PlexMonitor

python-script to monitor plex-activity, send iOS-Push-Notification and control Sonos plus Philips HUE

What it does:

The Cronjob runs every minute on the Pi / Synology and has no noticeable impact on performance.

It checks if there is an active Plex-Session. If yes, it logs the session (timestamp connected user, show/movie-title) and sends a push-notification to an iOS device using pushover.

If you are the user with the active session, the script reduces the brightness of your Philips HUE lightbulbs in the living-room and sets the Volume of the Sonos speaker in the living-room to zero.

If the script has already seen the active session it will not try to notify you (or control the lights/audio) again - until three hours have passed. Thus it will work again the next day, if i resume a show which i quit a day earlier after just having watched half of it.

What inside:

• The script itself is heavily based on the plexMon.py by Victor Wieczorek.
• The SoCo-Library controls the Sonos Speaker.
• Phue, a Python library for the Philips Hue system, is controlling the light.

Use:

Setup a cron with crontab:

This is a typical logfile-Entry if friends are watching

2014-09-19 15:23:11 Tony watches A Great Hollyday in Sweden

This is a Logfile-Entry with actions, if I have an active session

2014-09-20 16:43:31 JohnDow watches To Protect And Infect, Part 2
2014-09-20 16:43:32 Attempting to connect to the bridge...
2014-09-20 16:43:32 Using ip: 192.168.1.109
2014-09-20 16:43:32 Using username from config:     2f724e2f724e2f724e2f724e
2014-09-20 16:43:32 Sending SetVolume [(u'InstanceID', 0), (u'Channel', u'Master'), (u'DesiredVolume', 0)] to 192.168.1.105
2014-09-20 16:43:32 Starting new HTTP connection (1): 192.168.1.105
2014-09-20 16:43:32 Received status 200 from 192.168.1.105

Notes

• A plexpass-subscription to read the active sessions from the Plex-Server is required.
• The Pushover-App works fine, but will have a one-time-purchase after a brief trial-period
• The HUE-Bridge has to be manually paird on first run (hit the button on the bridge)
• I tried to pause the sonos-speaker but settled on the mute commando. I just wanted the living-room Speaker to be silent. But if i send him the pause-commando while he was part of a sonos zone, i would have been required to unjoin him beforehand, which is a bit tricky, because it can throw an exception if i would blindly send the unjoin-commando and the speaker is currently not in a zone. So i just mute him.