Heads up: channels support?!?

Dev Community Apps & Creations
1

Okay... I dis some work on the channels issue.

 

There are good and bad news, just as there are good and bad plugins.

- "good plugins" deliver data according to (as Elan said) the V2 XML standard. This means, PMS sends out a /Video/Media/Part/... structure with all nice information in there. Eg. Filetype, codec types, ... Based on this aTV/PlexConnect can decide on Directplay, Directstream, Transcoding and such.

- "bad plugins" don't give us that information. They basically only give a link to the file - V1 structure. PMS knows (and says) nothing about Filetype or Codecs used. V1 is deprecated and is going to be phased out short/mid-term - so update your plugin!

 

Support for V2 is in PlexConnect already - and should be working quite nicely (eg. youtube).

Lately I added basic support for V1 as well (github commit as of today). It is now possible to play a limited number of old plugins (eg. NASA Videos). As I said, we don't know filetype nor codecs before playing - the new transcoder won't support those plugins either. So we just hand over the link and hope aTV is happy...

 

The bad parts about all that:

- the user (you :-) doesn't see, if a selected plugin is V1 or V2.

- the user (again, you... :-) doesn't know, which filetypes or codecs the site delivers.

So everything stays the same - plugins are still hit or miss, with just a tad more hit. Unless you know your way, dig deeper and get your information beforehand.

 

Current status - my belief:

Working: every V2 plugin // V1 plugins feeding aTV native formats - raise an issue if one of those won't work.

Non-working: V1 plugins delivering non-native formats (eg. flv) - blame the Plugin keeper and have him do some work.

2

My question is, then why do some of these channels work on the iOS Plex app but not the ATV with Plexconnect.

3

Nice work looking into it though. Cheers.

4

My question is, then why do some of these channels work on the iOS Plex app but not the ATV with Plexconnect.

Did you try the latest sources? If so, which channels have issues with PlexConnect - but not on Plex/iOS?

5

This is GREAT news, I've only had 9 out of 27 Channel's working. I've been gathering info, data, logs, does it work in PMC, etc., so I can open a very detailed issue; however with this new build (which I've just applied to my Mac Mini Server (10.8.4) I plan on retesting my aTV running v5.3 over the weekend.

BTW- PlexConnect for aTV is probably the best thing to happen to Plex since I've been using it :) .  I really appreciate all the work ya'll have been doing.

2nd BTW- Here are the 18 channels that I've seen multiple issues before this build (hopefully most will now work):

A&E, ABC, ABC Family, Amazon Instant Video, CBS, CBS Sports, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Food Network, Fox News, HGTV, Hulu, MSNBC, NASA, NBC, The CW, The Onion, The WB, and The White House.

6

Baa, the most obvious ones are letmewatchthis, icefilms and SSPlex.

7

I wrote this in another thread:


The following have worked for me using Plexconnect:


Ustream

Twit tv

PBS

Justin TV

History channel (us)

Funny or die

CNN


The following did not work on Plexconnect but worked on Plex iOS.


SSPlex

NBC

Letmewatchthis

Icefilms

Hulu

History.ca

Food network


Many of these work to the degree that plex menus appear and searches are successful but usually media will not play. Other plugins failed but they also failed on Plex IOS at the time of testing

8

I’m not that intelligent when it comes to this stuff, but if it helps , navi-x plugin select uk channels , itv choice , sky news works 100% all the time , lots of others dont though. it is a bit frustrating trawling around trying to find channels that work, but can’t complain my atv3 was a paper weight before Plexconnect .
Cheers guys
Riche

9

Full Episode support for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report would be awesome. iOS app has it, seems to be completely removed awhile back from PlexConnect.

10

Oh. We have to add a third plugin class - add to initial post:

- "good but unwilling plugins": Those are framework 2 channels, that should be supported by now. Unfortunately they decide on their own to not be play-able.

