Giant Bomb Plex Channel

@mrpibb this appears to be fixed for me, thanks for looking into it.

Still can't play premium videos on my Amazon Fire TV. @razorramen Did it start working for you automatically, or did you have to do anything in particular?

I can't get any videos working through Plex on Amazon Fire TV, even using the code.

Attempting to use plex to get giantbomb videos up on a chromecast, no luck.

Edit. An hour later, I got it working. I should write up some documentation, becuase I had a heck of a time getting this to run.

@dbones80: Didn't change anything, it just started working. Checked today and it was still working.

It was working, it has now died. And when I try to open it via plex, it says that the channel isn't responding.

I just started using Plex because I got a chromecast, and I can't even play the videos in the plex player never mind through chromecast.

@theegravedigger:

how did you...having issues

I'm not able to find where to add the link key (giantbomb.com/plex) anymore, and as a result, I can't see any subscriber videos.

Am I just missing it? There is no "settings" gear within the Giant Bomb channel anymore.

Does the Plex channel support sync? Right now I use Plex for basically everything, even on my phone & tablet, but I use GB Video Buddy since it lets me download videos ahead of time.

@pyronite: I'm experiencing the same problem. Have you had any luck?

No luck! Hoping someone who knows better than I do comes in and knows the answer to (or is able to fix) the issue.

I was wondering the same thing ... :(

Having the same issue. @mrpibb or @rorie any idea if/when this will be fixed?

@razorramen: Hmm, I'm not sure. I know @alexisg uses Plex, or has in the past, so he should hopefully be able to look into this? Or maybe @frobie?

Just wanted to chime in that the settings button is gone for me as well in the GB plex channel. Hope this gets fixed soon.

Same for me

Yup, same here.

I'm guessing that the plex app's audience is way too small to get any real effort from the GB guys.

Is there a way to maybe open source the app? @alexisg?

The plex app is used just as much as the website on my end, would love to see it get some continued love :)

Im with you guano ... don't want to airplay things when I don't need to.

No settings option for me either.

No subscriber videos and no settings here either

I'll see if we can get some time for an engineer to look into this next week.

Here are my findings so far:

Plex updated the way they pull down videos. Instead of grabbing it from the API, they are grabbing the meta data from our site's video pages. In this update, they also removed the link code from the plugin repository.

So current workaround is to log into GiantBomb with your subscription account using the same browser that you're running the Plex Media Server. This allows Plex to grab the meta data of premium videos.

I'll be working on getting Plex to accept direct video feeds rather than hitting up our site pages for it.

That's not working for me, anyone else?
There's also no way for me to use a browser on the couch. I use my smart-TV's plex client to access the plex server.

Plex changed this without consulting or notifying us. (This happened in April: https://github.com/plexinc-plugins/GiantBomb.bundle/pull/9) @frobie is trying to work on a fix, but it's ultimately up to them.

Update #2:

The fix is in, almost. Sent a pull request to Plex to merge in the fix: https://github.com/plexinc-plugins/GiantBomb.bundle/pull/10

When they do the merge, it should update the GiantBomb channel in everyone's Plex account.

To access the premium videos, you'll have to enter your API Key (from http://www.giantbomb.com/api/) via the cog wheel seen on the channel list page or in the upper right corner of the screen when in the channel.

As part of this fix:

- Added a 'next page' button to paginate through categories with more than 100 videos

- Fixed the endurance run lists to show the correct videos

- Added endurance-like runs to the endurance run list: Chrono Trigger, Break Brad: Demon's Souls, Load Our Last Soulds, Metal Gear Scanlon, Bradley May Cry

@frobie: That's fantastic! Thanks for looking in to it

Thank ya @frobie!

@frobie: Good job @frobie!

How long does it usually take for the pull requests to go through?

A week or so?

Edit: Looks like the pull request just went through, and everything's working fine! Thanks @frobie

Looks like it was merged 3 hours ago. Is it instantly available via an update?

edit: Since I can see Chrono Trigger, the update must be in I guess..

Does that mean it should work now? I installed it just now for the first time so I can't tell if there is any difference but it doesn't work for me. With the API key entered nothing plays. Without it atleast the non subscriber stuff works.

edit2: ok the problem seems to be that you call ApiKey() to form the hd video link in ServiceCode.pys and maybe it's not accessible from there? Python isn't my strong suit. I got it to work by replacing the function call with my api key hard coded.

edit3: Ugh.. the problem keeps being reintroduced by automatic "updates". Any chance you have a proper solution to this @frobie? Thanks for looking at this btw.
And why is it working for you @guanophobic, are you on Windows? I'm running the plexserver on FreeNAS which is FreeBSD based if that makes a difference.

@tregota: yeah I can confirm that the same thing fixed the problem for me too. Seems like the ApiKey() call is the culprit.

Just a bit more context for other folks looking to fix things in the meantime, head to your plex media server plugins folder and under:

Giant Bomb.bundle\Contents\Services\URL\GiantBomb\ServiceCode.pys

Fire up the ole text editor and on line 59 near the bottom, replace the ApiKey() call with your API key. Since it's just hard coding the string into the query, just add it like so:

... + '&api_key=yourapikeyhere'

You can drop the + after the quotation mark because there's nothing else afterward to add.

