pyplex

Dev Community Apps & Creations
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A plex client for the Raspberry pi
For a few months now there have been some people working on a plex client for the raspberry pi (as its being highly requested). I myself missed the existence of a plex client, and raspbmc wasn't it for me. So when I discovered the work that was already done by some other people to made a python based plex client for the rs-pi I dived in and now it's time it deserves it's own topic.
You can find the code on github here: github.com/megawubs/pyplex
It's currently under heavy development.
A few things that on the to do list are:
[list][*]Myplex support[*]Media art slide show when idle (as a start for the GUI)[*]Web interface for when a user doesn't own a smartphone that has Plex installed[*]Make it a true python package[/list]A few bugs are:[list][*]When using Avahi to locate the server it doesn't find windows PMS (this is currently turned off, needs to be working when starting on GUI)[*]Some people seem to have HDMI audio output issues[/list]The old topic can be found here: http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/35906-raspberry-pi/page__st__300
If you have ideas and/or want to continue you are more than welcome!
Cheers,
JiK
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Moving this over from the other thread, concerning a web GUI:



If the current web gui had the same ability to push content to a particular client (like the mobile apps currently have), there would be no need to build a GUI specifically for Raspi. Efforts to add that functionality to the current web client might be more effective.





EDIT: OR, being completely unfamiliar with the current web GUI and how it works, might it be possible to separate the web gui process and have an “offline” version that can be used on a computer without a server. This web gui could get the server from pyplex’s avahi lookup (or however you’re doing that now). I’m just trying to think of ways we can reuse the work that’s already been done.

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On the new plex/web, the play button has a drop-down that allows us to choose the playback client.



(Assuming a full control implementation), this negates the need for a pyplex web ui for me; what’s everyone else’s input?

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How well does the web gui run on the Pi? Is there a solid webkit browser on the system?



I’m still waiting on my Pi to get in, so my input is largely theoretical at this point.

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I have tried this, without any luck. It is possible to install chrome on the pi an browse your media. But watching media is impossible because the web interface requires flash. And the browsing went everything but smooth.

The pi special web interface is more because the current web interface of plex is unable to sent control commands to a client. That's why there where ideas for an web interface hosted by the pi.
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So not sure if this is the appropriate place for this post, but I’m wondering if anyone else has tried to run pyplex along side squeezeslave? I’ve had no trouble running one or the other but when both are running in the background the first movie (or squeezebox playlist if you play something on squeezeslave before watching something in plex)plays just fine, but from that point on any audio you try to play on the pi completely freaks out (receiver shows the signal dropping in and out).



I haven’t messed with linux since college (which has been awhile) so I’m pretty rusty when it comes to debugging internals like this. Hoping to see if anyone else is running this tandem of programs together or not.

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So finally have found that this is a squeezeslave issue. It apparently holds open a handle on the sound device the entire time it is running.
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I did notice that the Amazon VOD channel isn’t working on PyPlex. I dug around a bit and it appears that the issue is the “clip” video type hasn’t been implemented (you’ve got movie, episode, season, etc but no “clip”) so there’s no transcodeUrl being passed into the play command. I’m happy to take a stab at implementing the type, but figured I’d mention it on here in case someone was already aware of the issue and already working on it.

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Just to confirm, pyplex is Python2 correct?

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yes, thats correct. If you have python 3 as default you can run it with python2 pyplex
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So I just got my Pi up and running tonight (using Raspbian) and I wanted to confirm the state of things with pyplex. I’m using dalehamel’s build and it seems to run well. I can send videos from both the web client and WP7 app. The web client doesn’t have an option for remote push of audio, but I just get a timeout error from the WP7 when I try to push audio.



It appears as if there’s no transcoding happening and it’s just direct streaming all content. My library is a combination of DVDs and Blurays that were just repackaged using MakeMKV. The DVDs stream fine; the blurays play for awhile then stall out, I imagine because of their high bitrate. Any HD content that was recompressed plays fine.





Again, this is just me making sure that everything I’ve tested works the way it should based on the current state of the project. Just want to get a handle on things before I start contributing :slight_smile:



EDIT: Scratch that! I just got back to my server and noticed that the transcoder had crashed. So it is getting transcoded?

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Yes, all media you select to play is requested through a transcode URL from the server.
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Mentioned this in the other thread but it’s probably more relevant here… Regarding the web GUI, I ran into this problem a little while back and decided to put something together using python, cherrypy, cheetah and javascript – you can find it at http://github.com/pearswj/plexweb . I plan on reworking it to use the py-plex API wrapper (rather than parsing the XML myself).



I do however agree that this functionality should be in Plex/Web.

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