[Suggestion] Hue entertainment support

Hi !

With the new version of Philips Hue App, Hue Entertainment is now out.

I’d love to see my living room lights light up with the movie i watche with plex

And you, what do you think ?

7 Likes

You could probably get that working with Webhooks and a tiny bit of coding :smile:

Is there any interest in connecting to Plex to the new Hue Entertainment functionality which will dynamically change Hue lighting change along with video scenes as Plex is playing.
I have done it with Apps on my iPhone and the effect is really good.
Built into Plex it would make it available for every piece of media in the collection not just a very short list of pre configured videos.

It would basically turn Plex into automated Ambilight enabled video service.

This would help to take home theatre to the next level.

2 Likes

I would LOVE that!

2 Likes

I don’t currently use Philips Hue (but do have a couple of TP-Link smart lights and plugs), but this would be a great addition.

@elan said:
You could probably get that working with Webhooks and a tiny bit of coding :smile:

As Hue Entertainment seems to rely on video or audio data to produce reactive colours / effects using lights, given what I’ve seen of it and my understanding of Plex webhooks I don’t think this could be achieved at the moment.

1 Like

@TheMooDude said:
As Hue Entertainment seems to rely on video or audio data to produce reactive colours / effects using lights, given what I’ve seen of it and my understanding of Plex webhooks I don’t think this could be achieved at the moment.

Ah, fair enough, that makes sense.

This should be natively integrated into the Plex server though. There’s no reason it can’t be unless Philips haven’t opened their SDK to many partners yet.

I concur that this feature should be supported. However, I do not believe it to be a server-side matter. The colors seem to be controlled via what is playing at the time via a player so it would seem that the player should be communicating to Hue… So, the official Android app that rocks my Nivida Shield sure could use this integration!!!

How can we bribe to get this feature on a list for work?

3 Likes

Would be super interesting to have this implemented. As of now it works with my Mac if I attach it via HDMI as a workaround but I have the media server running on my Synogy which I’m ove to use.

Let’s hope it gets implemented one day.

yes, please integrate it - the android app would be a great place - if there is no possibility to integrate it to the server. Otherwhise you could create an api/interface where we could get the colors of the current movie and sync it to the hue bridge.

1 Like

Can’t the server analyse the video colors the same way it can transcode ? That way you’ll be able to control the lights regardless of your player.

One would think so. I wish they would bake this one in.

Using mrmc on apple tv connected to plex server, works great :slight_smile:

I was just thinking about this (Plex driving Hue lights) and was pleased to see a thread for it already.

While it would seem logical for the server to drive this, as it’s already doing a certain amount of media analysis and scene detection, I believe the issue with a server-side solution would be that the server likely doesn’t know what’s actually being played on screen on the receiving device at any given moment in time. The server packetises video data and sends it to the client, which then buffers it and plays it back as and when desired/necessary, but doesn’t know what the humans in the room are actually seeing on the TV screen :thinking:

I think we’d need the lighting effects to be closely in sync to the video for it to be effective, and that would mean the Hue control coming from the playback client. Obviously, most playback clients (I’m thinking smart TVs here, to be honest) don’t have the horsepower to be doing analysis of the video stream at the same time as decoding it and displaying it.

One potential workaround would be for the server to do the Hue effect media analysis offline, and for the client to feedback to the server its progress during subsequent playback. The server essentially has a lighting script, inferred from its media analysis, that it refers to as the client says what frame it’s on, and controls the Hue lights based on that. There’s still going to be a certain amount of lag with this approach, but I think it would be considerably less than the webcam/phone camera approaches that are available.

Any thoughts?

2 Likes