I've spent the entire day digging into that whole exit button thing. Dead end after dead end and road block after road block. Ugh... The framework doesn't inform me in any way when the app is "shutdown". In fact, it isn't really ever shut down. There is an event I can listen for that fires at app shutdown, but all the apps startup when the dock loads and never actually exit until the TV is shutdown. Not helpful. I can listen for a view to be hidden, but that event doesn't fire until I relaunch the app from the dock. Also not very helpful.
I can stop the video playback when the app is restarted, which is something, but the screen that was last active when the Exit button was pressed seems to be present as-is in memory still and doesn't reload when I tell it to activate. None of the normal events fire when it is loaded. It just shows exactly what was on that screen the last time I viewed it. I can't find any way to re-init the view. This is annoying because if you, for example, select a show and a season, then hit exit, then come back in and select a different show, the first show shows up on the screen the first time. Grrrr.... Not a wide use case. But if you are playing a movie when you hit exit, then come back in, the player view is in the same kind of "previous" state where it isn't setup to play things. None of the events register, so the video won't actually play. You have to hit back once, then play again.
I'm gonna have to set this one aside for now. Spent way to much time on it today. Maybe some brilliant idea will come to me in my sleep.
Hrrrmmm... That last sentence isn't too far off. I was lying in bed trying to get myself to get up this morning and a potential fix for this problem occurred to me. It works! It is a total kludge, but it is pretty clean and only took about 4 lines of code in each view. When you first load the screen that was visible when you exited with the Exit button, you may (or may not) see a flash of the old content still, but it quickly goes away. I haven't tested this on the TV yet, but I'm suspecting it will work fine.
Woohoo! This one was the biggest thorn in my side next to transcoding. Maybe I should take a nap and see if I can solve that one. :)
Right now I have a Samsung TV and the UI for the plex app is stunning. I want to pick up a vizio because the are so well priced, but plex is essential to me. I would be happy to help with ui and ux
I am very interested in this. I know you have plenty of Vizio testers but if you have another spot, I'd be more than happy to help out. I have a Vizio M550SL 55" Smart TV.
Right now I have a Samsung TV and the UI for the plex app is stunning. I want to pick up a vizio because the are so well priced, but plex is essential to me. I would be happy to help with ui and ux
Been a while since I gave much of an update. I've been head-down for 3 days working on a better FastForward/Rewind functionality and cleaning up little bugs along the way.
The RW/FF has a couple options to test: Active and Passive. The Active will work best with a faster plex server and snappy network response, but it works pretty reasonably on my older TV even with Wifi, (and my wifi network is a bit lacking). So I have high hopes for it. Basically, active will try to display snips of the movie as you jump forward and backward, so you can see where you are at while you move. Passive follows the Roku/Plex paradigm of dimming and pausing the screen while the transport moves forward. When you play again, the movie starts again at the new location.
We will also be trying a simple attempt to see if the HLS format from the Universal Transcoder will play on newer TVs. It is completely experimental and probably buggy, but I didn't want to spend too much time on it before I knew if it was going to work at all. I'll probably have the other Transcode pieces ripped out for now, because it seems to be un-workable. The Generic Transcoder tends to blow up the PMS too much, and is way to slow and klunky. So, based on votes from this thread, we'll toss out Transcoding for now (unless we find positive things with the Universal Transcoder option), and go with Direct Play only.
That will be the big ones in the next test release, which will hopefully go out in the next day or two, assuming I get time to validate some things on my TV.
I haven't heard too much this week from my testers. I hope that means that the app is flawless! HA! I did have two reports of rather large bugs that I was able to squash in this release thanks to some reports.
I have released new test version 0.2.x. This is a completely bug free release! HAHA! Well, at least, I have no KNOWN bugs at this point.
Testers, if you haven't received an email from me, it means I don't have your email address. Please send it to support@crashplayer.com. I
First, as I said, I have removed the transcoding options. However, I have added a new highly experimental HLS transcode option for testing. I'm REALLY hoping that it works, as this will make implementation of transcoding so much easier.
I have implemented a new Rewind/FastForward functionality. There is an option for Active RW/FF in settings. The default is OFF. Active attempts to show snippets of video as you move forward and back so you can visually see the progress. This is somewhat experimental, but I believe it works pretty well if your server can serve up the movie quickly and your network can deliver it quickly. So high bitrate movies or slow wifi may cause this to be a little quirky in display, but it still seems to work. A fast PMS connected on ethernet and your TV connected over Ethernet will probably make this work nearly flawlessly.
If you turn Active RW/FF off, then the screen will basically pause and dim while the progress bar and time move forward. When you hit play again, it will restart at the new place.
You can use the on-screen buttons or the remote buttons. Hit FF or RW repeatedly to go faster (up to 32x, at which point it resets back to 2x). The display for how fast it is going is UGLY. I didn't bother to take the time to make it pretty yet. It is just some text that overlays over the progress bar.
Other notable changes in this release.
724c839 BUG 50: Ugly bug that caused Library to not refresh after playing media for several minutes
ee84956 Made InfoBar on playback screen default to OFF. Green button still turns it on.
