PyPlexer

Browse and play the video, music and photo libraries managed by your Plex Media Server from inside Kodi.

PyPlexer is not an official Plex add-on. It is not supported or endorsed by Plex.

• Requirements
• First run
• What you get
• Context menus
• Settings
• Adding Plex media to the Kodi library
• Plex Companion
• Up Next
• TraktToKodi

Requirements

Kodi	21 (Omega) or newer
Server	Plex Media Server, reachable over the network
Account	Optional — a myPlex account is only needed for shared libraries, Plex Home users and access from outside your network

PyPlexer pulls in script.module.requests, script.module.pyxbmct and script.module.infotagger; Kodi installs them for you.

First run

In most cases there is nothing to configure. PyPlexer discovers servers on the local network over GDM and lists their libraries straight away.

If your server is not found:

1. Open Settings → Server
2. Set Server Discovery to Manual
3. Fill in Primary Server Address and Port Number (default 32400)

To reach libraries shared with you, switch Plex Home users, or connect from outside your network, sign in through Settings → Server → Manage myPlex. You can sign in with your credentials or with a PIN shown on screen.

With several servers available, Settings → Server → Select master server... picks the one used for myPlex Queue.

What you get

Libraries — Movies, TV shows, music and photos, presented through the Plex section views you already know: All, Unwatched, Continue Watching, On Deck, Recently Added, Recently Released, Recently Viewed, By Collection, By Genre, By Year, By Decade, By Director, By Starring Actor, By Country, By Content Rating, By Rating, By Resolution, By First Letter, By Folder, and per-section search.

Multiple servers — Every discovered and shared server appears on the main menu. Combined Sections merges the same content type across all of them into one listing, and the all-servers rows (Recently Added, On Deck, search) span every server at once.

Main menu entries. Everything below the library sections can be hidden in Settings → Look and Feel, and several entries only appear once you are signed in to myPlex.

Entry	What it does	Shown when
Combined Sections	One listing per content type, merged across servers	At least one section is listed
Playlists	Playlists stored on a server	Signed in to myPlex
PyPlexer Playlist	Builds a playlist from criteria you pick	Signed in to myPlex
myPlex Queue	Your myPlex watch later queue	Signed in to myPlex
Channels	Plex channels installed on a server	Always
Plex Online	Browse and install Plex channels	Always
Widgets	Paths intended for skin home-screen widgets	Always
Switch User	Change Plex Home user	Plex Home is enabled
Sign In / Sign Out	myPlex account	Always
Detect Servers	Re-runs discovery	Always
Manage Servers	Status, master server, certificate verification, custom access urls	Always
Clear Caches	Drops everything PyPlexer has cached	Caching is enabled

Channels, Plex Online, Widgets and Playlists are per-server entries. By default they only carry the server's name when more than one server is present; set Server name prefix on the main menu to Always to label them regardless.

Playback — Direct play from local, SMB or AFP paths when the file is reachable, falling back to streaming from the server. Watched state and progress are reported back to Plex as you watch, so a resume point set in Kodi is there on your phone.

Better quality — Before playback starts PyPlexer checks the other versions of the title and offers the better ones in a dialog. It looks at the versions of the item itself, at copies held as their own item elsewhere on the same server - a Movies 4K library next to Movies - and, if you let it, at the other servers of your account. Movies are matched by their Plex guid and, for libraries scanned with different agents, by title and year; episodes by their guid and otherwise through their show, season and episode number. The search runs in parallel with a time limit, and the dialog only appears when the gain is actually visible.

Transcoding — One always-on profile plus two optional ones, each with its own quality, subtitle size and audio boost. When more than one profile is enabled PyPlexer asks which to use. Transcoding can also be triggered automatically for HEVC, for anything above 1080p, or for anything above 8-bit.

Extras — Skip-intro prompt driven by Plex's intro markers, song lyrics via Plex's LyricFind integration, Up Next support for automatic next-episode playback, a Plex Companion receiver so Plex apps can control Kodi, and Wake On LAN for up to eleven servers.

