Plex home theater player status

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Hello Everyone,

I was wondering if someone would like to create a plugin to get the player status from a Plex home theater. I did some research myself and found this workaround:

http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/839/how-to-get-plex-home-theater-status

This also works for xbmc, Kodi and openelec.

Have a nice day.

@defser For reference I found the following page:

• http://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/Examples

Btw. Did you try the pimatic-kodi plugin?

• https://github.com/Fjuxx/pimatic-kodi

EDIT: Tried it, but this plugin uses WebSockets. Apparently web sockets support has been disabled with PHT

I have been working on this for a while but have based in on Plex Media server so that it works for all clients and not just PHT.
Right now I have a prototype working where I can get what the user of a specific client is watching and the progress on that item.

Here is the current progress:

The current version can be downloaded from here:
https://github.com/tester22/pimatic-plex

If you enable debug mode on pimatic it will make a list of all unknown plex players that it finds:
11:31:19.475 [pimatic-plex] Found unknown Plex Home Theater with id xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx and name Hannas-Air-2.

@tester22

Very nice! I will try this today.

@tester22 Nice! Thanks for sharing and your effort!

I have tried the “plex-control” example, but it did not work for me as plex-control could not resolve my client (plex home theater) from the plex server. So, I am curious whether or not it works with your plugin base. I’ll give a try later and keep you posted.

Hi,

If you set the log level in Pimatic to debug and start playing something you will see an line like this:
11:31:19.475 [pimatic-plex] Found unknown Plex Home Theater with id xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx and name Hannas-Air-2.
The id (in this case xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx) should be saved in the config section player .

My config looks like this:
id : plex-vardagsrum
name : Plex Vardagsrum
class : PlexPlayer
server : 10.0.1.5
player : xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx
interval : 6000

Once that is done all the debug messages should disappear for that specific client. The reason it I need that id is that it is the only way to discover clients that doesn’t support the remote api like. Roku, Samsung TV. This method is a little bit harder to setup but is more stable as it doesn’t require the client to register before it is avaible (eg if you have guest users).

Or you can go to: http://<plex-server>:32400/status/sessions and copy the value in the machineIdentifier field on last row.
<MediaContainer size=“1”>
…
<Player machineIdentifier=“xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx” platform=“Chrome” product=“Plex Web” state=“playing” title=“Plex Web (Chrome)” />
</Track>
</MediaContainer>

HI,

I have implemented playback controls now but it requires that the player in the config section is name and not guid.
So in the example above this is: Hannas-Air-2

Found one fatal bug if pimatic is started before PHT controls won’t work

Hello,

I have tried this plugin, i cannot use it because my sever is in fact a VPS… so when i want to get the status from http://<plex-server>:32400/status/sessions i need to post login credentials to the server te gain access.

If I don’t: “401 Unauthorized” is all i get.

Maybe you could add a option to use a plex media server thats outside of the network? (username and password)

Thank you!

For those that also have this problem… simple solution:
http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/839/how-to-get-plex-home-theater-status

Authentication support is added now.
Unfortuanly that won’t work for playback controls yet but will hopefully soon.

@Anton-Delitsch

Thank you! Will try it!

@defser Have found a workaround for the controls to but need some time to implement it.

@defser Now is playback controls implemented. Unfortunately it currently requires both id and ip of the player. Will try to fix that in the future.
Note: that not all Plex players does not support playback controls.

@Anton-Delitsch I have published the first version to NPM.
Let me know if you find any bugs.

@tester22 is this plugin still up to date?

i just added it, but pimatic cant recognize the device.

plugins:
    {
      "plugin": "plex"
    }
devices:
    {
      "id": "plex-player",
      "name": "Plex Media Center",
      "class": "PlexPlayer",
      "server": "192.168.1.37",
      "port": 32400,
      "player": "Apple TV",
      "playerIp": "192.168.1.64",
      "intervall": 5000,
      "guid": "B64622E0-11A0-4644-AAFD-FC861AC62EDD",
      "username": "myplexuser",
      "password": "myplexpw"
    }

warn [pimatic]: no plugin found for device "plex-player" of class "PlexPlayer"!
error [pimatic]: Cannot find module 'extend'

@tester22 hasn’t been on for weeks now. either open a git issue or another @Developer may have a look at this

I use it for a month now and it works fine, my config:

plugin:

{
      "plugin": "plex"
    }

device:

{
      "id": "plex-woonkamer",
      "name": "Plex",
      "class": "PlexPlayer",
      "server": "192.168.1.201",
      "port": 32400,
      "player": "Woonkamer",
      "playerIp": "192.168.1.33",
      "username": "username",
      "password": "password",
      "guid": "e53d3008-d168-4d5a-bd14-f090c0XXXXXX"
    },

Is your installation right? Or try to install it manually:

cd /home/pi/pimatic-app
npm install pimatic-plex

any chance for a update? there is a request on git since 3 months without response.
this plugin doesn’t work on phs 1.1x and later. PHS 1.1 was released last summer.
if not, remove it from the plugin list or mark it as “not working”