I’m currently experiencing yet another rather severe summer thunderstorm here on Florida’s Space Coast. I wish I could send something like an emergency broadcast message out to any- and every-one streaming media from my site. This could let them know to expect service interruptions, It would be totally awesome if it were possible to type in a shore text message and also have it read aloud using one of the text-to-speech systems! However, unlike the actual EBS, Plex could actually pause the playback while showing the message – hopefully that would be somewhat less annoying in the event that nothing comes of the emergency message.
I’m sure things like this have been requested before, but have they been framed this way? I think an emergency announcement feature is an important capability to have. Anyone else?
If this is stupid, just say so and I’ll go away quietly and watch the lighting bouncing around my neighborhood.
It is NOT stupid but it is unnecessary.
In this age if anyone get surprised by bad weather it is their fault.
If all you want is a way to inform others about a possible outage then email and texting work great.
It’s not stupid and I think messaging users in Plex (as opposed to via email/SMS) has value.
A more simple feature would do a pretty good job of meeting all admins’ messaging needs… Just let us enter a text message into the server config, and show that text before starting file playback. Give the admin form a checkbox for “only show each user this message to each user one time” and that lets us decide how aggressive we want the messaging to be.
Even if message view status was not synced to the server, but was local to the client, that would be fine.
Not surprised by bad weather??? Do you always monitor the weather for the physical location where any media server you are currently streaming from resides? Even if YOU do, I cannot expect that from all my users, who are not all in my immediate area and I don’t expect them to have up to the second knowledge of things like lightning and power failures in my area (My Plex server is on a UPS, but I’d still like to send out a message warning viewers of my power failure and possible shutdown if the power is out more than a few minutes.) So I vehemently disagree with unnecessary. I also don’t like killing a playback just to add something that could be a sort of special subtitle on to the screen while they’re watching.
It is NOT Plex’s job to do anything except stream content. While Plex is a good piece of software it is not “The app to rule them all…”. There are many many many other ways to accomplish what you want and Plex should not overload its code to just provide info to users that they “can” get on their own. That is particularly true since email and phones work so well.
I simply shut everything down and answer questions later IF anyone hits me up and asks about it being down for a few hours, then I explain. Other than that, it’s actually not a big deal. You don’t owe anyone any explanation or courtesy.
IF anyone hits me up and asks about it being down for a few hours, then I explain. Other than that, it’s actually not a big deal. You don’t owe anyone any explanation or courtesy.