Context menus

Inside PyPlexer listings — Refresh, Go to (jumps to the parent season or show), Add to playlist, Delete from playlist, Delete playlist, Mark as watched / unwatched, Subtitles, Audio, Update library, and Delete. Delete is hidden unless Show the 'Delete' context menu is enabled, and the whole set can be suppressed with Skip Context Menus — both in Settings → Look and Feel.

On library and widget items — When Plex media has been scraped into the Kodi library, a PyPlexer submenu adds Transcoding, Mark as watched and Mark as unwatched, so watched state set in Kodi reaches the server. On home-screen widgets backed by PyPlexer, the submenu provides Open folder to open the widget's PyPlexer source. On TMDb Helper movie and TV-show widgets it also adds Add to Plex Watchlist and Remove from Plex Watchlist. The Watchlist actions resolve the item's TMDb/IMDb/TVDb id, then update the Watchlist of the Plex account signed into PyPlexer.

Settings

Category	Covers
Server	Discovery, manual address, HTTPS, myPlex, master server, Wake On LAN
Playback	Stream source, audio/subtitle selection, DVD, SMB overrides, intro skipping, lyrics, transcoding, better quality search
Look and Feel	Menus shown, season flattening, episode sorting, server name prefixes, Recently Added counts, context menus, Fanart.tv thumbs
Kodi Library	Which sections are exported to the Kodi library
Up Next	Up Next integration and its notification encoding
Companion Receiver	The Plex Companion listener and Kodi's web server credentials
Advanced	Playback monitor, artwork resolution, metadata and media flag skipping
Cache	Server and data cache toggles and TTLs, plus Clear Caches
Debug	Log level, log redaction, skip-intro dialog preview

A few worth knowing about:

• Stream from PMS (Playback) — Auto plays the file directly when Kodi can reach the path and streams otherwise. Force streaming with http, or point PyPlexer at your own share with smb / AFP.
• Audio and subtitle selector (Playback) — Plex Control applies the track selection made in Plex; Kodi Control leaves Kodi's own preferences alone; Never show subtitles forces them off.
• Search for a better quality before playback (Playback) — compares the versions of the title and asks which one to play when a better one exists. Closing that dialog with Back or the X cancels playback. Include other servers in the search also asks the other servers of your account, and Maximum search time caps how long that may take. Always show the version dialog asks whenever more than one version exists, even when none of them is better - useful to check that the search is working.
• Flatten TV Shows (Look and Feel) — Off, If only one season, or All seasons.
• Episode sort method (Look and Feel) — Kodi sorts by season and episode, Plex keeps the order the server sends.
• Prefer external artwork and TMDb fanart (Look and Feel) — uses localized wide artwork, portrait posters, transparent title logos and up to five TMDb backdrops for movies and TV shows. For thumbs, posters and clearlogos, the order is Fanart.tv in the preferred language, Fanart.tv in English, TMDb in the preferred language, TMDb in English, and finally Plex. Fanart.tv requires a personal API key. The TMDb API key or Read Access Token is optional; without it the TMDb step is skipped. On Fanart.tv the image with the most likes in the requested language wins; TMDb chooses the best-rated matching backdrop, poster or logo. auto uses Kodi's language, while a two-letter code such as de or en overrides it. API errors advance to the next fallback and results are cached for seven days. Thumbs are exposed as Kodi landscape artwork; portrait views use the resolved external poster. Fanart uses only the five best-rated, language-neutral TMDb wallpapers, with the Plex background as fallback. They are exposed as Kodi fanart, fanart1, through fanart4. Plex listings are loaded server-side in pages of at most 100 entries, including libraries, collections, seasons, episodes, search results and channels. Watchlist and Discover keep their native provider behavior. Lists of up to 20 titles resolve missing artwork immediately; larger pages open from cache without waiting for external APIs. PyPlexer's service fills missing artwork in the background and refreshes an open PyPlexer list once the queue is complete.
• Server name prefix on the main menu (Look and Feel) — Default adds the server name only when more than one server is present, Always adds it even with a single server.
• Data Cache TTL (Cache) — how long listings are reused before PyPlexer asks the server again. Lower it if changes made in Plex take too long to appear.

