New Plex Plugin...

If you're a regular follower of ScreenCastsOnline you may remember I covered a fantastic free application called Plex, back in episode SCO0201 - Mac mini Media Center - Part 2 - Plex This is an amazing application that turns your Mac into a media center and whilst optimised for large screen viewing, is just as great to run on your desktop or laptop. I've adopted Plex as the main application for my Mac mini media center.

The application supports a plugin architecture and when I did the original show, I put some feelers out via Twitter to see if anyone could help me put together a plugin for ScreenCastsOnline. To my surprise, I received back an email from James Clarke, one of the Plex developers who kindly offered to write the plugin for me.

Result!

Of course, the plugin was intended for the free and open shows available on the free feeds, but it was a terrific boon and quite a delight to see ScreenCastsOnline in there with the rest of the plugins.

I checked with James how easy it would be to develop a plugin for the members shows, baring in mind, these are protected and require a username and password to authenticate to access the content. He said he'd have a think about it and set about testing some possible approaches.

To cut a long story short, James has now delivered a version of the Plex plugin that supports both the free feed and the members feed. He's written a super front end to allow valid ScreenCastsOnline Extra members to sign in via Plex and stream the shows. The plugin accesses the standard RSS feeds so it will present a separate list of shows for each year, and will be updated each week when I publish a new show.

Wonderful!

He even took it further by adding in a option to toggle either HD or ED versions of the show to help out members with limited bandwidth. I know a lot of members have adopted Plex following the original ScreenCastsOnline show and this new option will be greatly appreciated.

I'm sure James won't mind me extending one more time, a huge thank you for all his efforts and I truly appreciate his patience and tenacity in bringing this to fruition.

If you're an existing Plex user, you can either install or upgrade the updated plugin from the Plex App store. This weeks members show contains a small screencast on installing and configuring the plugin.

If you've not checked out Plex, I can't recommend it highly enough - check out the free ScreenCastsOnline show SCO0201 - Mac mini Media Center - Part 2 - Plex