Default All Clients to Max Internet Streaming

Feature Suggestions
366

I think Plex have done a lot better at communicating for the last year or so, and you’ve been a big part of that, DaveBinM.

However.
I think a lot of the frustration comes from the lack of transparency for a period of years though, and that will most likely linger on a while. What frustrates me as a user is that Plex still has a long way to go when it comes to letting users know what you guys are working on. I think you could take a lesson from Microsoft in this regard.
Having a public roadmap for 365, for example, makes it a lot easier to see what is being worked on, and when it’s estimated to be released. All in one convenient location. Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365

How they have organized their UserVoices is also handled a lot better than the request forums here on the Plex forums.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/o365guy/submit-product-feedback-or-feature-requests-to-microsofts-virtual-suggestion-boxes

Firstly you have no arbitrary limit on how many requests you can vote for. I can’t fathom why Plex has this limit. This voting jail makes no sense to me. It is a jail, because for the 5 things I’ve voted for, I doubt I’ll ever get my votes back to vote for new requests. Unless I, myself, remove my vote from requests I do want implemented.
Secondly, when something is being picked up, it will show on the front page and top of the topic, so that it is very visible what Microsoft is doing about the issue/request. See the front page of the Teams UserVoice.
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public

And while people still find room for complaining, it is at least very easy to see what is reviewed, what is worked on, what is nearly done and so on.

These things would vastly improve how Plex as a company interacts with users imho. Currently you would have to read the entire thread to find the relevant Plex responce. Not optimal.

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367

Thanks, that’s nice to hear! :plexheart:

There is definitely room for improvement with things, and I don’t know if we’ll ever be somewhere that publishes a roadmap like that. As for the feature requests, we’re working towards giving more clarity on some of these requests, and giving them clear responses, whether that’s a “yes”, “no”, or “maybe”. While people may not like hearing no (especially if it’s one of the more popular requests), we still think an answer, even a disappointing one, is better than no answer at all, and better than leaving the request in limbo.

As for why we limit votes, we want people to carefully consider how they use their votes, so we can better prioritise the requests. If you only have five votes, you have to consider which five requests are really the most important to you, and give them away that way (you get them back when the request is closed), rather than people just clicking on 10, 20, or 30 requests, even if they only have a passing interest in something. So the goal here is for people to consider what they really want, and allow us to see what people are most passionate about

368

I understand the logic behind it, but I do think it is somewhat flawed. I think the result is people getting more spread out. If there’s, say, 10 things I’d like implemented, but the things I personally want the most are 5 “niché” requests, I will waste my 5 votes. And maybe my high priority wants are low priority for someone else, meaning that even if they’d like to have it they have their own “niché” requests to vote for instead. If you let people have more votes, I believe you’d get a better overall picture of what people want, regardless of individual priorities.

There’s a lot of request with somewhat high vote count I won’t bother to add my vote to because of this, and because of that you won’t ever know how many really want said feature.

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369

Very popular request from 2013:

It would be nice to know if this is about to come someday or if this is a no.

1 Like
370

I can’t promise I can personally answer these (or a specific request on some topics), nor am I sure we will answer all of them, but we are working internally to improve our communication on these

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371

You’d think that after 8 years, you’d have some idea of whether it’s happening or is not a priority. :upside_down_face:

This is also something I find a bit annoying. It doesn’t seem that the number of votes really makes a difference on what Plex chooses to work on. Lot’s of people want better audiobook support (I’d like it as well, but not to the extent that I’m reallocating one of my 5 votes), but we got a streaming service no one asked for. While I’m not saying that Plex shouldn’t also work on completely new features because Plex wants to expand on what it wants to be, it most likely contributes to the grumpy attitude on the forums. Because it kind of comes out of nowhere, while there’s a lot of unaddressed (and popular!) requests at the forums.

4 Likes
372

I’ll just cut some assumptions in the first message that you gave me:

There are nuances in everything that we addressed, and here is no exception.
I’m not expecting you to respond to every single thread on the forum (neither anybody made that claim). But I’m asking for better management of your communication. If we scale back to the forums, some users have soon waited 9 Years either for an official statement from your side or for the implementation of this feature.

One of the most basic and legitimate feedback I saw these past years was about “Saving Subtitles language selected on TV Show” and it’s still not possible today, for a media server. It’s been 4 Years since this request was made.

And not only on a time scope, but on a feedback point too. The request we’re on for example, was made in 2019. I think it was pretty clear from your users that they wanted an administrative way to manage the Max Internet Stream of their servers. Your answer is as follow:

We considered that, but this solution will be much more robust and less open to misconfiguration.

You have two things in Plex: the “Administrator” role and the “Show Advanced Settings”. Despite the clear confusion from the people here, you still didn’t listened to their feedback and proposed a different solution than the one asked. And while you have a solution that you’re prototyping, we still have no clear vision on what this solution might be. It is just called “The Solution”.

