Plex Connect

or: "Plex @ ATV - think different..."

We all want the pleasure of Plex on the big screen - in this case driven by an AppleTV. Unfortunately there are officially no Apps allowed on AppleTV, most of the time a jailbreak is late (iOS 5.2?) or not avaiable at all (ATV3).

This is a collection of files developed for the little project described in Plex Forum. See also the discontinued ATVBrowser for a project with similar purpose, all javascript.

For more information, like detailed Installation Guides, FAQs and similar, visit the Wiki.

How does it work?

The basic idea is, to...

• re-use an already available app (Apple Trailers)
• re-route the request to your local Plex Media Server
• re-work the reply to fit into AppleTV's XML communication scheme
• let iOS do the rest

Installation

# Installation
git clone https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect.git
# Updating
cd PlexConnect
git pull

If you don't have Git, you can download ZIP file and extract files to a local directory.

Gentoo sexyness

• Install plex-media-server from an overlay (I used luman's and 0.9.7.12)
• Copy these init scripts:

  cd PlexConnect/gentoo
  cp -R etc /

• Open /etc/conf.d/plexconnect, set PLEXCONNECT_PATH to where PlexConnect/ resides
• Add it on boot:

  # If you haven't added Plex Media Server to start up before
  rc-update add plex-media-server default
  # Add PlexConnect. This will start right after Plex Media Server starts
  rc-update add plexconnect default

Usage

See the wiki for details.

More detailed Information about the files

• PlexConnect.py - Main script file, invoking the DNSServer and WebServer into seperate processes.
• PlexGDM.py - Auto discovery of running Plex Media Servers: Good Day Mate!
• DNSServer.py - This is a small DNS server (hence the name) that is now called whenever aTV needs to resolve an internet address. To hijack the trailer App, we will intercept and re-route all queries to trailers.apple.com. Every other query will be forwarded to the next, your original DNS.
• WebServer.py - This script provides the directory content of "assets" to aTV. Additionally it will forward aTV's directory requests to PMS and provide a aTV compatible XML back. Every media (video, thumbnails...) is URL-wise connected to PMS, so aTV directly accesses the Plex database.
• XMLConverter.py - This script contains the XML adaption from Plex Media Server's response to valid aTV XML files.
• Settings.py - Basic settings collection. Creates Settings.cfg at first run - which may be modified externally.
• ATVSettings.py - Handles the aTV settings like ViewModes or Transcoder options. Stores aTV settings in ATVSettings.cfg.

Disclaimer

The software is provided as is. It might work as expected - or not. Just don't blame me.