Example: ABC

    if not Client.Platform in ('Android', 'iOS', 'Roku') and not (Client.Platform == 'Safari' and Platform.OS == 'MacOSX'):
        oc.header = 'Not supported'
        oc.message = 'This channel is not supported on %s' % (Client.Platform if Client.Platform is not None else 'this client')
        return oc

PlexConnect/aTV needs to identify itself accordingly...

11

Would it be possible to have Plexconnect identify itself as iOS then? Would that have any negative consequences?

Also, there must be further issues beyond these three as I am sure that SSplex and Icefilms do not care what device is trying to access the media they find. Plexconnect also acts differently when failing to play their media. There is no explicit error just a constantly spinning wheel as if it thinks it can play it but never does. I thought this might be an encoding issue so I tried again with “force transcode” set in Plexconnect but that did not solve it.

12

I've just been testing the channels I use with the latest version and here's my feedback regarding compatibility:

4oD - Doesn't work
Apple Movie Trailers - Doesn't work
iPlayer - Doesn't work
Ted - Kinda works (some videos play, others don't)
Twit - Works
Vimeo - Works
YouTube - Works
 
For those channels that don't work or kinda work, I've tested them on both iPhone and iPad and they're fine. I also found that during my channel tests, PMS would regularly crash so I had to keep manually starting the app again. I'm sure its channel related as I've not had a single PMS crash during my use of PlexConnect so something with the channels is causing PMS to die.
13

Would it be possible to have Plexconnect identify itself as iOS then? Would that have any negative consequences? Also, there must be further issues beyond these three as I am sure that SSplex and Icefilms do not care what device is trying to access the media they find. Plexconnect also acts differently when failing to play their media. There is no explicit error just a constantly spinning wheel as if it thinks it can play it but never does. I thought this might be an encoding issue so I tried again with "force transcode" set in Plexconnect but that did not solve it.

ID: yes, we are going to add that - now that I know about it :-)

ErrorMsg: If aTV doesn't get anything back, it just doesn't know what to do - and sticks to the spinning wheel. If the XML contains errors it gives a native error message. I am looking into making it more friendly...

Transcode: With V1 channels, transcode it NEVER applied. Could you check if the mentioned channels are V1 or V2? I guess, I might have to do some write up about a procedure...

14

Yes, let me know how to check V1 or V2 and I will.

15

Yes, let me know how to check V1 or V2 and I will.

Same here

16

institute11, CloudDweller:

Are you familiar with the PMS XML structure?

You could start with "127.0.0.1:32400" in a web browser... then climb down the PMS tree, following the "key' attributes - until you hit the actual media links.

Those links either look so (youtube, V2):

 
   
     
     
   
 

...

or like this (NASA Video, V1):

 
You see the difference pretty clearly: V2 has A LOT of extra information!
 
If you dont want to climb the tree manually, you could also edit debug.py, settings the debug level (dlevel) for XMLConverter to 1. That way you will see every XML read from PMS as well as the ones send to aTV in your terminal. Might get messy after a short time, but for debugging it is really convenient. Then use aTV to climb down the channel's menus to the clip list - at that stage, you should find the XML examples seen above in your terminal, close to the bottom...
17

Full Episode support for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report would be awesome. iOS app has it, seems to be completely removed awhile back from PlexConnect.


This is interesting as the "full episode" menu item doesn't show in Plexconnect while it is there in the iOS Plex. And skottles is correct that "full episodes" used to show up on Plexconnect. Could this be an XML issue?
18

?

We don't suppress anything, as far as I know. You could check with the upper method as well.

19

LOVE this idea!

Would it be possible to have Plexconnect identify itself as iOS then? Would that have any negative consequences?


Also, there must be further issues beyond these three as I am sure that SSplex and Icefilms do not care what device is trying to access the media they find. Plexconnect also acts differently when failing to play their media. There is no explicit error just a constantly spinning wheel as if it thinks it can play it but never does. I thought this might be an encoding issue so I tried again with “force transcode” set in Plexconnect but that did not solve it.

20

I m sure I saw that some shows are effectively in eg 4 parts, hence why you can get issues with only the first part playing.

The Colbert Report might be a good test one.

Where is Sanders1 when you need him!?