I’ve mentioned Plex in various other blogs (like here and here), mainly because I LOVE PLEX!
It makes streaming media around the house and to devices away from home so simple, with a beautiful user interface that even my 4-year-old daughter can use. They’ve also recently added a DVR feature that works with my HDHomeRun tuner, and the latest PlexPass version can also stream live TV to a limited number of clients. So I’m really happy with my PlexPass lifetime subscription I took out several years ago when it was only about $70 (and the exchange rate was a little better than it is today!)
That said, it’s not perfect, and there are a few things that I would like to see integrated into Plex, as at the minute I use a couple of 3rd party tools to do this:
PlexPy
This is a great example of a 3rd party product that could pretty much be picked up and fitted into the application it supports as it looks and feels very similar. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but it would make Plex a better overall tool. PlexPy provides a database of usage statistics, is is great for keeping track of who is watching what. It also has a very powerful notification engine, which is the main reason for writing this blog. It’s possible to link PlexPy to Facebook using their developer tools, and effectively creating a very simple app, which updates a Facebook group when new content is added. I first looked at this when the other tool I mentioned below broke, but that’s now working, so I don’t worry about the Facebook link. I did check it today and noticed it hadn’t been updating, so when I went in to check the settings, I wasted about an hour getting things working again. This blog was, therefore, a small note reminding me that the OAuth settings are in the Products > Facebook Login screen and not in the general app settings! Everything else is pretty self-explanatory!
PlexEmail
PlexEmail is a much smaller Python script that pulls together media content added over a specific period and creates a web page and e-mail. I’ve got this configure to run weekly on a Sunday evening, and it e-mails out to all my Plex friends to let them know what’s been added that week. It’s simple, but very effective and very rarely breaks. When it did, Plex had forced the use of token authentication, but the developer resolved this very quickly, and it’s worked faultlessly ever since. It sometimes doesn’t send when I’ve restarted the PMS and forgotten to remount the database folder into the PlexEmail jail, but that’s more user error than the application!
So this is just here to remind me about the PlexPy settings, but might be useful if anyone strumbled across this googling Plex and was wondering how to keep track of who is watching what and notifying them of any changes. You need PlexPy and PlexEmail, at least until Plex builds them into the main server application!
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