I have a playlist of movies I set to run overnight while my daughter and I sleep. For whatever reason when she wakes up, if there’s something playing, she rolls over and goes back to sleep. Without it, she wakes me up and wants to get up out of bed. The last week or so the auto play has stopped working. It gets to the end of one movie and then stays on the info screen. If I’m not awake to hit play or tell my Google Home to resume the TV, it stays paused until it disconnects entirely. This has been driving me nuts. I’ve combed through my settings, and auto play is DEFINITELY on, but for some reason just refuses to work. Halp~! What am I doing wrong???
I’m not sure how long it’s supposed to take to get a CS reply, I know things are slow with COVID, but even a “we’ll get back to you soon” or something would be nice.
This is user forum based support… no customer service in the usual sense.
As for your question… there’s limitations to the auto-advance feature built into Plex.
If there’s no user interaction for some time, Plex will stop automatically progressing to the next video.
Auto-advance refers to the countdown timer on the Up Next item, which plays automatically once exhausted. It will be shown whenever there’s an Up Next item, except in the following circumstances:
If videos have been playing without user intervention for more than two hours, and the video that just completed is > 20 minutes in length. In this case, the Up Next item will still be shown and selected such that a single click plays it.
These considerations are designed to try and make things work smoothly for users in as many scenarios as possible. For instance, these considerations should help:
prevent having a whole television season get played through if you fall asleep
There’s a feature suggestion to allow for continuous autoplay you can vote for. There’s a relatively large amount of users who already voted for it but Plex usually doesn’t communicate what’s on their roadmap or any ETAs
This just started for me, I never had a problem with my playlist stopping after any amount of time. I like to run my Rick and Morty playlist on Saturday night and it would play for 8 to 10hrs non-stop now I get maybe 5 episodes and it stops.
The response that this is a requested feature and COULD be added in the future is nonsense. I’ve had plex for over 10 years and have regularly just left it playing tv shows for the kids for days, even weeks at a time without stopping; until about a month ago. Now it turns off after a couple of hours… I think someone woke up thinking they work at netflix…
Honestly I’m frustrated so much by this. Making it optional is one thing “Hey do you want us to stop autoplay after so much inactivity? Yeah? Cool! No? Oh ok.”
Literally the LAST thing I want is Plex trying to dictate how I use my freaking media. UGH.
This needs to change back to the way it was. Often, since working from home, I’ll toss on a random series on shuffle, and built some playlists full of seasons of shows and adult cartoons to shuffle randomly while I work since I don’t have cable, this is my TV.
How infuriating. My favorite feature of Plex was how the auto play actually auto played until I stopped it. Im a little like your daughter, can’t explain but I need something on when I sleep. I’ve been having the same issue only recently since the new user-interface appeared on my TV. For the past 10ish years, not a problem.
If I understand the support document about it, I’m guessing a show like “Adventure Time” and most other Cartoon Network shows that have ten seasons and 11 minute episodes would not trigger a stop to auto-play? I might double check that now.