Adding Plex media to the Kodi library

PyPlexer can feed the Kodi video library so Plex content sits alongside your local media and is visible to skins and other add-ons. Scraped items lose most Plex-specific behaviour, so PyPlexer's own listings remain the richer way to browse.

Add a video source pointing at one of these paths:

Movies — plugin://plugin.video.pyplexer/library/movies/

• Choose information provider: Local information only
• Movies are in separate folders that match the movie title: disabled
• Scan recursively: disabled

TV Shows — plugin://plugin.video.pyplexer/library/tvshows/

• Choose information provider: Local information only
• Selected folder contains a single TV show: disabled

Follow the Adding video sources wiki page, using the plugin:// path above in place of steps 4–5 and choosing Local information only at step 9.

Choose which sections are exported with Settings → Kodi Library → Select sections to include in library scans; Reset selected sections clears the choice.

Plex Companion

The companion receiver lets Plex apps on your phone, tablet or desktop see Kodi as a playback target and control it.

Marked experimental in the settings. Changes to these settings need a Kodi restart to take effect.

1. Enable Kodi's web server: Settings → Services → Control → Allow remote control via HTTP
2. In Settings → Companion Receiver, set Enabled
3. Enter the same Username, Password and web server Port you set in step 1
4. Optionally change the Device Name (default Kodi-PyPlexer) and the listener Port (default 3005)
5. Restart Kodi

Kodi then appears as a player in your Plex apps while the service is running.

TMDb Helper

resources/tmdbhelper/pyplexer.json is a ready made player for The Movie Database Helper. Copy it to

userdata/addon_data/plugin.video.themoviedb.helper/players/pyplexer.json

restart Kodi, and pick PyPlexer as the player - not PyPlexer (Search), which is the manual search and knows nothing about the year. TMDb Helper remembers the player chosen for an item, so an item that was played with the search entry before keeps using it until the default is cleared.

There is no fallback from the precise lookup to the search: a film the lookup does not find is not played, rather than the wrong film being offered.

PyPlexer.search -> Search: query=... year=... -> exact lookup in kodi.log shows what the player handed over. A line saying plain lookup means no year arrived and the search cannot tell the films of that name apart.

The player hands the title over together with the data it already knows - year for a film, showtitle, season and episode for an episode - and PyPlexer resolves that to a single item instead of returning everything Plex' full text search finds for the word.

TMDb Helper movie and TV-show widgets also expose PyPlexer → Add to Plex Watchlist and PyPlexer → Remove from Plex Watchlist in Kodi's context menu. Each action performs the selected operation for the focused title and reports whether it was added, removed or was already present. The actions are available on home-screen widgets, in Arctic Fuse 3 search results, and in its video information dialog.

A film only counts as a match when its title matches exactly - checked against the library title, the original title and the sort title - and its year fits. A film of the same name from another year is a different film and is left out, even when that means nothing is returned; only when no item carries the requested year is a difference of one year accepted, because regions release a film a year apart. Every copy of the right film is returned - a Full HD and a 4K item are two things to choose from - with the better quality first.

Without a year the search stays as broad as it always was - the add-on's own search needs that - and only the order changes: exact title matches first, then newest first.

Up Next

With Up Next installed, PyPlexer offers the next episode as one finishes.

Enable it in Settings → Up Next. If Up Next is not installed the settings screen offers to install it; if it is installed but disabled, PyPlexer offers to enable it. Notification encoding (hex or base64) only needs changing if episode data does not reach Up Next.

TraktToKodi

PyPlexer pairs with the TraktToKodi browser extension to play a title from Trakt.tv straight on your Kodi box. Set the Add-on ID in your TraktToKodi profile to plugin.video.pyplexer.

• Chrome: Chrome Web Store · source
• Firefox: AMO Gallery · source