Without being overly dismissive, this is essentially our position.
I use EyeTV on my Mini, and frankly, there's no way I can do a better job myself part-time freelance than their paid fulltime team. Our focus these days is playback of pre-recorded local content, media management, and online content via the Media Server.
Can this be integrated into Plex as it would give live TV access and channel changing control from within the application.
My EyeTV hardware is upstairs on a Mac Pro with all my movie HDs, my Plex/Mac Mini HTPC is downstairs on a CAT6 network with a projector beaming out all the multimedia goodness from it. Adding the EyeTV capture plugin to Plex would enable control of the networked hardware.
As Ryan said, our focus is on local and online content at the moment. The EyeTV plugin interface has already been experimented with, as has the VLC code, and it’s certainly not as trivial to integrate as it first appears to be. Add to that the fact that DVB streams can vary greatly between countries, and that we’d still have to implement some sort of channel switching/control UI, and it’s fairly obvious that adding EyeTV integration would be a lot of work. There are very few of us, and we’re spread thinly enough already We just don’t have the time or manpower to invest in live TV support at this point in time, sorry.
Firstly I understand you position and you guys are justified in your response… but I also feel a little bit cheated here, i have been hanging out for eyeTV integration as I was under the impression it was in development. For me a media solution is not complete without TV integration as I believe it is a fundamental component and no media solution is complete without it…
I couldn’t give a rats @$$ about online content/integration as most (decent) online content isn’t available outside of the US (distribution restrictions), this leads me to wonder if you really understand what your user-base truly want? or are you just doing what you want? or just mainly looking after the US market? (which is ok, its your choice, im just interested to know?) I feel that that TV integration is more fundamental and believe in doing core media functions first before anything else… but thats just my 2 cents…
Unfortunately I will now have to start looking for an alternative product, I am disappointed as I have been a very loyal and patient Plex user for a long time, i would be more then happy to pay for Plex if it ment full time development and TV integration.
most definitely not. the plex team certainly understands that plex's userbase is a very diverse worldwide one, (i think the last compiled numbers i saw showed that the highest per-capita plex nationality was Sweden), even the plex developers themselves are a very broadly international group. there are a great deal of great european content plugins as well , but there's nothing we can do about it if some popular content publishers like hulu and netflix restrict their distribution to the US.
while with the constant plugin releases, it may seem like they are putting online streaming media at first priority, that is not at all the case, behind the scenes they have been focusing an enormous amount of effort towards local content, if you look at the progress towards better video playback (h264 acceleration, etc), and the complete library rebuild (about to debut any week now), you will see that the plex devs have certainly not been ignoring "core media functions".
(infact, most of the plugins are being written by people outside of the core dev team, they just provided us with a great easy to use framework to run with, and lately the core devs have been mostly occupied by the library rebuild)
what's wrong with using a complementary piece of software like eyetv *alongside* plex?
of course, if plex doesnt fit your specific needs, you are certainly welcome to try something else, we may mock you if you switch to windows media center, but we wont hold a grudge. plex cant be everything for everyone, having a defined focus is what enables it to succeed so well with so few resources.
The development effort demonstrated that creating a better interface than EyeTV was not feasible given the available resources. I'm in New Zealand, and as far as I know the only developer to have had a serious attempt at integrating live TV, so I can't really say much about the Swedish or American markets.
As Billy suggests, using EyeTV alongside Plex isn't a bad solution. Given it's availability, I don't feel TV is a core media function.
As I said, we're more interested in your collected library. (Think CD/MP3 collection vs radio).
Regarding the EyeTV API, that was what I used to integrate the DVB stream playback into Plex in the first place. The issue isn't getting the stream in, thats essentially trivial. The issue is replicating the EPG, tuner interface, record / live TV buffer. Like I said, I'm not able to turn around and come up with a better interface than EyeTV (which I think is quite good). If anyone in the community feels different, We'd welcome coding contributions.
I'll just briefly outline my setup which I think works really well.
On my Mac Mini, I have Plex running as the sole front end - i.e. in full screen and rarely exited. In the background I run iTunes and EyeTV which both are controlled using the Apple Remote and Elgato EyeTV iPhone/iPod Touch apps. With the EyeTV remote app I can schedule recordings. I'm (not) missing live TV and time shifting. If I want that I can quit Plex and start the EyeTV interface (which is, in fact, quite good) using the excellent RemoteBuddy.
