Because of the scarce information on the subject, another blogpost in English. This blogpost is a bit different from the rest, because it’s not really web related. It’s about Plex, my mediacenter software of use in my house. I own a Mac Mini and a big computerscreen (so no TV), and I use Plex (version 9) to manage and watch my media. It works really well and I can navigate everything with my iPad or Apple’s ridiculously small remote (i’ve lost that thing in the couch too many times). It’s so great to be able to watch whatever you want, whenever you want, without commercials. And with apps like Tv Shows 2 I can automate downloads and really never have to leave Plex.

 

 

The downside of this setup is that downloaded content can get stale.. it’s hard to fill an entire evening with all (fresh) downloaded content so I got myself an Elgato EyeTV. The setup and quality is very good and worth the money, but EyeTV doesn’t have a plugin for Plex, so I would have to leave my trusted interface and get a mouse to actually WATCH the tv. So i’ve figured out a way to easily get EyeTv working within Plex 9.

 

EyeTV Live plugin

This simple Plex 9 plugin created by Shirk is still in an alpha stage, but works really well nontheless.

 

 
Get theEyeTVLive Bundle and put it in the Plex 9 pluginsfolder (~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/plugins). If all is well you can get the rest set up by following the steps on this page.

 

Easy Acces

When you’ve got the plugin working, you still have to get through an annoying amount of sub-menu’s though… so i’ve created a copy of Plex’s standard skin and added a ‘Live Tv’ button. Just download the Plex skin and put it in the Plex skins folder, located here: ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/skin. Then select the skin in Plex’s preference menu.

 

Custom themes

If you have a custom theme installed (like Jeroen‘s fantastic reFocus), just open the file 720/home.xml (or in reFocus’s case ‘HomeMenu.xml’ and look for xmlnodes that look like this: [item id="5"].

 

Change an item which you don’t really need (like a weather button) by just changing these nodes:

• [label] Live TV [/label]
• [visible]true[/visible]
• [onclick]ActivateWindow(10024,http://127.0.0.1:32400/video/eyetv-live/list/channel/,return)[/onclick]

 

Some tips

There are some settings to take into account; auto launch EyeTv when starting up your Mac and don’t show the video-window (both are in EyeTv 3′s general settings). In Plex, hide the movie-plugin and music-plugin buttons in the Plex preferences.

 

If you have any more tips, i’d love to hear them! drop ‘em in the comments! Good Luck tweaking!