HTPC flatpak and Media Keys support

Player Version#: tv.plex.PlexHTPC 1.31.1

When I press the play/pause or forward/back media keys I expect HTPC to recognize this but nothing happens. Instead, a Gnome overlay appears showing it does not recognize any media that needs to be paused/unpaused/skipped/etc. There are no other programs running.

My limited understanding is that gnome & kde both support media keys using mpris and plex htpc doesn’t support this. Though it does use mpv and there is a mpv-mpris plugin here https://github.com/hoyon/mpv-mpris. I was actually able to get this running in the flatpak by doing the following:

  1. Copy the mpris.so file to ~/.var/app/tv.plex.PlexHTPC/data/plex/
  2. Create a file ~/.var/app/tv.plex.PlexHTPC/data/plex/mpv.conf with:
    script=/var/data/plex/mpris.so
    
  3. Give the flatpak permission to use org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.mpv.*:
    $ sudo flatpak override --own-name='org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.mpv.*' tv.plex.PlexHTPC
    

After restarting the flatpak it now recognizes the play/pause button, but it does not react to the forward or back buttons.

Perhaps I need to create a ~/.var/app/tv.plex.PlexHTPC/data/plex/input.conf file with entries for these buttons but I am not sure how that would look.

Has anyone made this work? Media keys support seems like a pretty basic feature and it is a shame it is missing out of the box, at least for the flatpak.

We need to implement mpris in the app itself. It’s on our list of things to do but I don’t have a time-frame for it.