Hopefully the “super-easy enhancement” label will get your (and the devs) attention. I’ve posted about this elsewhere but it occurred to me that this really is a potentially easy enhancement for the devs to make. I am running Windows Media Center (and Plex Media Server) on my Windows 7 server, so I’m going to focus on that as the back-end for now, but read all the way through to the end, as I think that the enhancements I describe will work for other back-ends as well.
Let me start off by saying that I think that the really hard work is already working in Plex (kudos Plex devs!). Here’s the great news…
- Plex is already capable of streaming .WTV files (that’s the packaging that Windows Media Center writes to). HDTV recordings are (most of the time) encoded as MPEG2. I’m not familiar with the other DVR back-end programs (e.g., MythTV), but I’m pretty certain they, too, are already writing their files out to a file format that Plex can already play.
- Plex can already apply on-the-fly transcoding of these files and serve them up to ANY client. Yes, iPhones, Android phones, Roku…everything!
- Ceton makes a mobile app (for a few bucks) for iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 8, and Android, called My Media Center that lets you view your Windows Media Center EPG (electronic program guide) and remotely schedule/manage your recordings. No need for the Plex devs to reinvent that wheel (yet). A quick search on Apple’s iOS App Store reveals similar apps for MythTV, and I’m sure that other back-ends have EPG apps (or web-based EPGs that you could pull up in your mobile device’s web browser).
So what’s missing? What do the Plex devs still need to do to make this all work better?
- I can’t speak for other DVR back-ends, but for Windows Media Center, Plex Media Server needs to be enhanced so that it gets all of the metadata it needs directly from the .WTV files. These files already have the necessary metadata embedded in them. The program/script WTV-MetaRenamer parses this info so that it can rename the .wtv files into a format that Plex can work with, but that workaround requires that we wait for a TV show to finish recording. if the Plex devs replicate the same logic that WTV-MetaRenamer performs for parsing that info, we can skip the “middleman” of needing to execute WTV-MetaRenamer, and we can see these recording-still-in-progress TV shows show up nearly immediately (complete with at least partial metadata) under the Plex TV Show category. This page shows the source code of the WTV-MetaRenamer program/script:
http://wtvmetarenamer.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/25482#170251
- The ability for Plex Media Server and the Plex client to constantly refresh/update the time duration info for recording-still-in-progress TV show files. Currently, if I start recording a TV show with WMC and I have Plex Media Server watching that directory (treating it as a home movies folder - so it just displays the filenames and doesn’t try to retrieve metadata online), the TV show typically appears within a few minutes on my iPhone as being available to play. If it’s a 30 minute TV show and it just started recording 5 minutes ago, when I start playing it on my Plex client, the “time bar” is only 5 minutes long. Assuming that I don’t attempt to pause, rewind, or fast-forward (which is already fully supported, by the way), after 5 minutes of playing, I will have reached the end of that time bar and the Plex client will stop playing, even though by that time the in-progress recording on my hard drive will now contain 10 minutes of recorded content. So, when playing this “in progress” recording on the Plex client, we need it to periodically (every few seconds) poll PMS to ask it for the most up-to-date recording length, and then for the client Plex app to refresh the time bar so that it’s kept up-to-date. By doing this, I should be able to start watching an in-progress TV show almost immediately and watch it all the way to the end of the TV show.
- New: I’ve just realized that another [easy] update needs to be made. It seems like Plex will only scan your folders at set intervals, with the shortest interval being 15 minutes. This would need to be changed for “Live TV” folders so that it shows an up-to-the-moment view of what’s available there.
Once implemented, the user experience would work along the lines of the following…
- I fire up the Plex client app to see what recorded TV shows are available. All recorded and recording-in-progress shows will now show up, complete with their metadata.
- Nothing already recorded that interests me, or maybe the Superbowl is on right now? Let’s see what’s on live TV right now…So, I jump over to the Ceton My Media Center app and look through my program guide. When I find something I like, I select it to record. Then, I jump back over to the Plex client app and, within a couple of minutes (once its retrieved the metadata - but perhaps the devs can speed this up even more for files, like WTV files, that contain a good amount of metadata within their own XML), I
can select it and start watching it.
*** Remember to click the + symbol on the bottom right of my post to up-vote this feature suggestion! Thanks!
I’ve reposted this topic in the public forums as well, here:
http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/59539-super-easy-enhancement-dvr-pseudo-live-tv-support-for-all-clients/
So as to keep all conversation about it together in a single thread, I would recommend replying to the public thread (linked to above) and to use this thread only for the purposes of Plex members up-voting this as a feature request. Thanks!
