We have a web store and a brick and mortar location. (store for Magicians)
Of the 13000 or so products, about 4000 of them have videos. I'd like to use Plex to make an in store kiosk to play the videos to customers, on demand.
I'm thinking that I can do this as a custom Plex Channel. I would put all the videos on the local Plex server, instead of pulling them from our website. I have all the filenames, video titles, author, manufacturer and descriptions in an Excel spreadsheet, and was hoping to use to seed the Plex server data.
Has anyone written a local kiosk type plugin before?
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to approach this in Plex?
I have programming experience, but I'm new to Python.
I don’t think plex plugins do what you think they do. You would make a plugin to stream videos from your website, but if you have the videos on a plex server why not simply use PMC to watch videos on your “kiosk”?
As for playing them from the local server, there is no metadata with the video files and the player on the website has no metadata for the files.
I assumed that a plugin would use some sort of xml datafile, which I could build from my database and relate to the proper filename, since there is no embedded metadata in the video files.
I also figured that I would have more ability to customize a channel to do or show exactly the files I wanted to use. Such as making different channels for different manufacturers or artists or categories.
You shouldn’t need a channel to do this at all, set them all up in your Library and if you wan’t to give it all some separation just make a new library for each type of video. I think you could put all of the info for each file in an .nfo file, but you’re probably better asking about this particular part of it in one of the PMS forums (instead of channel development).
just make separate server sections for the manufacturers/artists/categories and add the meta data yourself in PMS. (disable the meta data agents for these sections)
