Since some of the open source Plex clients are going unmaintained, such as Plex Media Player and Plex for Kodi, I think having a good documentation reference for future third-party developers will be more important than ever.
These resources are a great start, but I’m sure your team could provide significantly more information:
- Plex Remote Control API
- Python Plex API Implementation
- GDM Implementation
- Web API Overview
- API - Google Code
I recently developed a third-party client for my own Linux-based use cases, and found that while the above resources were extremely valuable, I still had to resort to using Wireshark and F12 Developer Tools to watch API requests from working players.
I’m sure there are already more extensive documents that are simply unreleased. I don’t think it would be a significant risk for Plex to release the documentation. In fact, the contrary is likely. If more third-party developers write software for your ecosystem, more users will be attracted to Plex. It might also take some load off of the development team, as unsupported clients will be easier for the community to update.
Another note: The recent move seemed to cause a lot of concern in the community that in the future third-party and unmaintained clients would be deliberately disabled by changes to the Plex media server. I’m not particularly worried about this, but I feel that releasing and updating documentation would be an easy and solid step to put these members of the community at ease.
