I am new to plex development. I am trying to get the playon plugin (https://github.com/slowshutterfilms/PlayOn.bundle) to work with plex. I am using plex(windows 7) and my client is a samsung tv. I got it to work some what. I can surf the the playon videos but I can not play them. I did some sniffing with wireshark and updated the playon video port to 54479.
For some reason I can not get the video to play back. It just hangs with no errors in the logs. I see the url in the logs and it is valid. I was able to download the video with curl but plex just hangs on playback. The video from playon is "Content-Type: video/x-flv". Should I try to get the mpeg video from playon and not the flash video.
You'd definitely be better off grabbing the mpeg video stream. That's what the plugin is currently configured for and more clients handle mpeg video natively than flash video. You'll still need to do some updating to the bundle structure at the very least. Take a look at the structure of the Syfy channel bundle for reference.
Thx for your response. I did post the question of how i can get mpeg stream but no response as of yet.
It does look like samsung tv can handle flash.
I guess I have 3 questions.
1) What exactly does HTTPLiveStreamURL do? I have read that it marks the url as steaming url.
2) In the interim I would like to get flash to work, if it possible. Does anyone know of a plugin that is streaming flash.
3)
I did take a look at the syfy plugin and it is using a .m3u8 file, this is the same extension as playon. I take it that this is not the media file but a play list?
HTTPLiveStreamURL indicates an HLS streaming video file (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming). As the default streaming format for Apple devices, it is very common and generally well supported. It uses an m3u8 playlist to pass data about the audio/video segments to the player.
Flash is generally not well supported on most Plex client devices. Due to minimal support, most channels have been converted to avoid flash. In fact, unless you have direct access to the underlying .flv file, flash video is pretty much a dead end with Plex.
My intension of pointing you towards the SyFy channel wasn’t to look specifically at the way in which it handles video. Rather, it’s a good example of the necessary file structure for a channel to work properly with an included URL Service.
* Server MediaMallServer/3.9.19.8761 is not blacklisted
< Server: MediaMallServer/3.9.19.8761
< Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 22:04:00 GMT..
Solution.
Generate a playlist that has the playon stream. Is this possible? Basically dynamically generate a hls (.m3u9) file that points to the playon url. Is it possible for a playlist to contain another playlist?
Wrapping a FLV inside an m3u8 (as PlayOn seems to be doing) is strange enough. Adding another external m3u8 playlist layer just confuses the issue without any real benefit. Since the content is still FLV formatted, changing it to HLS would actually require transcoding it, which Plex Media Server will do when required. If you can’t get the MPEG stream, then try opening the playlist file to read the actual content. Generally, there should be a pointer to the first video segment (often other segments too). In this case, I would expect there to be a link to the FLV file. If you can find the direct URL, then you should be able to pass that as the key to the IndirectResponse (skip the HTTPLiveStreamURL).
I just have a few more questions. I have been looking at the documentation.
What is the difference between the following.
Redirect ? Does this flag the url as a direct stream?
IndirectResponse ?
HTTPLiveStreamURL does this flag the url as a HLS, or does it do the conversion to HLS. transcoding?
I did look at the stream and it is pretty cryptic. I couldn't get vlc, chrome, standalone flash player. VLC just complained that is couldn't access the playon media server for each of the segments.
