Getting Started with HTTPS Streaming for PS4

[topherfangio]

Hi all,

 

A long time ago, I sat down and started writing a Plex client for the PS3. Unfortunately, Sony decided that playing videos wasn't really a useful thing, and it removed the functionality, so my project basically turned into a glorified file downloader and the file had to be in a format that the PS3 understood, and it wouldn't even allow me to name it something useful...so I kinda gave up.

 

However, the PS4 now appears to support HTTP Live Streaming! So, I thought I'd dig back into my code and fire it up to see if I could get it working. I currently have my code working and bringing up the URL to the actual video file, but the PS4 doesn't really support any of the formats I have. So, I'm trying to figure out the proper way to provide a URL to the HLS transcoder.

 

At the moment, I'm just trying to figure out how to trigger the transcoder in Google Chrome on my laptop and once I have that working, I can try to make the PS4 work.

 

Here is my current URL and I am fairly certain I am missing some sort of authorization, but Plex keeps returning a 400 Bad Request (and not even an error message) so I'm a bit lost as to where to look.

http://10.0.1.117:32400/video/:/transcode/universal/start.m3u8?path=%2Fplex%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F72%2Fchildren&protocol=hls&session=1&videoResolution=400x300&maxVideoBitrate=128&videoQuality=60

Any pointers on where to go from here?

 

Thanks!

[Orionshock]

yeah, you are likely going to need an authentication token of some sort, especially if you have local authentication turned on.

[Orionshock]

Just checked this. If you load up the plex/web for a file that uses the flash player (like enabling subtitles will do), and then look in the logs, you will see the entire URL command that invokes the transcoder. There are A LOT of query string args that go into it.