundles to solve the problem.

I’m looking to achieve two things:

the ability to configure a couple radio stations on the server, preferably as part of a music library labelled “Live Radio”. I suspect this would involve developing a scanner that can deal with M3U or PLS files.

the ability to browse through those radio stations from a control point and cast them to a renderer, at which point the renderer connects to the radio stream directly rather than having it served indirectly through the PLEX server or the control point (both should be able to power down/sleep without radio streaming to the renderer being impacted).

I’ve seen a lot of requests for this sort of thing in various forums. I’ve seen some partial solutions, none of which still work today.

Can anybody with PLEX / DLNA experience confirm that this is technically feasible? Has anybody got an idea why this isn’t already part of PLEX? Has anyone got ideas where I should best be looking for developer documentation to get me on the path towards solving this issue myself? Any other ideas/tips/suggestions are also greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

2

Hmm… not much activity in this forum, is there… anyone?

bump!

3

New forum makes it a tad hard to track :stuck_out_tongue:

I would try and use the Plex python wrapper lib & check the existing ones :wink:

4

Thx Mirabis. I’ll take a look. Thanks for the pointer.

5

I’ve since been able to answer my own questions. These are the results:

Internet radio streams

I decided not to develop a scanner for m3u files. I’ve instead adapted an existing and very simple internet radio streaming plugin which I found on Github:

After my adaption the plugin lists those stations I’m interested in and only those.

Casting

Casting works for any media stored on and managed by my Plex Media Server, but it doesn’t work for streaming content from the internet through channel plugins. My experiences so far are mentioned here:

Using an iPad as the controller
Using a Windows 10 Mobile phone as the controller