Note that updates to the plugin will overwrite this fix, but the update should fix this problem anyway! :)

... + '&api_key=yourapikeyhere'

Somehow that didn't work for me, premium videos still don't show up. Am I doing something wrong?

For those having issues still, are you using your api key from http://www.giantbomb.com/api/ or were you still trying to use the key from http://www.giantbomb.com/plex ?

any news on a fix for this? everything seems to be working except for live streams (This channel is not responding)

Yes, the error is because ApiKey isn't available in ServiceCode.pys:

File "C:\Users\Evan\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Plug-ins\Giant Bomb.bundle\Contents\Services\URL\GiantBomb\ServiceCode.pys", line 62, in PlayVideo

return IndirectResponse(VideoClipObject, key=video['high_url'])

NameError: global name 'ApiKey' is not defined

(The 'apiKey' key in the Prefs interface isn't available either thanks to the sandboxing stuff.)

I fixed this by creating a regex to extract the api_key param from the URL that was getting passed to PlayVideo to start with. Simple enough. I also modified the regex in ServiceInfo.plist to handle https URLs when it's doing the service lookups, because I saw a couple of errors relating to how it couldn't find a service for them whenever they were encountered.

Just submitted a PR, hopefully it gets merged soon: https://github.com/plexinc-plugins/GiantBomb.bundle/pull/11

Once it is, update your channels and it should start working. I was unable to play any video that the API returned an HD resource for (i.e. when I did the search using my API key). In my local sandbox, after changing the stuff I put in the PR, I was able to play any video I tried. I'm watching the Mario Party Party 2 video right now on my ATV via PlexConnect, for instance.

@3van: Whatever you did, Live streams are working again !!, watching Patrick's stream right now on my ROKU. Many thanks

@r3d_zombie: you're welcome! Looks like they merged my request 3 hours ago, and apparently that means it's live in the release channel since it's working for you now.

For everyone else: if you click the "check for updates" button in the Channels section of Plex, you should get the changes I made to get everything working. If you manually modified any of the Python code (to hardcode in your API key, for instance), you might need to uninstall and then re-install the plugin.

While I'm at it (and apparently have someone willing to merge my changes into the Plex repos), is there anything else anyone's having problems with or would like to see added/changed?

@frobie and @rorie: what's the official stance on using the 'validate' resource in the API? It'd be a whole lot better user experience to enter a simple link code rather than their entire API key, especially if they're doing so on something without a keyboard.

I'd like to change the plugin back to asking for a link code (from http://giantbomb.com/plex). I think I see what was going wrong before when people were having to re-link for every video. Do these link codes expire after a certain number of accesses or a period of time? The one issue I can think of is that there's no way to have a callback to transform stuff when the user preferences get saved. Ideally, I'd do the link code->API key resolution there (and return an error if I didn't get a key in the response) and persist the actual API key... but the best it appears I can do currently is to do the lookup the next time a user goes into the plugin.

I'm asking over at the Plex dev forums to see if there's a way to do this when it gets saved.

edit: I found a list of undocumented stuff in the plugin framework that someone put together, and it reveals that PMS will call a function you define with a route of '/ValidatePrefs' whenever a user wants to save preferences... so that's awesome and will solve this. Now I just want to know if it's cool to use the whole link code method.

Also, I'm going to change the route decorators to allow PlexSync to work, since I saw that mentioned earlier in this thread.

not working at all on today's UPF (This channel is not responding)

@3van: Agreed on this idea. We want to use validation tokens so you can use oauth methods with authenticator apps, potentially. This is among many improvements we're trying to complete for the new API release.

@r3d_zombie: Taking a look.

Were any changes made recently? Yesterday morning, everything was working fine. Last night (by around 11pm EST) I started to get "cannot connect to channel" errors that are persisting into today.

@ascagnel: The XBMC add-on stopped working for me yesterday too. They also had (possibly still have) problems with the RSS feeds. Could be related.

Probably the same issue as reported here: http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/xbmc-openelec-addon-problem-1500604/

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/chats/?api_key=????? is responding with a 404

I was able to get the plugin working again by making the following changes to \Plex Media Server\Plug-ins\Giant Bomb.bundle\Contents\Code\__init__.py

Look for "response = JSON.ObjectFromURL(API_PATH + '/chats/?api_key=' + ApiKey() + '&format=json')" and put a # sign in front of each line going down to the second ")" like link below.

http://pastebin.com/J2rF9ANW

Once the change is made you will need to restart your Plex Server for changes to take effect.

Live Streams will not work till this is fixed.

Once we get word this is fixed you can remove the # from each line so it should look like link below.

http://pastebin.com/SBxVpYqe

This worked for me.

Thanks for this, working again.

Yeah, the /chats resource is returning a 404 currently for some reason.

I'm writing a patch to make the channel handle this failure more gracefully so this won't be an issue, and I'll put in a PR tonight.

Just as it was before, you might have to delete and re-install the plugin to get the "official" fixed build if you've made any local modifications to any of the plugin files. I'll update here when it gets pushed.