While it is true that you @DaveBinM is pretty present for the community, I wouldn’t qualify communication and feedback listening as a standard in Plex.

Nota Bene: And I don’t criticize for free. I want Plex to improve otherwise I wouldn’t take the time to say it. But you don’t seem to understand why people here and on Reddit can be angry, so I took a more “vocal” road.

6 Likes
373

That’s good to hear and very appreciated.

I hate to pile on, especially on you since you have been very present, open and active here and on reddit which is so much appreciated but this request is a prime example why people are frustrated. It’s 8 years old, very inline with plex mission statement and there seems to be no progress. Emby(i think) and Jellyfin offer this feature yet the market leader in this niche does not.
In the meantime we see our userinterface cluttered with news, free TV, ads for tidal, a streaming service no one asked for, a second streaming service no one asked for (even though it’s a nice idea) etc. etc., we see your priorities shifting away from what users pay for to your own content. We don’t like this. We see our favourite software becoming something we don’t want, we don’t recognise and quite frankly we don’t need. Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Hulu, ATV+ already exist, we don’t need another one, what we need is you to be better at your core product and not do a worse version of those streaming services with worse content.

Yes your blog post said your commitment to personal media is strong, but those are just words. Actions are a mixed bag, while intro detection and watch together are fantastic and whoever made this and came up with it deserve a raise, praise and a thank you, however we do see how you do SO much more in areas your customer base does not need. This seems to be were the future of plex lies and that sucks (for us users). All of us here, we don’t critique because we hate but because we like the product, most of us are plex pass users for a reason and we see where this is going. You are on the forums a lot, you have to have noticed the shift in tone from your userbase, have you not? The frustration grows, the anger grows and the cries for jellyfin get louder and louder. Are you not concerned about this? Do you really not mind that you are going from a beloved brand to something ppl are frustrated with? Do you think this is all also untrue and disingenuous?

The common user cant differentiate between plex, plex provided content and shared libraries. All my users call my server “plex” and if I had to guess it is that way for 90% of all server admin’s users here, please correct me if I am wrong.
What do you think will happen if server admins switch to jellyfin or emby, do you think the common user will sign up for plex because of the streaming service you guys are providing? Is that the hope here? Without the server admins, i doubt you would see much traffic, or even have ppl know what plex is in the first place, but obviously I don’t have any numbers, so what do I know. Have you tried setting up a new users now? Before I can even share my library that users is flooded with a torrent of crap you throw at them neither the user nor I asked you for.

I am glad that you are already prototyping the fix for this issue(even though i am a bit sceptical about the direction of the implementation, but also hopeful), but if we are honest with each other, this should have been fixed a year ago and, with the right priorities and resource allocation it would have been but getting us propaganda tv channels that spread lies right into the userinterface of our shared users seems to have been more important. ¯\(ツ)/¯ (yeah i know, different teams, yea i know hyperbole is not helpful)

For the roadmap thing, that would help so much. Even secretive apple gives us a roadmap once a year, showing us some feature they are working on for iOS and macOS. You really should think about doing this too in some way to some extent, it would be something to look forward to, to get excited about and could alleviate some of our concerns.

Anyhow, I want to close this rant by saying thank you for discussing this with us, being here and taking all the sh*t from us, your presence here is noted and very much appreciated, so thank you @DaveBinM! And btw we did notice that you guys were listening, for example in the RA rows merging.
Tbh you, elan and chuck are the main reasons I have not given up on plex yet and actually try to participate.

p.s. may I ask what your job title or function is within plex, if that is something you are comfortable with sharing.

7 Likes
374

What I was trying to get at is there will always be people who feel as if they’re not listened to, purely because we can’t get to everything, and while we’re working on improving our communication and transparency, it will take time for things to change, and despite improvements, it will likely never be as transparent as some people would like.

Something like the example you gave with subtitles is definitely legitimate, but that doesn’t mean it’s basic. There are always complexities to try and handle (what if there are multiple options in the preferred language? What if some of the items do not have that option? Is that setting for the item as a whole, or is it per user per show? That’s just a few things off the top of my head).

I think you may have misread this request. Server owners can already set the maximum streaming quality from their servers. The request here was to change the quality on the client-side to minimise transcoding and maximise the quality for the end-user. We’ve read what the desire is, and worked on a way to solve this problem in what we think is an elegant and effective solution. As for not detailing things, we don’t typically detail things we haven’t formally announced, and especially when things are still in a prototyping stage, they are prone to changes, and detailing things would not be helpful long term as things change during prototyping, development, and testing.

There are plenty of others from Plex that are present, I’m not even in the top five for the number of posts from Plex Employees and Team Members in the last month. I barely make the top ten, so I also wouldn’t say I’m terribly unusual.

