Plex Rich Presence 2.0

[Ombrelin]

Hello everyone,

I'm starting to plan the project of remaking the Plex Rich Presence app. I'm making this post to announce the planned features, which were suggested by the users, but also because I still have some things I still haven't decided.

Tech Stack

• Runtime & Language : .NET 6 & C# 10
• Library for discord rich presence : Discord Game SDK
• Library for PLEX : PLEX API

The goal will be to have a code base which is tested and of quality (leveraging IoC, Clean Code...)

Planned features

• Ability to choose one server among the servers available on the PLEX account (Mutliple PLEX servers #9)
• Support costumization (with an interactive UI) of what is displayed in the rich presence caption (Show Album Titles #60, User-templated text for rich presence caption #43 )
• Support displaying image to put track / album / artist image in the rich presence (thanks to Discord Game SDK) (Change Image dynamically #55 )
• Usage of PLEX Websockets API to enable realtime (instead of polling) session status and allow any user of the server (not just owner) to use the app (Detect Shared Servers #40, [Enhancement] Support managed users #68 )
• Optionaly choose device to track activity from (Option to choose specific device "machine_id" only. #59, Multiple Streams from Single User #6 )
• CLI Version (CLI Version #56)

Planned bug fixes

• Rich presence bugger when no track id in meta-data (Partial Rich Presence Display #58 )
• Handle loss of connection to the server ([Enhancement] Attempt reconnects if Plex Server is restarting/down #63 )

Questioning

I'm strongly hesitating on one point of the tech stack : Which UI framework to use ?
.NET has two frameworks for cross-plateform UI development : Avalonia and .NET MAUI.

Each have their advantages and drawbacks, what do you think ?

Avalonia

• Fairly mature
• Less polished Tray Icon API
• Cross platform across Windows, Mac and Linux
• Not an official framework
• Constant UI across platform (drawn controls using Skia)

MAUI

• Not in GA yet
• More polished Tray Icon API
• Cross platform across Windows and Mac for desktop, no Linux
• Official framework maintained by Microsoft
• Use platform-native UI, mapping to native controls

[darovic]

MAUI looks like it might be the way to go. Allegedly, there is Linux support provided by the community, but I can't see any links (source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/supported-platforms). I'll do some research and get back to you.

[Ombrelin]

Yes you're right, I should have written "no official linux support from microsoft". The current community project for Linux support (leveraging GtkSharp), is the following : https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux) but the state of the "Status" page of the wiki does not give any info on whether it's usable at the time.

[itslino]

I'd love to be able to display art of music that I'm listening to, there's another project that got images to load up for TV Shows and Movies using a TMDB api key.

https://github.com/EthanC/Perplex

The only thing I noticed is that the sessions crashed but its probably cause how early its in development. But maybe that could be one approach?

[itslino]

I'm not sure honestly, I do know that someone made a mod where you can fetch music album art from Tatulli but it wouldn't work if the images were pulled locally in my Tautulli. You'd need a public Tautulli otherwise it showed the corrupted image file.

Maybe this is why he chose to use to source images from a public web source??

You can see the comments of those who modified the existing project on here.
https://pythonrepo.com/repo/EthanC-Perplex

[itslino]

Here's the dev's explanation
EthanC/Perplex#4

[Ombrelin]

Okay thank you for the material ! I will look into it.
But my first guess is that if I manage to fetch the data directly from the plex server (and not tautulli) which in any case must be accessible from the user computer for the app to work, that will not cause the problem you're talking about.
Anyway I'll think about it and keep you posted about my conslusion, thank you for your interest

[darovic]

Given Plex's work integrating Tidal into Plexamp, I suspect letting plex do the heavy lifting will be sufficient for @itslino's needs and saves the hassle of implementing and maintaining a custom scraping strategy.

(And I haven't forgotten to go digging into the linux support for MAUI, I just haven't had the time T.T)

[Ombrelin]

Haha no problem we have all the the time we want, no pressure !

[Jenni32222]

Great app! Can't wait for V2!

[stewieboo]

Really excited! Been using the program since last year. Honestly, I came here to check if there's a way to display posters on my Discord status. Well, it seems like you're already working on it. Mad respect!

[MargeyShah]

I'd love to contribute as well! Also, is there a possibility to have Tidal support? I know PMS doesn't report something being played when in use, but wasn't sure if this info could be pulled when using PlexAmp.

[Ombrelin]

Hello,
I don't use Tidal, but IIRC, it has already has been request in issue. I'd love to integrate it, but I would require help from someone who knows and uses Tidal. Maybe they offer an API of some sort we could work with ?

[MargeyShah]

I did not catch this message. There is no official API but there are some unofficial ones on GitHub.

[Ombrelin]

Hello,
I had time to put some progress in this project, and while I'm not finished yet I'd like to keep you guys up to date on what I've done yet.
First, after dabbling a bit with MAUI, I deemed that its tooling is not yet mature (can't run on Rider yet), and the Linux support is nowhere from ready. I don't want to lock out Linux users (I've myself, recently switched to Ubuntu on my main computer). Hence I selected Avalonia for this project, with this library to feature a nice looking fluent v2 UI.

The UI is well under way, I'm working on implementing the Plex notifications correctly, especially to handle non-owner users.
Here are some screen shots of the current (heavily WIP) UI :

Hope you like it, I'm counting on releasing v2 in September if everything goes as planned.

[Ombrelin]

I'm very close to releasing a 2.0-beta, I'm just checking last details to correclty setup CI, it will be released next week.

[apoapostolov]

What we can expect in it?

[Ombrelin]

I just updated the roadmap : https://github.com/Ombrelin/plex-rich-presence/wiki/Roadmap

[Ombrelin]

The 2.0 version is released !
Hope you will like it, and don't hesitate to give feedback, especially for non server owner users, because I couldn't thoroughly manually test it