PM4K / PlexMod for Kodi
SOURCES
Code Repository
Issues (post bugs/issues here)
Discussions
Features (vs. official)
- Maintained.
- Very stable.
- AV1 support
- Compatible with Kodi 18, 19, 20, 21+ support (21/Omega is preferred)
- Directplay anything (as long as your setup and Kodi supports it)
- DirectStream support for every codec, not just AVC/MP3
- Passthrough audio enhancements (e.g. prefer or force AC3/DTS depending on channel config)
- Correctly identify and display video/audio streams (Atmos, DV, etc.)
- Support all (+historic) watched marker styles
- Add (auto-) intro/credits skipping
- Add auto recap skipping
- Modernized theme and assets
- High performance UI
- Chapters and virtual chapters in player
- Optional TV binge-mode
- Slow connection support (hotels for example)
- Local/LAN server discovery and option to prefer local servers instead of secure connections
- Real context-aware background images by default (not blurred to oblivion; configurable)
- Optional solid-color-background instead of images
- Optional post-play enhancements (via external addon settings)
- Forced-subtitle selection configurable (non-forced can be enforced)
- Improved photo playback/slideshow
- Better resume and pre-play dialog (HDR/DV support, show resume time)
- Add horizontal pagination for views
- Show mark unplayed even if video in progress
- Better/own PlayerProcessInfo (current stream info) implementation
- Add vertical round robining for dialogs
- Make background art blur and opacity configurable; display background art per item
- Own Estuary-based skin, âPlextuaryâ, to reduce OSD-hiding-times and remove blurry backdrop while player is paused (install from repository)
- Customizable player UI
- Support SDH subtitle streams
- Vastly improved music and photo handling
- Path mapping support (SMB/NFS/⊠instead of HTTP streaming)
- Automatic plex.direct domain handling (no need for DNS rebind exemption)
- Selective library hiding per user per server
- Selective hub hiding
- Watchlist support
(many older changes have been merged into the official addon; but weâve departed from the official addon pretty massively)
KNOWN ISSUES
Album/Playlist-playback UI somewhat broken (skip-next in player doesnât work); since Kodi 19; also in official addon; help neededMight be fixed from 0.5.4 onwards.On NVIDIA SHIELD standby Kodi loses its audio passthrough capabilities (SHIELD/Kodi issue). You can circumvent that by using the plugin âSleepy Watchdogâ from the Kodinerds repository to automatically exit Kodi after a timeout.PM4K now has built-in functionality to exit Kodi when the display goes to sleep. Look at the system options tab!Playing audio tracks directly from search results is broken- Multi-part media resume is somewhat broken (also see here for watch state issues)
NOTABLE CHANGES
2025
- Add watchlist support
- Achieve stability on CoreELEC
- Massive speedups when rendering huge libraries, collections, playlists
08/2024
- CoreELEC workarounds
- Templating engine
- 16:10, 4:3 support
05/2024:
- Use new common watched-states instead of unwatched
- Easy mapping
- Sections are now movable and hidable
04/2024:
- Fix DNS rebind issues for Kodi 19 and above
- Assets updated and player UI theme support
- Path mapping added (SMB/NFS/local mounts vs. HTTP)
- Hide all Kodi loading spinners when using 0.7.8 beta and Plextuary
03/2024:
- Fix any DNS rebind issues, hopefully
- Drastically improve performance
12/2024:
- Add Movie reviews
- Localization fixes for PMS API results (library names, (subtitle-) stream names)
- Full DirectStream capabilities including not burning in subtitles
Introduction
This is an unofficial partial rewrite and evolution of Plex4Kodi.
The original codebase has been abandoned by the company for years by now.
PM4K aims for a Plex-like user experience but doesnât necessarily adhere to official guidelines. Its UX is directly based off of user feedback, while retaining the Plex optics.
It is still based off of the original P4K source and critical bugfixes might be PRâd back, depending on the severity.
Installation (recommended)
-
Add
https://pm4k.eu/(orhttps://pannal.github.io/dontpanickodi/) to your Kodi installation as a source in file manager (Hit Add source in File Manager, click on the selected â<None>â in the list, enterhttps://pm4k.eu, OK, down, enter a name, hit OK) -
Go to Settings->Addons, choose âInstall from zip fileâ, choose the file source you added and install the repository
-
Install Plex via Settings->Addons->Install from repository->Donât Panic->Video add-ons->Plex
-
Optional, recommended: Install Plextuary via Settings->Addons->Install from repository->Donât Panic->Look and Feel->Skin->Plextuary
Installation (old stable only) - HEAVILY OUTDATED
- Install âPM4K for Kodiâ from the official Kodi repository
- Install Plextuary skin using the above
Develop install:
- Checkout any branch of this GitHub repository and use as-is
Translation
You can help! Join the translation effort at POEditor (thanks for the free open source license, guys).