375

OP here. I think you got that mostly right. The request was to allow server owners to set the default quality for all clients connecting to their server (specifically the ability to set it to max). While maximizing the quality for the end user is nice, I don’t want to optimize for that. So if the user can’t handle max quality, they’d have to go and change it.

I know there are considerations that make it a hard ask for Plex to do that, and that the conversation has evolved over the years, but that was the original request.

4 Likes
376

I thought this request was only from 2019, I hadn’t realised it was older than that (though I know there have been discussions in the past about the default quality for remote quality for clients. While there is no public release yet, work is still ongoing and progress is being made. While our offerings have increased, we’re still a company dedicated to personal media. Some things take quite a bit of work from foundational changes that are needed, through to actually delivering the feature that folks may not see as related (take the Watchlist for personal media as an example, which has been dependent on the new TV and movie agents, which were fair pieces of work on their own).

Believe it or not, the tone has actually improved in the last couple of years. It’s something we monitor quite closely, and while there are some threads that can be quite negative, the overall sentiment in the forum has improved. We will never please everyone, we know that, and there will always be people saying that the sky is falling and it’s time to move to XYZ. For some people that may be a better fit, and for others, Plex will continue to be the solution that works best for them.

As for setting up new users, that is something we do regularly as part of testing, and perhaps we could improve the flow when a user has something shared with them, but for now, if people sign in to a new device (when they already have an account), then they should be prompted to select which server they have access to, and which sources they want pinned to the sidebar.

I’m pretty confident in what we’re working on, and that it will solve this issue for the vast majority of people, and improve things even for those who don’t mind the current defaults. Would I personally have liked it to be fixed a while ago? Yes, I would have, but there was also quite a bit of planning and foundational work that had to take place first (and smoothing out any issues that arose in those early pieces).

I wouldn’t so much say that Apple gives a roadmap as a public beta announcement, but perhaps I’m splitting hairs there. Regardless, we’re working towards having things available for feedback earlier on in the process.

Also, thank you for the kind words, it’s much appreciated, and there are many other folks here besides myself and Chuck that chime in regularly, just kind of depends on which parts of the forums you look at. As for my job title, I’m a Test Engineer, responsible for Apple, Android, and Roku testing.

4 Likes
377

In what we have working, the situation where the user can’t handle max quality is catered to as well, plus any users who may be concerned about data usage (metered internet is still very common in many countries, such as Australia, where I live). I appreciate your input and clarity on the original request :plexheart:

1 Like
378

I think what you said earlier would go a long way towards improving this:

I think that’s what most people look for. At that point it would even be nice to reclaim votes without affecting the prioritization of the request.

As nice to haves on top of that would be:

  1. If it’s no, and you can explain why, please do

  2. If it’s yes, and it’s going to be multiple years (or decades), please give some type of indication of that

  3. If it’s maybe, and there’s something the community can do to help figure it out one way or the other, spell that out clearly.

379

That’s what we’re working towards. We’d never just give a “no” without an explanation. It may be something that technically isn’t possible, or the engineering effort may greatly outweigh the actual usage of it. Or it could be something that doesn’t fit with everything else we’re doing. I can’t say exactly how we’d handle the yes or maybe ones, that remains to be seen. Votes can only be given back for closed items, so we’d be likely to close the requests after giving a “no” answer, so folks can have their votes back.

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380

Thanks for the answer, I was referring to the Audiobook support request from my earlier post, sorry for the confusion. (I’d really love to have an Audiboook library, especially if we start commuting again)

1 Like
381

I found a sort of workaround for the audiobook conundrum, whilst plex doesn’t support it properly:

  • use audiobook agent link here
  • use this tutorial to organise your metadata link here
  • use an app like Prologue (iOS) or Chronicle (Android)

I use prologue with my audiobook library and it’s a heaven sent.

Also audiobook library looks miles better (attached screens)

screen2
screen2987×506 126 KB
screen1
screen11118×447 149 KB

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382

Last time I looked it required some windows executable to do the tagging (iirc), so that is not an option. Did that change?

383

Yes it does require a bit of manual legwork (mp3tag) but the tutorial walks you through automating most of the process. Like I said this is not a perfect replacement but a workaround until such time audiobooks are better integrated with Plex.

384

One thing that worries my slightly about the whole “we got something coming, but not yet telling details” in general is that the last time something like this happened on a topic that I care a lot about was when the music scanner was updated. It was teased for quite a while, but when it did release it still left a lot to be desired, and missed the mark on quite a few important features that I’m pretty sure would’ve been pointed out by the community very quickly if given the chance. Almost to the point of feeling like wasted developer time because so much is lacking, and I believe a proper fix will require a lot of rewriting on a lot of code.

However you guys did an open beta for the new video and series scanner, so maybe the lesson was learned. :slight_smile:

E: Just to be clear, the music scanner did improve a lot, but felt like such a missed opportunity.

385

I am not running windows, so no .exe. Also it’s a headless server, so especially no GUI .exe :confused: