[Development Request] More stability vs More features

Feature Suggestions
1

Hello,

 

Using PMS for Linux and love it.

 

PMS should be, at it's core, a platform to list and play your media.

Only after this is done properly, developers should consider adding features.

In the end, all those bells and whistles mean nothing if PMS:

cannot play your movie

cannot display a subtitle if it contains a weird space

displays a green screen with certain formats and subtitles

plays audio but you see a black screen when you try to skip to a certain time

....

I love new features but I think Plex developers should focus more on stability.

 

Please, consider allocating more resources to testing and making PMS more stable than to new features.

2

Not that I don't agree with you here about where to focus, but we also has to consider the fact, that regardless of we want it or not, Plex Inc. is a business, and has to sell it's stuff

When that's said, I would like to address a few of your complaints:

cannot play your movie

That is a wild statement, and needs to be backed up with more details here, cuz it's working fine for me, but granted....I'm not an advanced user

cannot display a subtitle if it contains a weird space

Hmm...But Plex is following the Std. here!

Yes, I know that some vendors are having a more relaxed view on this, and cope with this in their code, but in my book, they are dead wrong here....

If not following the std, then drop it, cuz otherwise, it will run loose, and then where to stop?

displays a green screen with certain formats and subtitles

Yes, but my guess now is that you are talking about the PlexPass BETA builds, and not the public stable builds, or?

Do recall, that a PlexPass build is not a stable build...You, if using them, is part of the testing crew, that you opted for  :D

Best regards

Tommy

3

Incredibly stable for me on Windows 7.

I do think core stuff like solid parental controls and a slick multi user solution should be prioritised above some of the recent innovations, but I can't personally say I've come across much if anything that I would class as unstable.

4

PMS is incredibly stable here, never have problems anymore. Bring on the features! MAC OS X Mavericks user, btw. Also use plex pass releases, and purposely did not upgrade to the latest one, due to complaints about the green screen issue. That may have been fixed by now, can’t remember. Just know using beta preview releases should take away your expectation of a perfect release.


P.S. You should list more detail on the problems you’re having beyond “cannot play your movie.” This will get you zero help here, especially from the development team.

5

Thank you for your replies.

I did not open this topic to talk about my issues but to point out that more testing prior to release would rock.

For the record, I used the latest stable release for PlexPass. Never used a beta.

Now I am back to 0.9.9.16 just to be able to play my MP4s with external SRTs without the green screen issue.

As you can see from the dedicated sub-forums, there are some issues still not fixed. No need to re-post them here.

What I wanted to point out is just this: Please, consider allocating more resources to testing and making PMS more stable than to new features.

I think everyone would benefit from this.

Thank you

6

I did not open this topic to talk about my issues but to point out that more testing prior to release would rock.

I agree, but as a developer myself I understand that some issues get by internal testing, bringing us to...

 

 I used the latest stable release for PlexPass. Never used a beta.

"PlexPass" releases, are beta.   Like it or not, we paid to be beta testers.  The PlexPass versions of PMS are nothing more than beta, sometimes even alpha, releases.  This is why PMS does not "auto" update to them.

Having early access gives us the opportunity to shape the final product through feedback.

 

Now I am back to 0.9.9.16 [...]

 

And 0.9.9.16 was also a  "PlexPass", AKA beta, release.  It's what many of us are using.  0.9.10.x were attempts to bring out a new transcoder.  Having such a new feature, it can be expected that they'll have issues.

That said, now that Plex is fully aware that the 0.9.10.x releases have some serious issues, their release posts should be updated to point out the known issues, and, since the issues effectively make them unusable for a good portion of the user base, they probably should be pulled from the download page, instead requiring a direct URL for those that would like to continue testing them. 

 Please, consider allocating more resources to testing and making PMS more stable than to new features.

As pointed out above, WE are that resource.

7

Well for me I now would not dare use Plex Media Server for Photo Slideshows for large filtered selection - not until I know the Plex Dev Team have addressed the issues that resulted in database inconsistencies which have led to daily Plex Media Scanner.exe crashes on a server that I have now abandoned and started afresh with a new server.

A photo library of over 80,000 photos with a filtered selection of over 23,000 photos in a slideshow even when the requests are split at 3,000 at a time (following a major RARflix development to handle large slideshows and ensure no Roku or RARFlix crashes) the server after a while ends up with memory fragmentation on Windows 7 and crashes.