Changelog
1.0.0
CoreELEC
- Fix issues with delayed audio playback via the alternate seek method
- (Re-) Implemented sophisticated alternate seek method for problematic devices (brought its own quirks)
- Gradually improved alternate seek to a stable state with community feedback
- When switching audio track donât trigger progress events
Watchlist
- Implement first version of the watchlist feature
- Auto-remove watched items (movies, shows) from the watchlist (adjustable via setting)
- Allow adding any media item to the watchlist from any media view
- (blindly) remove item from watchlist if manually marked watched via Home or Library context menus
- Allow visiting and playing back items on any available server with the item available, without having to manually switch servers
- Allow selection between multiple versions, if the case, instead of only one/the first per server (ordered by bitrate)
Subtitles
- Add support for subtitle Auto-Sync (based on audio analysis, PlexServer-side)
- Allow live-toggling of subtitle Auto-Sync in the player (overrides global setting temporarily, or per-TV-show setting)
- Fix embedded subtitle selection when path mapping enabled
- Add subtitle language denylist (disable subtitles for native languages)
- Live-download subtitles via Plex (or Kodi, or both; pre-play and during playback)
- Parse, use and store Plex account subtitle preferences
Episodes
- Fix episode progress handling
- Try using PlexServer settings for episode completion handling
- Improve background music handling
- Fix play from beginning not working for context menu of episode list items
Libraries
- Massive potential speedup (5-10x) for huge libraries
- Adhere to the library collections setting of Plex
- Use library title in title header instead of library type
- listview-16x9: Reimplement item type filter
- General fixes
Collections
- Fix collections repeating themselves after CHUNKSIZE hit (240 by default); Improve performance tenfold for big collections; Implement chunking in Collection.all()
Playlist
- Fix playlist subsequent chunking (was broken) (thanks @BrendanMyers88)
- Select the currently relevant item once itâs been created properly
- Massively improve resource usage on big video playlists when returning from playback by only refreshing affected items
- Correctly show and scale video progress
UI
- Mark any item as played/unplayed on Home (even in-progress ones), Libraries
- Allow removing individual items from Continue Watching/On Deck (same as in official clients)
- Implement fast server and user switch in Home (via long-press/context menu)
- Visual changes to adhere more to the 2024 style (player, dropdowns, dialogs)
- Add the ability to hide episode and movie spoilers defined by multiple user settings (titles, blur images, summaries, ratings)
- Add the ability to always resume in progress media (also directly from home if wanted); can be overriden using long-press/context menu
- Settings: Allow navigation using MOVE_RIGHT/LEFT; fixes
- Unify dropdown behaviour: always allow round-robin on any dropdown; default close behaviour is pressing left or BACK/PREVIOUS_MENU
- Core/Poster dimensions: Use 268x402 (0.66 ratio) for poster base resolution instead of 268x397 (0.675 ratio); unifies vertical scaling for posters and collection art
- Unify bound Home key (should now work everywhere)
- Home/Core: Donât retain background image when switching home users
- Home/Hubs: Use season thumbnail for episodes if possible (adjustable via setting)
- Home: Add context menu option to start playback from beginning for in progress items when resume in progress items on home is enabled
- Home: Make moving sections more resilient (esp. when moving fast/holding left/right)
- Home: Add âMinimizeâ and âExitâ options to user menu (touch based devices canât easily hit the exit menu by using BACK)
- Episodes: Use season art as background if available
- Episodes: Show correct cast per episode, not from parent show
- Movies/Shows/Episodes: Add Directors (up to two) to the beginning of the cast list; support searching for directorâs movies (currently not possible with shows/episodes)
- Episodes/Shows/Movies: Make âgo to sectionâ action actually visit the section instead of the home hub
- Remove most obsolete dividers in sub views
- Movies/Episodes: Properly vertically align audio/video/subtitle labels within textures
- Movies: Show duration for extras
- Postplay: Scroll titles (instead of cutting them off + ellipsis); scroll multiline summaries
- Item/AudioSettings: Donât trim secondary title, scroll it
Videoplayer
- Modernize the usage of the Plex Media Decision Engine
- Use bitrate instead of resolution when asking the Plex Server for a decision (better transcode behaviour, especially with HEVC)
- Any transcode quality selection is now bitrate based, as the resolution can (and should) vary
