Automagical Plex To Miso poster
I've been using Miso for quite some time now for checking into media as I watch it - be it weekly eps, old movies or even at the cinema.
About a month ago, I purchased a Mac mini and have been running the Plex Media Centre app on it and it has been fantastic, however, there is always the manual element of checking into Miso (using either the web interface, or the iPhone app.)
I figured there had to be a better way, so started hunting around. There isn't (at time of writing) a plugin for Plex directly and I don't know Python, so wasn't going to go down that avenue just yet.
After a bit of digging around, I discovered that Plex still exposed the XBMC HTTP commands, so started looking to see what was available. Luckily, it returned the now playing video. So I set about polling this and parsing the output to then lookup the media at Miso and eventual checkin.
My day job sees me doing a lot of PHP work and, whilst this isn't necessarily the most suitable of tools for the job, I decided to write a script to handle checkins for me. What I now have, is something that handles what I have tested so far with fairly decent accuracy.
The PlexToMiso script I have come up with is available at my SVN repository here. Once configured, cron this script to run at ten minute (or so) intervals. It will check to see if Plex is playing, identify the media via Miso and post a checkin, if possible. There is a bit of logging from the script, which you can pipe to a logfile for later perusal.
Checkins are databased for the primary purpose of keeping track of and not double checking in, potentially clogging up people's Twitter and Facebook feeds (my friends hate it). There is also a quick script that gives an output of logged media, based on checkins.
At this time, there is no way via the Miso API to checkin to a specific season/episode, so these are tracked via comments for now.
The end goal of this project, in my eyes, is to end up with a proper Plex plugin but that'll take time given I know neither the Plex framework nor python...
Feedback is appreciated to michael at iatstuti dot net or follow me @michaeldyrynda.