Rasplex Kiosk Mode

Dev Community Apps & Creations
1

HI guys,

 

stop me here if I'm alone in this, but does anyone else feel that a kiosk toggle in settings would be a great addition to RasPlex, something like the master lock in XBMC? My problem is as follows, and reading around, I am not alone. My problem is as follows: I am the only tech savvy person in the house, whilst everyone else just struggles with tech in general. I have recently setup PMS and 4 RasPlex clients, and they work live a dream, save a few irritations. The problem that I have is that my family keeps getting into muddles with preference/settings menus, accidentally hitting shutdown/restart or switching poster view to list view, etc.

 

I noticed that XBMC has a kiosk mode for certain skins, and I was wondering how feasible/easy it would be to implement something similar in Plex, assuming it is a feature that others also want.

 

My proposal for the Kiosk mode functionality broadly:

 

1. Hide the Preferences/Shutdown/Restart etc. menu, instead having the top menu being the one showing the libraries (Movies/Tv Shows/etc.)

2. Lock the Browsing mode to the Poster view. (ie. disable the list toggle if one clicks too far right).

3. Kind of reinforcing point 1, hide all menus for settings/configuration.

4. If possible, though not essential, hide the left sidebar containing the filter/play/shuffle buttons.

5. Again, not essential, but would also hide the user icon/name in the top right of the main menu, and replace it with a lock icon that could be highlighted and subsequently clicked, upon which the relevant person can enter a previously defined pin that would disable kiosk mode.

6. Pretty obvious, but add a Kiosk mode toggle in the preferences menu.

 

This is a very rough sketch of ideas, so please feel free to suggest things to add to it, or alternatively you could just shoot me down ;)

 

Regards,

 

Sasha

 

2

The custom skin "Plex Black Edition" has what it calls a "Kiosk Mode" setting, though I believe this only blocks the view mode changes in browsing media sections, so it's very limited.

A true kiosk mode should (as you describe) disable a lot more of the PHT functionality options, so as to prevent non-tech users messing up the effective functionality.

But this also means blocking access to the kiosk/non-kiosk toggle, so it can never be a normal preferences option.

It must be handled by manual editing of some settings file in root mode. (Can easily be done by a tech person using an SSH client.)

Having that toggle accessible in a normal menu effectively defeats its purpose.

It would be like a 'kiosk computer' giving each user administrator access.

In any case, implementing a true kiosk mode is something that should be done by the official PHT project team, not just the team porting PHT to the RPi.

Best regards: dlanor

3

It's in my mod of Plex Black, Superuser mode blocks all access to preferences/viewmodes/context menus. And it has normal Kiosk mode...

Only caveat with Superuser is that the user has to use preplay screen to be able to resume, as this is the only place where I allow the context menu to pop up safely without 'other' destructive options included in the list.

4

Dlanor when i said there should be a toggle, i was suggesting that the visible toggle when the device was in kioak mode could be clicked, and the user would then have to enter a code to unlock it. Whilst SSH isn’t difficult, all of the other system settings are accessible from within the UI, and it would also require a reboot if using ssh. Though it might be a good idea for a kiosk config file that could be edited over SSH that detailed enabled screens/buttons etc. in any case, there should be a kiosk mode of some sort

5

Super Kiosk Mode now in skin.plextra - https://forums.plex.tv/topic/156672-skin-plextra-default-skin-with-extra-options/

6

Sweet, will give that a go and let you know how it goes :wink: Might be a whole before I can get to a rasplex instance though :frowning: