I've completed my SageTV Channel, and it appears to be working fine. Thanks for the help in sorting out the shared code, and other issues.
https://github.com/stuckless/sagetv-phoenix-plex-channel
I have list of suggestions for the Channel API, that I think would go a long way in enhancing the user experience...
1. Add Hooks for Video Playback (PlaybackPaused, PlaybackStopped, PlaybackCompleted). These are important to allow a channel to properly update the remote server about the status of video being watched, and update the watched time, and watched status. (for Paused and Stopped it would be important to pass time code, in seconds perhaps). This question of watched statuses has come up a number of time. I've some people suggest hacks of adding multiple video segments to the playlist, and then have the server listen for the "fake" video segment and set the watched status... Needless to say, this falls apart quickly when you consider that most media items are never watched fully.
2. Add a "Resume Playback" option. If I've watched 30 minutes of video, when I go to replay it, give the option to playback from beginning or start over
3. Allow contextual menus on an Item. Ie, if I had the ability to add my own context menus to a media item, such that, I could add things like, "Set Watched", or "Delete Recording", etc, and it make it less important to have #1.
4. Local Media Playback. My Channel is simply serving up files via http that are completely accessible to Plex, since they are on the same filesystem. It would be nice if you simple pass the file path in these cases. My understanding is that this used to be there, but it was removed??
5. Maybe I'm missing it, but it would be nice if you can add a generic Panel view with text. ie, from SageTV plex channel, I'd like to be able to show current system information (amount of disk space used, system messages, etc), but this type of information doesn't fit nicely in a DirectoryObject and it's too large, really, for a MessageContainer... so it would be nice to have a generic PanelObject where by you an add content, via sections... ie, section header, then one of more line of content, etc. This is purely for display purposed and it has no interactive component.
6. From the documentation it doesn't appear that I can add an actor list to a Movie Object... I can add directors, producers, writers, etc, bu no actors. http://dev.plexapp.com/docs/api/objectkit.html#MovieObject
And finally some really nice to have features... but I understand if they will never happen, since the core plex doesn't support them.
1. Skip Forward/Back (ie, 30 sec skip ahead, 10 second skip back.. poor man's commercial skip)
2. Commercial Skip (ie, request edl files and show commercial skip segments on the timebar, allow user to press right/left to skip sections) (even in lieu of built in Commerial Skip... this would be done in the channel, if you provide media player apis that hook into the right/left action, and allow the channel to send a command to reposition the media player...ie, if right is pressed, call an action in the channel code passing the current time index... of the channel sees that the time index is in a commercial block, it sends a command to reposition the media player to another time (or bytes even)).
Thanks again for the help... and at least the SageTV channel is a point where users can watch movies/recordings from SageTV on any of their plex clients.