0843aaa Bug 30: Hacked my way around an issue that caused screens to not display correctly if they were previously exited with the exit button
812a70d Down key on remote will hide the transport overlay during playback instead of waiting for a timeout.
0000030 2 Bug tweak closed 2014-01-08 Using remote Exit button from any screen causes that screen to be showed again when back in the app
0000019 2 Task major closed 2014-01-09 Revamp Rewind and Fast Forward functionality
0000050 2 Bug major closed 2014-01-10 After playing a movie for a while, library won't reload and hangs at a black screen.
For the next release, I will either work on some serious refactoring of code, because it is a bit ugly with this rapid development. Or I have a few new features that I'd like to start to tackle.
I just wanted to say good luck and keep going with your app! I happened to find this page after I had given up on getting it going on my tv. I can't wait for a wider release! My vizio M550VSE is begging for some plex goodness of its own.
Sounds like your TV might be similar model to might. Mine is a M550NV. It is a couple years old, but doesn't have great media support. Only mp4 and wmv. The first version (and who knows how many more) will be Direct Play only, which kinda sucks, but it's better than nothing. I may end up having to get with the Plex team to work out the transcoder so that it can get us something that the TVs will support.
Anyway, just a heads-up that the media supported on your TV might not be great, but converting ahead of time is usually not such a big deal.
Yes, the media is shaky. I tried using the VIA media app with DLNA and it was a challenge. I think I was able to get it to recognize Plex, but couldn't enter any menus. I tried using PS3Mediaserver and was able to play some files inside avi containers, but it was spotty and I enjoy using plex on my other systems so the library stays synced. I know you have plenty of testers, but if you need help with a tv that may be a little older, I'll be glad to play around. I'll quit spamming happy thoughts so the thread doesn't get bogged down, but know that there are others rooting for you and looking forward to supporting your app when it's released.
Hi guys, new plex user here. Have an E320i - A0 i picked up for the wife's christmas present. I have a huge library of .mp4's mainly encoded in .h264 with aac audio (via handbrake). However, i have not been able to get the mp4's to play at all. (says audo/video codec not supported when trying to play direct) Is there anyone that has had any luck with this on this perticular model? I'm at my wits end. i'm grateful someone has spearheaded an app for these vizio tv's. Crash, if i can be of any assistance, let me know. I'll email you my contact info.
I have the same problem as the post above. I have the M Series M55d1-a2r. Looks like it is playing the MP4 file but shows that the video and audio codec not supported........Vizio said in a support email that the M series supports avi and mp4 as well as mp3's.........hope this Plex project takes care of the issue! Thanks for working on it.....can't wait.
+1 for this app. Been trying to figure out how to re-eoncode all my mp4's so I can watch them on my tv. I did find out that you can watch videos with an mp4 extension as long as they are encoded with level 3.1. If mediainfo shows level 4.0 they will not play. For now I can watch them on my xbox, but sometimes support for mp4s can be a little flaky.
+1 for this app. Been trying to figure out how to re-eoncode all my mp4's so I can watch them on my tv. I did find out that you can watch videos with an mp4 extension as long as they are encoded with level 3.1. If mediainfo shows level 4.0 they will not play. For now I can watch them on my xbox, but sometimes support for mp4s can be a little flaky.
Nulimitz, nice find. I have a M701d-A3R and was experiencing strange playback issues. I used ffprobe to dump the level information and sure enough everything that wouldn't play back was the same level. On my TV, however, it was level 3.1 that wouldn't play--anything level 4.0 would. I quickly converted the level information in a sample file from level 3.1 to 4.0 (just the hex values -- no transcoding) and the file played without issue.
I don’t know if this helps, but TVMobili streams everything perfectly to my vizio. nothing else does. the problem is that it is far from free. is there any way that their profile could be used for this project? I like everyone else would love some plex on vizio.
I don't know if this helps, but TVMobili streams everything perfectly to my vizio. nothing else does. the problem is that it is far from free. is there any way that their profile could be used for this project? I like everyone else would love some plex on vizio.
+1 for this app. I have a Vizio E601-A3 and a year old Mac Mini for a server. I would love to see this happen. All of my movies are MKV so I would imagine there would have to be some serious transcoding going on. In the meantime, I'm curious about this TVMobili app. After installing it, how do you actually implement it? My guess is that it doesn't show up as an app on the Vizio, correct? Do you just use the DNLA app and everything streams through that?
update ... I just installed it and tried it. So from I can tell, it's basically the same ugly Vizio DNLA server and then it transcodes as needed. I have a pretty large media library and it's a lot easier to just use Plex at this point than waiting for the transcode to happen and also to deal with that interface. It's making this new Plex app look even better and better!
I guess I will add myself to this list of rabid users wanting this app....
Bought a Vizio E241i-A1 on Sunday and I have spent the past 36 daylight hours going through direct and not being able to play anything, trying UMS with the same luck, Serviio which was just horrible and finally PLEX where I can at least play avi's.
Found out the hard way that a smart tv is actually pretty dumb when it comes to streaming from an existing network. They're great if you want to exclusively use it for Netflix or Hulu but that is really pretty limited.
If I could play mp4s I would do cartwheels...most of my library is mp4 because I have an AppleTV downstairs on the big (non connected) tv and it will only play mp4s.
