Plex Webhooks Announced

Plex Media Server announced yesterday that they’ve implemented a new “webhooks” feature that will enable users to send a JSON file to a given web address with information such as “play”, “pause”, “resume”, “stop” actions on a Plex client. So among other things, this would enable Plex to tell a home automation system like Vera that a movie just started, and then Vera could dim the lights, pull the shades closed, etc. Movie stops, lights back on, shades open. You get the idea.

I think there’s been some toying with similar applications in the past by some Vera owners for Kodi or XBMC, but nothing officially through Plex. Now that this is available, what will it take to get this working on Vera? Is there someway for Vera to receive the JSON info and trigger a switch based on info in the JSON? Any help would be appreciated.

NOTE: Plex does say this feature requires a Plex Pass.

I’m very interested in this also!

Interesting but I see this as only an additional option for control:

With the Receiver plugin or with the harmony plugin and Alexa, I am already able to do all of this:
Get alexa to turn on the home theatre and switch to plex in one command and all the lighting, window covering set to home theatre mode. When I turn off the receiver, everything goes back. All done within the vera with scenes.
Not sure what more one could do with this “webhooks”. Maybe more granularity to control when you hit play pause or stop? But since one can do that using Alexa or Harmony, we can attach vera scenes with these triggers. Any idea of what more one could do?

I am looking forward to being able to have the lights turn off in the movie room when I hit play in Plex. When I press stop, have the lights turn back on.

You can’t trigger Vera scenes/actions in pleg based on starting stopping play yet with the harmony plugin.

Only trigger them based on the harmony scene.

This as cmile points out can instead pin your actions to the playing state so leave the lights on until your media begins to play and back on when you finish etc

I think for me I’d have the blinds close when I start the harmony “plex scene” but keep the lights until the media begins.

[quote=“Chrisfraser05, post:5, topic:195393”]You can’t trigger Vera scenes/actions in pleg based on starting stopping play yet with the harmony plugin.

Only trigger them based on the harmony scene.

This as cmile points out can instead pin your actions to the playing state so leave the lights on until your media begins to play and back on when you finish etc[/quote]

Actually I am doing that albeit not using PLEG but just a simple scene. I set the harmony activity change as a trigger and am able to close curtains, turn off lights, set volumes on SONOS etc… It is not instant. It takes up to 3 sec due to the plugin polling interval but it isn’t bad at all.

Yes you can do it based on the harmony scene, I’ve been doing that for a long time.

It’s the playing state that makes the difference.

Bump…

Has anyone progressed with this Plex integration??

Cheers,
Josh

Has anyone figured out a way to use Plex Webhooks feature with Vera?

I haven’t ended up doing anything with it directly, but I know that the folks at Home Assistant have had some luck. I’ve been running Home Assistant parallel with Vera. HA can control Vera and has a lot more integrations with other services. So in theory you could setup HA, connect it to Plex webhooks and do whatever automations you want from there. Here’s a couple of threads discussing it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/9nm7th/080_lovelace_updates_webhooks_trådfri_switches/e7om0tj/