Android retro is achievable by downloading the apk and disabling updates.
I can barely imagine that only 2% use the trackt plugin.
Sure, if you only count active access of the frontend part, it might seem like almost no one is using it… once it is installed and configured, no one will ever return to the fronted part, unless they need to change the confiugration, would they?
This particualar plugin does its service in the background. So the question is how “2% of the users use plugins” is messured?! By the number of users that installed plugins? By the number of users that use the frontend of a plugin? Was it a survey? Or automaticly submitted user statistics, that many users keep disabled?
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I’ve been questioning the same thing.
The only plugin I regularly use is Trakt.
I have a couple of others but seldom use them.
The opt-out option doesn’t seem to cover a lot of stuff so I suspect Plex still gathers enough data to know how many users use channels no matter what your setting are.
Do you use trakt on multiple servers or for multiple users?
No. One Plex server and one user.
I also use it with an Emby server and Kodi to keep everything synced.
That is pretty much the plan, yes.
** caveat emptor: what you’ve described could end up taking many forms, so let’s not assume anything specific within that until we share more details.*
@elan, I appreciate you’re a busy bloke and I thank you for taking your time to respond to messages over the Christmas break when you could be with your family, but what I really, genuinely, don’t understand is why it’s taken this long, with this many complaints for you to produce that comment. I don’t get it. You’re a personable chap. You must know how this is coming across to people. But sometimes I get the feeling that asking you, or anyone else at Plex questions about “the future”, “the strategy” or any sort of roadmap at all, is genuinely like pulling teeth…or talking to a politician…you get the picture.
May I propose something here, and it is purely out of my love for Plex and me wanting to see it succeed and improve. How about you, or a member of your team, publish a high-level 12-month development roadmap every quarter or so identifying what you are trying to achieve. It’s not about “holding you to account” for things that you say you’re going to try and introduce by month ‘x’, but for whatever reason it slips or you can’t. But it’s so that you can say something like “Refreshed Roku interface” and then this incredibly valuable resource you have at your fingertips, can give you feedback on what’s wrong with the current one, features they’d like to see, or raise any concerns like “don’t change the current one, it’s ace!” or similar.
The biggest problem to me in this whole, forlorn, saga, is the lack of communication from the team. That’s it. People may have had a bit more patience if they believed they were being listened to, but it very often doesn’t come across that way. Even if you comment on a post, it’s still an effort to try and get a straight answer.
Please don’t take this disrespectfully.
Best,
P.S. Whilst I’ve got you here, I need to ask. What on earth made you choose to partner with Tidal? Spotify is a significantly better service that’s used considerably more widely than Tidal. Hell, I hadn’t even heard of it until you guys started using it. It would be SO awesome if you could integrate Spotify.
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Public released Development roadmap help who? Answer in two words, “the opposition”. It would be nice to know but for a business it’ s a crazy idea.
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Public released Development roadmap help who? Answer in two words, “the opposition”. It would be nice to know but for a business it’ s a crazy idea.
Happens literally all of the time in the IT industry. I work for a company that publishes a roadmap to clients and they love it and we’ve had no issues so far. Major companies like Microsoft, HP, Apple, Facebook etc. all have conferences where they literally tell their investors what they’re going to be trying to achieve in the coming months/year, what their outlook is, and then they broadcast it all over the world.
Having an idea of what you’d like to achieve is one thing; making it a reality is something totally different.
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Actually it’s never done infuse any harm.
They announce what features will be in the next update and that update doesn’t get released until all those features are implemented.
Also Emby (being as near to competition as Plex have) tend to do similar to a limited degree. Features are often mentioned in the forums and there are often comments from the devs saying they will be in release x, y or z.
I’m only saying…
I have long learned to live with how Plex prefer to do things.
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What I don’t like is if they do have to rewrite some of the new UI to get the old one back - improved,of course.
Then that might take again resources away from the core,the PMS.
I purchased PP because of streaming Brain.
And since then nothing happened.
If the stream switches from 2mbps to 4 mbps the sound is gone because it switches from stereo to dts for example. There should be a setting for having stereo the whole bandwidth.
I want User based bandwidth limits…etc
I don’t read nothing from those Core things.
I know it is wrong in this thread,but maybe @elan is reading it…
I reported those things with logs long ago…
Nothing happened accept new UI and online stuff…
Really frustrating…
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A point I raised in another thread.
The lack of love for the new UI is as old as the hills.
The whole idea of first pushing it to less popular clients and ignoring the complaints for 18 months.
Then push it to a really mainstream client.
Hit the sh*t storm and then have to revert multiple clients (that we were simply told at the time “we would get used to it”)
I really hope there was a lesson learned there If Plex sometime in the future decide to update the UI (beyond the current one after the revision) I really hope they push to a major client first to get a better indication of reaction.
