Same thing when I put the URL into VLC, just sound no video.
These plugins don't seem to work on the iPhone app, so I'm not sure if what Media Manager is doing. Can anyone explain how the video is coming back? Is there a way for Media Manager to convert the video on the fly before sending it over? I figure it will need to if we would be able to stream to an iOS device.
First off, great episode. There is not much funnier than someone else having explosive diarrhea. Also, I am pretty sure that PMM does not stream webkit plugins. Notice that the plugins available can be different for each PMS instance on the same network. Usually these plugins require site configs also, which are local files with video player information for “zooming” in the webpage. This is why the debs say the webpage needs to be accessible from the device you are using ( specifically iOS devices ) for the plugin to work.
no, it will definitely stream webkit (flash and silverlight) plugin videos to the ios app, and yes the media server transcodes everything to send to the ios app (hence the video quality settings in the app).
that URL you’re hitting does not appear to be the video transcode service for the ios app, but rather the plain old webkit video api that the plex desktop client uses. its not working in firefox because it wan’t intended for use in a browser, its just sending plex the raw framebuffer of the captured video source.
Ah, it does work! Very cool - I sometimes get an error when running these, but Elan mentioned that not all the plug ins are fully tested yet so that is to be expected.
So when it did work I sniffed the network traffic when my iPhone was requesting a South Park episode and got this interesting URL instead:
However I get a 401 Unauthorized error. Media Manager is does not require a username password, so I was not expecting this. Accessing other videos do not have this restriction (they just start streaming in). There also seems to be a username/password in the the TCP/IP dump, but the password looks like it is changing for each request. Same thing obviously with VLC asking for a user name and password, trying to replay the same user name and password as my iPhone does not work.
So my question is still, is it possible for me to request these videos from the Media Center directly?
Checked console says plex can’t check my NBC.com siteconfig. Any suggestions? Other than that my other plugins work great. The plugins in the hooligan pack all stream fine, save NBC of course.
Can you please elaborate on what an "authorised client" is exactly? Is it only closed-source clients that you guys write? Plex 9 was/is being boasted as providing open APIs for accessing all the stored content, so I'd hate to think that suddenly the community can't write clients that work with this content. I may be totally wrong with this assumption; I'm just putting it out there because it's a valid concern.
Hi, Nick, note that all the metadata and direct access to your media is completely open and available, it’s just the transcoding feature specifically that’s restricted at the moment, for which we’re requiring an API key type thing for access. One simple reason for that is that if we didn’t, someone else could write an iOS app and make it free in the App Store and then nobody would buy ours. We’re totally open to working with people wanting to use the API, but we want to keep a certain amount of control over it at the moment, at least.
Thanks for the speedy reply. While it's good to hear that it's only the transcoding functionality that is restricted, it's a bit annoying: I have an N900 and my wife a HTC Desire. I'd be looking to write clients for at least one of these (I just need to find the time somewhere!), but they too would require transcoding.
I guess it would be possible to put together a separate process that provides a transcoding service outside of PMM (ie, device <-> standalone transcoder <-> stream from PMM), it just wouldn't be as seamless/reliable/pretty. I suppose another solution is to transcode ahead of time and let PMM index them under a different section - wastes a lot of storage space though.
Gotcha, I thought it might be the case when I saw the X-Plex-Access-Key/Code.
Well this was what I wanted to do, Elan and Jam let me know what you guys think. I wanted to watch the Daily Show/Colbert Report during lunch but cell reception and wifi for personal use is a no-go at work so I wanted to try writing the stream to a file in a format my iPod could play. Since Media Manager is doing 90% of this already (and I did help write the first iterations of The Daily Show and Colbert Report plug ins for Media Manager :)) I was trying to use that to write a simple program to check for a new episode save the file nightly.
It’s not really a replacement for your iOS app (which I of course bought already), but maybe some overlap? The thought of encoding everything and trying to save it onto an iPhone would be crazy but very useful in my situation. I kinda just wanted to write some code against the Media Manager and thought of one thing I can’t do yet. Obviously I don’t want to step on any toes here. I would probably be okay giving you any code I write anyways, this would be useful as part of PMM.
It sounds like you would be open to letting other people play around with this, would this be possible?
We'll be coming out with an Android client before too long, so that should cover your HTC, right? Not sure what OS the N900 runs or what video formats it supports, but if it's possible to write a client and you'd like to take a stab at it, we're always to talking about it.
It's a possible feature, but in order to work well the offline transcoding bit would need more support from the Media Server. Stay tuned as we'll be talking about more stuff like this within fairly short order.
Elan - Just wondering if KLEXi is what you were talking about or are there more plans in the works? I would really like to see some sort of desktop app, since an iOS app wouldn’t be practical for the day to day use I’m hoping to see.
Yeah, KLEXi can do that out of the box (taking videos with you). So you're talking about a desktop app that would bring transcoded videos with, like on a laptop? Apologies if I'm totally missing the point, it's late and there's been alcohol involved.
Umm, kind of. Really what I would like to do is transcode nightly whatever new Daily Show video that was put on the website. It would get added to a play list (or maybe even show up as a Podcast source) so that it get's synced to my iPod (classic - no iOS) every morning automagically when I get my other podcasts. It would be nice to be able to watch these on laptop too when traveling. Either on a plane or hotels where the internet sucks, which seems to be every hotel I stay at. :)
Just like I can download a podcast from my iPhone (and at times that is an awesome feature) it's not really a practical way to get my podcasts on a daily basis.
That was my goal anyways when playing around with PMS HTTP interface. Does that make sense?
Yes, I can certainly see where you're coming from. I suspect future enhancements could make this a reality in the iOS apps :) Of course, it would also be possible to pivot things around and just use PMS as a transcoder, but that's not where our focus is at the moment, at least.
