[REL] PleXBMC

I really love the idea to have a central library and this one may be "better" than the current mysql solution. I tried the PMS some time ago and wasn't really happy about it. Development went on. Before giving it a new try and using the plugin, a few questions:

1) Can XBMC still looks exactly like it does today? Don't want to look XBMC look closer to Plex. Exactly the same (meta data, skin, recently added movies and tv shows, sort by actor, trailer, etc.)

2) I don't want PMS to do any scraping. I am using EMM and like to keep NFO, posters, fanart and trailer) locally in my movie folder. By doing so, I will stay independent to any changes. So, PMS would need to import those, but not do any additional scraping. Is this possible?

3) Someone said "music" is not supported yet? Is this a PMS issue or plugin-related?


One last comment: planning to use PMS for Windows.

Thanks for your help!!!

1) you don't need to use any plexbmc specific skin - what's available for XBMC works fine. Only issue it that integration doesn't extend to the complete library system within XBMC. So PMS can track the recently viewed, display by artist/genre type stuff, and the addon can show this, but not directly from XBMC library.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure what the standard menu items fir the XBMC library are, so it's possible that PMS covers them all. I'll check it out tomorrow as I have some dev time.

2) not used the feature, but I believe that the PMS agent "local media assets" uses the nfo and folder art for metadata.

3) music is supported.

I'd just give it a try on a small number of files and see what happens, worse case is the loss of a hour or two - you aren't going to lose any of your existing XBMC library setup so you could just delete PMS and uninstall the addon and be back to original.

hippojay Wrote:1) you don't need to use any plexbmc specific skin - what's available for XBMC works fine. Only issue it that integration doesn't extend to the complete library system within XBMC. So PMS can track the recently viewed, display by artist/genre type stuff, and the addon can show this, but not directly from XBMC library.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure what the standard menu items fir the XBMC library are, so it's possible that PMS covers them all. I'll check it out tomorrow as I have some dev time.

2) not used the feature, but I believe that the PMS agent "local media assets" uses the nfo and folder art for metadata.

3) music is supported.

I'd just give it a try on a small number of files and see what happens, worse case is the loss of a hour or two - you aren't going to lose any of your existing XBMC library setup so you could just delete PMS and uninstall the addon and be back to original.

Thanks for your message. Just gave it a shot, but unfortunately, local files (nfo, posters, fanart, trailer) are not supported under PMS for Windows (yet). Also, it appears that PMS in general is not really suited for local files. For me, this is a deal breaker as I don't want to make myself dependent on PMS.

Also, just realized that things like "XBMC Commander" or other remotes that requires XBMC library would probably not have worked anyways.

Feels like I will need to wait for XBMC to come up with some improved central media database solution...

No probs, you need to use what works for you best, although I'm not sure what you mean by PMS not being suited to local files?

I agree that the library system for XBMC needs a but more work, the fact that you heed to use 3rd party apps like EMM shows that there is an area that XBMC is missing.

I do have another addon that's in it's early stages called XonX (thread in this forum) which attempts to utilise a single XBMC instance as a central library - however it requires some extra functionality to be built into XBMC for it to match PLeXBMC/PMS in terms of maturity.

hippojay Wrote:No probs, you need to use what works for you best, although I'm not sure what you mean by PMS not being suited to local files?

Agree, I just try to avoid locking me into some specific software. PMS for Windows does not support "local files (nfo, poster, fanart, trailer) at all. PMS for Mac does, but it is just a workaround, which someone put together. I looked in the Plex forum and many users have problems with it. Also, it may break in every new release.

hippojay Wrote:I agree that the library system for XBMC needs a but more work, the fact that you heed to use 3rd party apps like EMM shows that there is an area that XBMC is missing.

Agree. I love EMM, but of course ideally this would not even be needed. Let's see, giving increasing demand, maybe there will be some form of XBMC server (with transcoding function).

hippojay Wrote:I do have another addon that's in it's early stages called XonX (thread in this forum) which attempts to utilise a single XBMC instance as a central library - however it requires some extra functionality to be built into XBMC for it to match PLeXBMC/PMS in terms of maturity.

Let me look into this. Thanks for pointing me there.

can anyone explain what this addon does exactly? i tried to figure it out form the posts but im just drawing a blank.

krish_2k4 Wrote:can anyone explain what this addon does exactly? i tried to figure it out form the posts but im just drawing a blank.

It allows XBMC to read and play content from Plex library.

pecinko Wrote:It allows XBMC to read and play content from Plex library.

installed it, went to open it and just get an error saying "unable to connect....."

i tied to google around and all im getting is it just plays anything you have off itunes and iphoto. is that right?

krish_2k4 Wrote:installed it, went to open it and just get an error saying "unable to connect....."

Well I'm not the author of this plugin, but it could be helpful to know the usual things - Xmbc version, plugin version, what did you enter in settings ...

I think it highlights the lack of detail in the first post of this thread ;-) Tonight I'll put together a proper readme for this thread and also get an update for the one over at plexapp.com. I'll need Harley to update the post though, so it might not happen straight away.

krish_2k4 Wrote:installed it, went to open it and just get an error saying "unable to connect....."

you'll need to configure the addon to point towards your PMS server instance.