DreamPlex — fork for modern Plex Media Server

Plex client for Enigma2 (OpenATV and friends), forked from oe-alliance/DreamPlex to make it work again with current Plex Media Server releases, on both OpenATV 6.4 (Python 2.7) and OpenATV 6.5+/7.x (Python 3).

What was broken and what this fork fixes

1. "No data in this section!" when opening any library

With the default setting Show filter for sections enabled (and always for music sections), the plugin asks the server for the legacy secondary navigation of a section (GET /library/sections/<id>) and builds its menu from the <Directory> children (All / Unwatched / By Genre / ...). Modern PMS releases no longer answer with those children, so every library appeared empty; only the global "New" / "On Deck" rows kept working because they use a direct content endpoint.

The fork detects the empty answer and synthesizes the filter menu on the client, with the same entries the server used to send:

• Movies: All, Unwatched, Recently Added, Recently Released, On Deck, By Genre, By Year, By Decade, Search
• Shows: All, Unwatched, Recently Added, On Deck, By Genre, By Year, Search
• Music: All Artists, Recently Added, By Genre, Search

Old servers that still send their own menu keep being used unchanged. Drilling into a filter value (a genre, a year...) now follows the fastKey attribute of the server answer (/library/sections/<id>/all?genre=<id>), because the legacy <section>/genre/<id> path no longer exists either.

2. Transcoding only worked on OpenATV 6.4

The Python 3 port left transcode() iterating the m3u8 master playlist as bytes: the # comment check compared an integer with a string (always true) and the URL formatting injected b'...' fragments, so the player received a corrupt URL on every Python 3 image. The fork decodes the playlist before parsing (works on py2 and py3), removes the long-dead 2010 X-Plex-Access-Key/Time/Code request signature, sends the X-Plex-Token both while prefetching and inside the final playback URL (the media player cannot send headers), and falls back to handing GStreamer the tokenized start.m3u8 if no media playlist can be parsed.

3. Robustness extras

• New per-server "Access Token (optional)" field (IP/DNS connections): paste an X-Plex-Token and it wins over any other token source. This lets the plugin work against servers that require authentication without going through plex.tv on the box.
• Playback URLs for raw streaming also carry the token now, and a missing token no longer crashes playback (url + None).
• doRequest() follows HTTP redirects (301/302/303/307/308, absolute and relative Location, up to 3 hops).
• Big libraries are fetched paginated (X-Plex-Container-Start/Size, 200 items per page) and merged, instead of relying on one giant answer.
• Parser guards for answers of modern servers (missing title2, poster downloads without a known token, unparseable payloads are logged).

Installation

Build the package (any OS, only Python needed):

py -3 tools/build_ipk.py        # Windows
python3 tools/build_ipk.py      # Linux/macOS

Copy the resulting dist/enigma2-plugin-extensions-dreamplex_*.ipk to the receiver and install it there:

scp dist/enigma2-plugin-extensions-dreamplex_*.ipk root@<box-ip>:/tmp/
ssh root@<box-ip>
opkg install /tmp/enigma2-plugin-extensions-dreamplex_*.ipk

Then restart the enigma2 GUI. The package uses the same name as the OpenATV feed package and a higher version, so it cleanly upgrades an existing feed installation and survives opkg upgrade runs (the feed would need to publish something newer than 2.3.1 to replace it; pin it with opkg flag hold enigma2-plugin-extensions-dreamplex if you want to be sure).

Works on OpenATV 6.4 (Python 2.7) and OpenATV 6.5/7.x (Python 3). The plugin needs the six module, which both image generations ship by default; if it is ever missing: opkg install python-six (6.4) or opkg install python3-six (6.5+).

How to get your X-Plex-Token

Only needed if your server requires authentication for local connections (Plex settings → Network → List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth is empty) and you connect by IP/DNS without plex.tv:

1. Open Plex Web in a browser, play any item of your server.
2. Click the ⋮ menu of the item → Get Info → View XML.
3. Look at the address bar of the opened tab: it ends with ...&X-Plex-Token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. That value is your token.
4. In DreamPlex: server settings → Access Token (optional) → enter it.

(Official article: support.plex.tv → "Finding an authentication token".)

Verification checklist after installing

• About screen shows version 2.3.1.
• Movies: All / Unwatched / Recently Added / On Deck list content; By Genre → pick a genre → movies of that genre appear; Search finds a known title.
• Shows: All → seasons → episodes; Recently Added lists the latest episodes and seasons.
• Music: artists → albums → tracks.
• Global "New" and "On Deck" rows still work.
• Playback Streamed plays.
• Playback Transcoded plays and a transcode session shows up on the PMS dashboard (both on a 6.4 and a 7.x box if you have them).
• With server auth hardened (empty no-auth list) and the Access Token field filled, all of the above still works.
• Logs if something fails: enable debugMode + writeDebugFile in the plugin settings → /tmp/dreamplex.log; GUI crashlogs live in /home/root/logs/.

Known limitations

• Plex servers with Secure connections: Required and no local-network exemption are not supported (the plugin talks plain http to the PMS; API redirects to https are followed, playback is not).
• The /library/sections/<id>/search?type=N endpoint is kept for the Search entries; on servers where it ever disappears the search entry would come back empty (the filter/browse entries are unaffected).
• Some boxes/networks cannot reach plex.tv reliably. plex.tv is a round-robin of AWS IPs; on some networks part of that pool is unreachable or the connection is flaky, so a plex.tv connection type can time out (the box's plain TLS to other hosts is fine — this is network reachability to plex.tv, not OpenSSL). The plugin now retries and reports the error instead of crashing. Reliable workaround: use an IP/DNS connection to the server with the Access Token field filled — direct HTTP to the PMS is unaffected.

Development

Offline test suite (no receiver, no PMS needed — a mock server is included):

py -3 -m unittest discover -s tests
py -3 tools/run_checks.py       # byte-compile + py2-syntax gate

Skins (big thanks to the skinners :-)

• Blockbuster — http://www.vuplus-support.org/wbb3/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=69568
• YouPlex-Blue/Green/Purple/Red, Plex_Experience — https://github.com/OpenViX/DreamPlexSkins

License and attribution

GPL-2 (see src/LICENSE.txt), like the original. DreamPlex was written by DonDavici (2012), ported to Python 3 and maintained by jbleyel and the oe-alliance / OpenViX teams, with parts based on hippojay's plexbmc. This fork only fixes compatibility with modern Plex Media Server releases; all credit for the plugin itself belongs to the original authors.

The modern-PMS fixes in this fork - root-cause analysis against a live server, the offline test harness, the fixes themselves and the on-receiver verification - were researched, implemented and tested by Claude (Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 model), directed by jrodzar. Every commit carries the corresponding Co-Authored-By trailer.