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I hope there is no misunderstanding of what a Vision statement and or Mission statement with a"public" released Development Plan. At times they sound similar.
As for Apple they never release a public Development Plan, so I don’t know were you got that idea.
Plex Mission Statement or there part of:
https://www.plex.tv/about/careers/#
If Development plans are released a NDA would be norm for any Company.
Apple do, do one, and most of it is behind an NDA. However, they deliver a keynote which gives an overview of what they are looking to achieve over the next period of time. It’s called the World Wide Developer Conference. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/WWDC-Provides-Apple-s-Roadmap-for-2018-12985410.php
There is considerably more released at huge numbers of developer conferences etc. than a simple Mission Statement. You can actually go and watch Microsofts on the Internet and they go into a fair amount of detail on what they’re hoping to try and achieve in a given window and why.
As I said, many, many companies do this. Its actually more odd when companies don’t do it. I work in cyber security, and you can go to places like Blackhat, Infosec, and BSides and listen to companies talk about what they’re trying to achieve and the new products they’re releasing.
Of course, when it comes specifics, there’ll be an NDA signed, but if Plex made a statement like “refresh Roku interface” or “add other music streaming vendors”, that would hardly be cause for an NDA because they’re not stating how they’re going to achieve it.
It’s simply the “done thing” in this sector and it absolutely isn’t usually covered by NDAs. This is all going off the premise that Plex actually has a competitor, which it really doesn’t at the moment; as this thread evidences.
That’s not a Public Development Plan, developer conferences is such a watered down version of possible future direction. The Forum members are asking for specific direction plans. That will never happen.
Well it really is. Stating what areas you’re going to be concentrating on and why over the next 12 months is exactly that. I even said all of this in my initial post.
I then provided further clarity in my response to you with this:
So even if this isn’t what you would call “Public Development Plan”, it certainly is what those companies would call it and precisely what I was referring to in my comments.
I don’t speak for other forum members, I speak for myself, and this is exactly what I’ve been writing since my opening comments on the subject and they have all been more than clear about the sort of thing I’ve been stating. Regardless, I would wager that the majority of users on the forums would also be supportive about the kind of thing I’m proposing.
Emby right now is your best bet, for similar functionality
Few points I want to make to those who haven’t been around that long (and it looks like that’s the majority of you)
- Plex since it’s inception has come a LONG way. If you’ve used Plex Media Center and PHT you probably know what i’m talking about, or even just XBMC for that matter.
- A lot of the “basic features” you take for granted now, weren’t even available without tons of manual coding or extensive setup … if it was even possible, outside of Plex.
- If you’ve ever had to setup transcoding through scripts before, you know what a game changer Plex was when it came out on the scene.
- Sharing? Oh you think that’s always been something easily done? No.
- Plex Web wasn’t always available, and i’m sure most of you take that for granted now.
- Plex 2011-2014/2015 IMO were the Plex “haydays”
Plex was born from open source software, and was even open source itself at first … sorta … for a while. And even though the linux support was still new, it made my life 100x easier, so much so that I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when i found Plex.
When Plex first came out, it seriously changed my life. The amount of time I spent just writing scripts or setting things up just to watch a show on my phone … was a thing of the past. I think a lot of you take for granted all the features you have that are standard now, but I understand the unrest in the community.
Now with that said, I think the best part of Plex becoming popular was the wide range of client/device apps that were available. If you were around from the beginning you know how bad it was at first – i mean the samsung app you could only use locally unless you wanted to set it up based on IP address manually.
The worst part of Plex becoming so popular … is that it became so popular. Elan had great intentions, which I believe he still does, but I think the “corporate” side of things have been the cause of the downfall. Plex was originally putting out something that was completely changing the landscape and architecture for “HTPC”, and even after moving away from being open sourced, I still stuck with it because IT WORKED. If you’ve ever spent 6 hours trying to watch a 2 hour movie you know what I mean. And i’m a full time open source developer.
To those who are super upset about the new UI or changes … you should just be happy that Elan is even responding in this thread, that shows he does care.
Unfortunately though I do have to agree with almost everybody, in the fact that the past few years have only made Plex more sluggish, or made huge UI changes which were not necessary. Why try and fix something that’s not broken?
I think Plex has moved into a state now of having such a large following that they’ve been trying to find way to monetize it (outside of Plex Passes). And investors want returns on their investments, so they’re going to push anyway they have to in order to make that a reality.
I think the decision to remove Plugins was a BAD IDEA … even if only a small percent of people were using them … you’ve now completed closed off Plex so we’re basically at the mercy of Plex 100% now. I get that you want to add your own paid content to generate revenue, but now you’re telling us we’re SOL and maybe developers will have other options in the future… i doubt it.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t see all of this coming.
