If JF was a viable alternative to Plex - this thread would be a wasteland - nobody in it would be here.
Unfortunately FEW of us are going anywhere…
Plex knows that…
Our Option is to wait to find out if what Plex cooks up will be usable.
We’ll find out - at some point in the future.
Plex has the potential to be great, however them dragging their feet is leaving room for someone to take their place.
There is no someone in that position - unless compromise is something you enjoy.
That’s why there are a WHOLE LOT of Plex Veterans waiting to see what Plex is cooking up (and not discarding the current work-arounds in place).
My work-around was driving the 600 miles to set the Remote Quality when the Phone Call/Email/Texts just couldn’t hit paydirt. I mean they are my Friends and Family - so… I did get some cake. Worth it.
we want auto quality which prevents transcoding if possible and tone mapping on windows with nvidia cards. it really is a pain in the neck. i only have a handful users but it is not possible to manage it. time and time again i send whatsapp messages to some users. almost all the time they transcoding 1080 movies to 720. there is no benefit to it at all. i was in their homes more than once setting things up. it drives me nuts… but i can‘t understand why people going crazy in here. dave did a great job giving feedback to us. and this is one of the major problems/wishes, and plex is working on it to solve it! and on none of this we get as good information as here. this one guy with his 50+ users should be kicked. i don‘t understand why this is allowed (i love plex)
all this valuable time dave spend on this thread is wasted. to explain plex is working on the problem is not enough it seems. you should kick this dreghammels out!
but also i read the funniest post of the year here
„At this point the best we can hope for is a bankruptcy and they make it open source“
This is a constant repeat process on the forums, and it will keep happening until the end of time. It’s honestly not surprising that people get grumpy, as Plex prefers to not disclose the details of what they are doing and when they are doing things. Sometimes that has backfired spectacularly like with the HTPC disaster of 2019, for example. Or they release a feature like the game streaming that no one asked for out of nowhere. Or the improved music library that honestly has really poor tag handling and missed the mark on so many levels that they probably have to rewrite it again to fix it, and it’s annoying because if they did forum previews of it or just asked for input early in the process Plex could’ve weeded it out with the feedback from users with actual complex music libraries.
The biggest reason for transcoding on my server is not because of poor bandwidth or because the default setting is set too low, but because the Android apps doesn’t support ASS/SSA subtitles, and probably never will, because I don’t see Plex ever bothering to add support to ExoPlayer when they can conveniently blame Google for not adding it instead.
My issue with all of this is that it’s just so unpredictable. I don’t know if an issue I have will get fixed this century or just miss the mark and not solve anything or just get a new feature I’m not going to use instead. I don’t understand why Plex insists this is a good idea, but here we are. And unless we collectively get really angry and shout at Plex in the forums we’re not really getting a response either.
And because I’m actually invested in the ecosystem and have given access to my media to a lot of my friends and family it’s not just an option to switch, because at the end of the day Plex is still the most mature platform by a longshot. I wish Jellyfin was awesome, but it’s not (yet).
That sure turned into a long rant. I think that Plex is getting better at addressing issues on the forums, but I still wish they’d be more open about what they are working on. Public roadmaps, asking for feedback on the forums at an early stage, an so on, would just do so much for all of us… 
There is no someone in that position - unless compromise is something you enjoy.
Here’s where I think you’re wrong honestly. A year ago, I would have agreed with you.
A Personal Media Server imo should do certain things and do them well, in the following order of logical priority.
Easy setup, flexible with hardware - Plex does this extremely well. It’s a streamlined process for the most part, nothing to complain about. So do JF/Emby, a little less cleanly, but they’ll do.
Scanning + Metadata - The next step is scanning in media. I’d say all three were about even, but with the release of their new movie/TV agents, Plex is well ahead of the curve. Great job for delivering something actually useful that is core to what is Plex is supposed to be.
Sharing to users/Client Support - Something Plex has excelled at, thanks to having a big team. Anyone can download Plex on whatever device (not linux tho -plex) and get it up and running in a few mins. Codec support is a whole another story however. If you have certain unsupported clients, JF is lacking, if you don’t, then JF is just fine (ie. TVs are the big ones that are not yet released)
Playback - This is one of the crucial ones, and where Plex has been really failing. Jellyfin tries to direct play first, instead of landing on 720p, 3 mbps as if it’s 2003. Not only that, you have per user level transcode control.
To me, everything beyond this is fluff. If it can do the above, I don’t need much else. JF has a few pros, Plex has a few pros of their own. None compare to the above points though.
Maybe you care about these features, maybe not, but they’re not integral to the home media server that I downloaded to stream my videos. Stuff like:
There arr other features like Skip intro/credits, lyrics, audiobook, ebooks, watch together etc that are tangentially related and I can understand dev time going to them, but not when the core experience is still lacking. The only reason I haven’t switched is because getting friends & family to break their habit is a pita, and I’d rather not.