- Add the ability to not spoil anything during playback
- Add fast resume/pause behaviour (use OK/ENTER to quickly resume when paused or pause when playing, instead of showing the OSD)
- When showing stream info, pressing RIGHT will show playerprocessinfo, pressing LEFT will show playerdebug
- Donât skip to next episode after final credits marker was skipped if binge mode or skip postplay for TV isnât active
- Never show postplay for movie extras, regardless of any postplay setting
- Allow for immediate skipping of a counting down marker (before you had to wait 1 second for that to work) (needs the respective AddonSetting enabled as well)
- PlayerVideoCurrentPlaylist: Scroll titles if theyâre too long; allow vertical round-robining at the top boundary; allow closing the playlist by pressing LEFT
- Use uuid4() as session ID; keep session ID when switching streams; report session ID when sending timeline requests
- Remove artificial percentage-based virtual chapters (intro/outro are still generated if necessary)
- When stopping playback after idle, donât start playback of next episode/playlist item
- Fix rare occasion where immediately going to next item in playlist/season would keep the âskip prevâ button disabled, when the playlist/season was started at episode 1
- Ensure correct audio track was set after a handler was reused (skip to next video was pressed in player)
- SeekDialog/CurrentPlaylist: Mark previous episodes/items as watched in current playlist during a multi-item playback session
- SeekDialog/CurrentPlaylist: Show progress indicators for items in playlist; âliveâ snapshot of current video progress when opened as well
Core:
- Add Autoupdater (for beta releases)
- VideoPlayer/Timeline event improvements
- Ship certificate bundle and allow manual certificates
- Improve background resolution by allowing a manual scale value
- Fix Collections
- Fix Playlists
- Improve VideoPlaylists
- Fix Postplay issues
- Fix MusicPlayer
- Migrate to InfoTags for Kodi >= 20, removes deprecation warning for setInfo
- Fix HTTPConnection was never async. Unify Asynchronicity between HTTPConnection and HTTPSConnection via AsyncConnectionMixin
- Add requests cache for Plex data (can also be persisted), to speed up re-visiting resource-heavy views
- Fix core networking issues
- Basic support for external players. Does not support seeking or resuming inside external players but tries to keep the playback and resume states (for resuming an item with an external player youâll have to seek there yourself); only supports path mapping if the external player can access the same path PM4K sees
- Core/Transcode/Audio: Allow audio transcode targets âmp3â, âac3â, âaacâ, âopusâ, âvorbisâ, âeac3â, âflacâ, âalacâ (new: eac3, vorbis, flac, alac)
- Improve audio stream type detection
- Improve correct audio stream selection during certain events fixing Kodi quirks
- Add setting to loop theme music (default: on)
- Harden VideoPlayer
- Implement cleaner shutdown functionality
- Support custom theme.mp3 theme music for TV shows and movies (additional extensions: âac3â, âaacâ, âopusâ, âvorbisâ, âeac3â, âflacâ, âalacâ)
- Watchlist/Core/ThemeMusic: While traversing items of multiple types (movies and shows), properly stop or start theme music if necessary
- Support Plex markers as watched indicators
- Check plex.direct dns rebind issues more thoroughly and donât completely rely on the protection flags from the Plex server registry (often false); can lead to a slightly longer bootup time
- Fix plex.direct host mapping not being triggered in certain situations (local docker IP mapped to VM for example)
- Donât consider a resolved plex.direct domain with IP 0.0.0.0 as âsuccessfully resolvedâ
- Force plex.direct connectivity check if the current connection has hostname issues (should fix certain setups with manual connections/LAN connections without allowing insecure local connections, falling back to plex.direct)
- Home/Movies/Shows/Episodes/Libraries: Implement generic watched toggle; toggle watched via keyboard mapping âwâ (buttonCode: 61527)
- Home: Donât fail hard when no currently selected server is available
- Home: After selecting an unavailable server from the dropdown, shutdown wasnât possible
- Write templates to user directory instead of plugin directory when env var INSTALLATION_DIR_AVOID_WRITE is set (useful when plugin directory isnât writable)
- AddonSettings: Use 850ms as new default for the Alternate seek fix (was: 500ms)
- Bring back screensaver.
- Optionally allow direct play for resolutions above 4K
Translations
- Update translations for Spanish (100%), French (75%), Chinese (90%), Hungarian (100%), Italian (63%)
Addons:
- Provide the Plextuary skin with optimizations for CoreELEC and CoreELEC CPM
- Plextuary: Allow customization of Exit menu
- Add âMcFontFaceâ Kodi font management plugin
- Add âPM4K Log Uploaderâ plugin