We’re now at the point where we’re just “manging” a Plex server … not running one, because you’re only running it IMO if you have some control over it … even if it’s an old antiquated plugin architecture.
Just look at the community around Plex in small things like what started out as PlexPy … developers want to build things on top of Plex … and they will if you let them … JUST like you did when you forked XBMC (yes I know plugins do not affect PlexPy).
IMO plugins failed because Plex did not do that good of a job in documenting or promoting them to draw interest from developers to build them. And even the ones now who did … are basically SOL. I don’t think there was ever any real intention from Plex to have a thriving 3rd party plugin community, especially once investors got involved.
The problem is that there isn’t really any good “open source business model”, so I understand moving to proprietary software, they have to be able to generate some kind of revenue to keep it going. Just look at what recently happened with event stream npm module. Without any kind of monetary incentive, open source projects become just that … a project, and when you move on to the next one that probably has something to do with making you money, that last project gets left behind.
You should all know by now when things become commercialized that it becomes about $$$ and not about what the product was a couple years, or even a month ago … or what it could be in a month. I mean … Plex STILL does not have any kind of Google Home support … but it has Amazon. Why? $$$$
I still <3 you Elan for changing my life, but I don’t think I want to hang around for the day when it comes that I have to watch ads before I can watch any of my own media. It was a SUPER fun ride while it lasted.
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Totally agree really.
The amount of hours I put in trying to get XBMC anywhere near Plex’s levels of functionality is time I’ll never get back and the main reason I’m not jumping up and down like others are, merely asking for better communication; especially with regard to “the way ahead”. Like you say, it changed from having to play and tinker for hours to get things even to stream, to just “download Plex, install a client app, login to both and watch”. Some of my users, like my parents, would have given up LONG ago if it was any more complicated than it already is (and it’s really not complicated).
Sure, mistakes have been made, but I’m glad to see @elan on here taking responsibility for the issues for, what I feel, is the first time on this specific issue. People value communication with the developers, and from what I can see, that’s the only thing Emby has over Plex at present (outside of the UI issue, obviously).
Some of the decisions have baffled me a bit, Google Home - like you say, and Tidal - as I mentioned earlier, cutting plugins rather than replacing them with a new-but-similar functionality, etc. and I’d like a bit more of an explanation surrounding those decisions, perhaps an open and frank discussion period with the senior management team, but it really does boil back down to communication again.
I did like your comment because there are some things we agree on. Also you seem attached, which is an emotion I rarely see towards software. 
Here we disagree.
There is also something I do not understand. You seem grateful, you want the Project to strive, but also you are angry at them because they are trying to stay afloat???
This is the way the world works. The bad idea may lay the way to make Plex actually profitable. If it’s profitable we ll win in the end.
Plex offers much more than it’s price tag, I am sure customer are willing to pay once more, if they know they are not the only one.
That is simply untrue. We got a lot of features, cool ones and a lot of fixes.
Why improve something if it works would be more exact, no?
I don’t think People use emby for other reason than the community. Plex was once cool, now Emby is cool.
The thing is, if you buy a lifetime account for emby, the money will be gone at some point as well. Then someone new will come, asking for another 120$ and makes enough to stay afloat for a few years.
Either that or we try to make one work for the long term.
Also kind of the reason I hope Plex will eventually bring something they can put a new pricetag on. And that the community outcry will only be loud and not worse.
Yep, I agree. It certainly offers no real, tangible benefits/features over Plex as far as I’m concerned (again, obviously excluding the current UI issues).
That’s why I think that “lifetime accounts” are a bad business idea.
Yeah, they bring in a burst of cash in a short space of time that means you don’t have to go to the bank for a loan or ask for investors, which is useful if you need that injection for a specific project or feature development. It will definitely help the business and be nice for the customers in the short term; but long term it really is killing your monthly returning revenue, and not just on a temporary basis either. There’s only limited amounts of people that are interested in this sort of thing and once it’s gone, it’s gone (unless they bring in new services, cough TIDAL etc. cough, ahem).
Also, from a customer perspective, it also means that your voice doesn’t really count anymore. I mean, it should count on a purely moral basis, but the business has no business need to listen to the customer anymore because they’ve already got all of the money from you that they’ll ever get (unless they bring in new services, cough TIDAL etc. cough, ahem).
It’s one of the reasons why I’ve refused to move off my annual fee option because 1) it means my voice still counts from both a moral and business perspective, 2) It means I can continue to help Plex long-term.
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I think it’s more a matter of iPhone vs Android, or Pepsi vs Coca Cola. Neither is better but each have their devoted fan base.
Their community and support is objectively better than Plex’s (probably partly because it’s smaller), but the two products are mostly equal otherwise, with their individual strengths and weaknesses.