In Plex I use a modified video plugin that scans EyeTV recordings (which are packages containing several files) for the .m4v files, which are automatically exported by EyeTV when a scheduled recording completes, and for adjacent metadata. This plugin solution is somewhat a hack but I suspect that a scanner/agent could be written for the new .9 database to do the same in a smarter way...
Will Plex 9 support video plugins? Otherwise, I hope someone will code a scanner like the one I use now (as outlined above). Sadly, I'm not capable of that myself, although I was able to modify the EyeTV plugin (which originates from XBMC IIRC)...
No, it won't support XBMC video plug-ins. However, given the flexibility of Alexandria in Plex/Nine, it'd be fairly trivial to recreate in the "new school" way, and your TV recordings would be first-class citizens in the library rather than available only via a plugin :) If you don't mind dipping into some Python coding (which I assume you're okay with, since you've already modified an XBMC plugin!) we'd be happy to help you out when the 0.9 alpha drops.
My two cents as a Swede, yes one of those people that have a lot of plugins to enjoy. However, even though the plugins are greatly implemented, most services they rely on are rather useless in my opinion. Due to regional restriction, almost only swedish productions are available and that is not something I would watch anyways. I mostly watch the Discovery channels, comedy central and so on. Headweb is great, but I don’t pay that much money to rent a movie, then I may as well buy it and keep it.
Plex and EyeTV are my two favorite pieces of software on the mac, but trying to use them together I do not find as a very seamless experience. I have tried using services to activate applescripts, I have tried Remote Buddy, I have tried to use the Applications menu and so on. Nothing just works without hiccups and I usually end up reaching for the keyboard and mouse. This doesn’t not win any points with the wife, so EyeTV lives on its own and I once a week just export all my recordings to Plex manually.
I don’t think that it should be a burden put onto the development team of Plex to implement the EyeTV integration. They have more important things to work on. I rather hope that some third party developer comes up with a plugin. Grover ( I believe it was) made a very good attempt with a plugin last christmas which I got working quite well, but what seemed to be due to technical limitations just was left hanging and now seems to be abandoned.
I still have hope for the future that we see something that makes it possible to watch live TV inside Plex. I don’t need more than that.
I agree, parsing the eyetv package file to read in the recorded mpeg stream and metadata would be cool (I personally do not export via EyeTV but use handbrake for better quality and 5.1 so I’d rather parse the native package). While season and episode info is often there, sometimes it isn’t so I wonder if this would still be seamless alongside sources named/scanned this way…anyway for the OP couldn’t you put an HDHomerun on your network and solve LiveTV that way if that is the main issue?
I personally prefer to have EyeTV automatically export to M4V because I need iPad/AppleTV compatability...
But sure, I agree that the best thing would be to index the original/native recording (MPG) stream. That is, in fact, the way the unmodded plugin functions; however, Plex in my hands does not play that file well (no seek, random errors etc)...
What about the recently added feature of EyeTV (discussed in another thread), that makes it possible to access live, as well as recorded content in EyeTV using Safari in OSX 10.6 or an iPhone?
Are not these video streams contolled by some Java script i the browser, similar to most other media streams Plex handles through it’s Python-written plug-ins?
Couldn’t these video streams be picked up quite easy by a Python plug-in?
Possibly, it depends how their web UI works. I have an EyeTV, but can't pick up a DTT signal at the place I'm living in now, so I'm not able to try it out :( If anyone's able to provide technical info about the web-based EyeTV viewer, particularly the player itself (what technology it's based on, and what methods of controlling it are available), that'd be a great start.
Look I understand what you guys are saying, but I need a package that is "family friendly" and seamless unfortunately when you run custom scripts, do this and that just to get things working it stops being "family friendly" and tends to break often. Have you guys considered just adding plex support for eyeTV switching? so that people don't have to build and use custom hobbled together scripts?
it was my impression that this already worked, just add eyetv to plex's applications menu, launching it from there should quit plex and release the remote to eyetv, and when you quit eyetv, plex should re-open by itself.
We just don’t have the time or manpower to invest in live TV support at this point in time, sorry.