Plex Media Center

Hello again, myPlexians! (myPlexers? myPlexites? Hmm…) Andre here again, back from working hard in the myPlex fields with a juicy harvest. As part of our ongoing efforts to make adding videos to your queue as easy as possible, we have set up a newer, friendlier way. Every myPlex queue now has an email address. To find out what your queue’s email address is, just visit the queue help page. The email address on that page is unique, and adds videos only to your queue. Keep it to yourself, since anyone can add videos to your queue if they know that address.

How is this email address useful to me, you ask? Well, it’s actually pretty cool. On certain types of mobile devices that are pretty popular nowadays, like iPhones, and iPads, and those Android thingies, it’s hard to use bookmarklets. Setting them up is a pain, finding them to use them is a pain, and it’s pretty much just a pain all around. What those convenient and tiny computers all share, though, is a button that lets you email a link to the page or video. That button is now the beautiful integration point for your myPlex Queue! Just email the link to your queue’s email address, and you’ll be able to watch the video later from the comfort of your very own Plex.

To make things even easier, you can add your queue’s email address to your address book, with a name like “myPlex Queue”. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to remember (or copy and paste) your queue’s email address whenever you want to queue an item over email. Now that you can email items to your queue, it’s easier than it’s ever been to queue up videos to watch later on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and any other device that supports myPlex.

Since those devices all put the name of the video in the subject line and a link to the webpage in the body, myPlex tries to take the title from the subject and the link from the body of the email. We didn’t want to limit you, though, so we’ll also look for URLs anywhere in the email subject or body. In fact, you can even queue a few URLs at once by sending all of them in a single email. We’ll add each one to your queue.

We hope you enjoy the new feature, and we’ll keep you posted as we continue working hard to add more. As always, we love to hear how your feedback as you use myPlex to watch your media when and where you want it.

Hi Guys! André here, taking a break from working on myPlex to give you an update on how it’s going. Since we launched almost two weeks ago, myPlex has gotten off to a very rousing start. Sophisticated and good-looking Plex users (that’s all of you) have been queueing videos from all over the internet to watch later in one of the many Plex clients.

Enterprising Plex users have even created Chrome and Safari extensions to allow queueing videos directly. Those clever coders have already figured out the HTTP requests to add an item to your myPlex queue. But we want everyone to be able to add to their queues as easily as possible.

So, I thought this would be a good time to explain how those requests work. Armed with this information, you will be able to add “Plex It!” functionality to any program or script that can make HTTP requests. If you’re not the kind of person who “adds functionality to any program or script”, I suggest instead that you bask warmly in the knowledge that there will soon be even more ways to add videos to your myPlex queue.

Anyway, back to adding videos to the queue. Once you have a myPlex account, you only need one thing to queue a video: the URL. As long as you give myPlex the URL of the page with the video on it, we will handle the rest of the work. While not every website with videos works yet, rest assured that we are busily working to expand myPlex to encompass all videos, everywhere.

All requests to myPlex must be made over HTTPS, and must be authenticated. The easiest way to authenticate is to just use HTTP Basic Authentication with your myPlex username and password. Once you have an account and a URL, though, adding a queue item is very easy. How easy, you ask? Let me show you with curl.

$ curl -i -u "username:PASSWORD" \
    --data-urlencode 'url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCSBoOcGFFE' \
    https://my.plexapp.com/queue/items  
HTTP/1.1 200 OK 

That’s it! Next time you load up Plex on your TV or mobile-handheld-thingy-of-choice, you will be presented with the chance to find out exactly how reality hits you, bro.

That’s all for now, but if you’re writing an application or client that integrates with myPlex, stay tuned! I’ll be writing a followup post explaining how you can connect to a myPlex user’s account without storing their password.