Discontinuation of Plugins, Watch Later, Recommended, and Cloud Sync

Announcements
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This morning, in our latest blog post, we announced the retirement of Watch Later (and its cousin, Recommended, for recommending Watch Later and plugin items to friends) and Cloud Sync along with the gradual phase out of plugins. While the decisions to discontinue/phase these out were not made lightly, they were done as part of our efforts to re-focus development, streamline our work flows to keep strengthening our core product, and clean house on some resource-consuming features. We encourage you to read the blog post for more details and check out the FAQ below.

When will these features get discontinued?

The Plugin Directory will be removed from Plex Web App in an upcoming update on Oct 9, 2018. You will still be able to manually install plugins on the server itself, even after the Plugin Directory is removed. Watch Later, Recommended, and Cloud Sync will also be removed starting in early October, and will vary between each player app.

Will player apps lose support for plugins?

Aside from the removal of the Plugin Directory in Plex Web App, there will be no immediate user-facing impact, as we won’t yet be actively removing support from apps that already support plugins. We will not however, be building plugins into areas that do not already have it. This would include apps undergoing a rewrite or redesign such as our Roku app.

Will scanners and agents be affected?

While support for browsable plugins is being discontinued, nothing is happening to scanners and metadata agents with this announcement.

What will happen to utility plugins?

There will be no immediate loss of functionality for utility plugins, but we encourage developers to transition their utility plugins to stand-alone apps. Tautulli is a good example of a stand-alone utility that interfaces with Plex.

Will there be a replacement for plugins down the road?

We do believe there is a better approach to plugins than our existing, ancient protocol that plagues our app teams, though we don’t have anything to share on that front at this time.

What happens to the iTunes/Aperture/iPhoto plugins?

iTunes, Aperture, and iPhoto plugins are enabled/disabled through server settings and will not see any immediate changes. Accessing the plugins in an app will still require plugins to be supported in that client/player app.

Can I export my Watch Later queue?

Yes. See this post on how to export your Watch Later queue as a CSV file.

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If you wish to save your watch later queue please follow these steps.

  1. Open the Plex Web app https://app.plex.tv/desktop
  2. For any media item in a library click the ellipses menu and choose Get Info
  3. Click ViewXML on the bottom left of info window
  4. Look at the URL and copy your plex token (see image below)
  5. Copy and paste this one of the URLs below in a browser window placing your token after the = then hit enter to load it
  • https://plex.tv/pms/playlists/queue/export.csv?X-Plex-Token=TOKEN

Will give you a CSV file with episode title and URL on one line, separated by comma.
This should be more easily usable in other apps.

  • https://plex.tv/pms/playlists/queue/export?X-Plex-Token=TOKEN

Will give you a simpler XML file than the above mentioned workaround, with just title and URL in it.

xml_info_token