You might say why you need to do a slideshow for so many photos and it would take ages to go through them - well... the RARflix/Roku app has pause facility and continues where it left off so time does not come into it - in fact it is so resilient that you can take your server down / whole network down and it will pick up from where it stopped or lost the connection and continue ...

The last time I used this after server crashes I ended up with database inconsistencies where new metadata item numbers were assigned to photos/folders but the new IDs were allocated to the database entries before the thumbnail IDs were updated so lost all the thumbnails and ended up with every scan of the library section crashing when it completes going through all the objects and creates a file of all the work that needs to be done... All this stuff is still not addressed and I would not dare start such a slideshow on my new server considering the mess I ended up and the daily crashes that are still occurring on the old server - which I kept hoping one day the Plex Dev Team will want to investigate.....

Problems started to exhibit symptoms here back in February 2014 :  

PMS 0.9.9.2 Errors - Cached Photo Files Not Found. What Deletes the Files?

Later discovered that the files were not deleted - simply not generated following the metadata ID change

and PMS 0.9.9.2 Many On The Fly Scans Lead to Memory Loss

This was sidestepped by a change to Plex Media Server that came in to remove on-the-fly-scans for photos

and Plex Media Scanner Issues / Crashes - Dev Resource?

Not all the same and some for other users were fixed. 

and PMS 0.9.9.5 Recurring Scanner Crashes

and Now on PMS 0.9.9.5 - Thumbnails Gone for Most Photo Albums

The last post in this thread shows the problem where the 43Mb temp file produced at the end of the Photos Library Section scan gives a crash in Plex Media Scanner.exe every time

and my main outstanding topic on the issue with tons of diagnostic evidence:

PMS 0.9.9.5 - 0.9.9.10 Scanner Crashes / Massive Loss of Thumbnails on Windows

and this one to suggest that the order in which things are done is changed so as not to end up with orphaned thumbnail pointers in the database

PMS and Album Thumbnails - Order in Which Things Are Done When Re-Scanning

and a suggestion to re-create missing items eg album thumbnails

Feature Request: Re-Create Missing Media Plex Objects / Info

But may be the crashes were happening where it was trying to re-create the missing items - not sure. 

and to this day my old PMS with the database inconsistencies and lost album thumbnails is crashing in Plex Media Scanner.exe at the end of the pass to scan the Photos Library Section and as it starts processing the temp file - which I did capture before it was deleted in one of my evidence sets ! 

So I stopped using Plex Media Server for the very use case that I needed it for : Photo Slideshow and Music. Instead just using it for Music and photo slideshows for very small selections. Cannot risk ending up with a database mess as happened before.

8

I'd have to agree with the original poster here.

I like Plex, it's very slick and fulfills one of my requirements perfectly - to be able to stream music to my iPad (where Apple's own facility is hopeless).

Unfortunately, despite paying out for a PlexPass (which at least fixed the iTunes library crash issue compared to using the free Plex which still crashes), I'm still seeing numerous bugs:-

  • Seemingly random playback of FLAC files using Firefox ie. I play an album stored in FLAC - one track plays back natively, another transcodes to mp3!
  • Despite checking 'Prefer AAC', all transcoding is to mp3
  • When playing a track in the iTunes channel, the 'Activity' icon remains blank and nothing is showing as 'Playing now'
  • Streaming photos to an iPad seems to physically copy the photos into a temporary cache, which quickly fills up and slows the iPad to a crawl - after 30 minutes it's unusable. Flushing the cache does fix it, but surely this is not terribly user friendly for the less techically literate?

This is a little disappointing and it seems that as I attempt to use Plex for more varied things, I'm probably going to discover a lot more bugs.  Seeing all of the issues people are having streaming movies, I'm not sure I'm going to bother to try this just yet!

My setup is about as standard as it's possible to have (decent spec PC with 32 bit Windows 7 SP1) and streaming to iOS devices so I don't think there's anything in that to exacerbate any problems.

So yes, the OP is absolutely right based on my experience of using Plex so far.  I intend to persevere, as Plex would be awesome if these bugs were eliminated; fingers crossed!

9

2021 clean-up: no feature suggestion