I don’t know if roadmaps will ever happen (and I suspect not), but we have been opening things up earlier for feedback. We did this with both the new TV and movie agents, and are currently having a closed beta for our new downloads feature (which we’ll be opening up more soon), and with the new home screen via the experimental features option (with more experiments coming soon). We’ll be continuing to offer more experimental features for early feedback, though we know there will always be folks who will like them, and those that won’t, but there is an ongoing effort to engage with the community earlier and gather more feedback.
Yeah, it was mostly an example I made on the spot. It doesn’t have to be detailed roadmaps, but I think something like an annual blog post about what Plex are working on or what you want to achieve going forwards would be nice. As a server admin I really would like to know what I can expect from Plex for the next year or so.
To use this current thread as an example though:
Last year elan made a post estimating that the solution to the low default stream quality probably was finished at around this time this year. That gave users something to look forwards to, and I’d say that was a good call to give an estimate. I’d also assume that a couple of months ago you probably realized that estimate would not be met. If someone from Plex around, for example, March of this year, made a new post in the thread saying something along the lines of:
“We are making progress on the solution, but it has taken more time than we thought to develop. We estimate that in X months we will have progressed far enough to do a closed beta on the feature. We will let you know when we have more news on the topic”.
And then kept us updated somewhat regularly on progress… I honestly believe that most of us would be understanding if that was the case, and that it would have mitigated most of the current annoyance that the lack of updates have resulted in. Being left in the dark is rather frustrating.
Giving dates is always tricky, because sometimes lots of things can change, like people moving on to a different job, or having to change which client things are being prototyped on due to resources, and other competing priorities (which can be hard to forecast), or things just being more complex than we initially thought. However, I thought I had been doing a decent job of giving updates whenever I had something to share 
There aren’t always things to share, or they’re not particularly interesting or noteworthy (like tracking down a bug in foundational work, which can take a little bit of time, and probably isn’t super exciting for the community).
Go back to your roots.
Edit: Just to be clear, nobody asked for Plex Arcade, News, Music with Tidal, Podcasts, etc, etc, etc. Try taking care of the basics before moving on to stuff most of us don’t want.
Edit2: Honestly sick of everyone trying to get the people working at Plex to understand basic concepts. The people working at Plex are not dumb. They hear us, they just won’t care until it hits their bottom line.
Edit3: Think about it. How many people get excited for any of the features I mentioned above? A minority. So why is all of that prioritized above improving the core Plex functionality?
Priorities can be a bunch of different things. It can be features, bug fixes, updating dependencies such as ExoPlayer, or some refactoring that’s needed to lay groundwork for other things, or so that this kind of work can be built. No one said those particular things were prioritised above this work since we started it (and they weren’t).
@davebinm It’s baffling to me how we cannot disable transcoding outright. i have 1Gb/s up/down!! no fancy features needed, just a freaking toggleswitch, per-user, enable / disable transcoding. that’s all I ask
lmao forgot about plex arcade. PleX MediaServer is missing basic functionality, let’s just make ■■■■ no one uses!
It’s not available per user, but there’s already an option to disable video transcoding under Settings → Transcoder (Show Advanced) → Disable video stream transcoding.
Yeah, but you guys still make us default to 720p, which means by default everyone is going to transcode. Toggle it off completely and now nobody can stream because the defaults are completely obsolete for 2021.
You guys say you don’t want to change the defaults until your new solution is ready because you’re catering to the lowest common denominator: non-system administrators running Plex Media Server on a residential network.
Plex is basically catering to people that have absolutely no clue as to what they are doing. Which is asinine.
Stop catering to non-technical individuals. Our clients. Our hardware. Our rules. The moment we leave, our clients leave with us.
We’ve already stated we’re going to be improving things to minimise transcoding, and are actively working on it. I was addressing a specific question that asked about that specific option.
I understand. I am just making sure that everyone knows that while you can disable transcoding completely, it is not a viable solution.
Edit: @DaveBinM We do appreciate your presence here even if we’re always frustrated. Just understand that none of this is personal. We know that you don’t have any control over the situation.
More or less I put this on upper management. More and more it seems like Plex is just here trying to please investors.
Edit2: Damn, 50 million raised this year from your latest Series C from Intercap. I wonder how much of that is going towards all the crap we don’t want lol. 
Maybe it would be good when releasing the Plex solution to this problem to also introduce per user disable/enable transcoding settings at the same time.
I am constantly having to remind users to change their “remote quality” to “Original” to avoid wasteful transcoding. I absolutely do not mind if my users need to transcode out of necessity, but 9 times out of 10 it’s simply because the client reverted to the default setting for some reason. It’s 2021, 720p/4mbps should not be the default anymore.
In reply to what sensei said about votes:
This, this, this, this. I really don’t think the votes matter. I think they’re mainly to help users find popular topics and that’s that.
I’m pretty confident that the answer to these is “no” which implies that, at the end of the day, the votes don’t really matter in terms of feature implementation. Sure, it’s a nice way to make things more visible, but the concept of limiting votes implies there’s a certain value to them, that they’re impactful. To me it seems that they’re mainly there to allow other users to see what’s popular. It’s like an upvote on Reddit, except you only have five.
