When you say removal of Python and the addition of a public API, does that also mean scripts built using the API found Table of Contents — Python PlexAPI documentation here will all be deprecated?
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What’s being removed is the legacy Python 2.7 API that Plex’s legacy agents and custom third-party agents/scanners use. Python-PlexAPI is a separate project might actually benefit from a public API spec, since it already uses Plex’s API. With an open spec, it can refer to that directly instead of doing some minor reverse engineering to figure out what API endpoints are available and how they’re called.
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100% agree.
While I love Plex - particularly the bits Plexamp has brought to my music collection - I want nothing to do with any “social” aspects. 99.99% of my server usage is by me, for me, using media I own. Trying to make it some kind of social platform is completely antithetical to why I even looked at Plex in the first place.
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To lean into this, and maybe be a bit redundant with my other reply: I’m absolutely here for what Plex offers as a personal media server. Outside of the extra stuff y’all have been doing with music, that’s it. That’s what drew me to it, that’s why I bought my lifetime pass.
I don’t want “social” features. I don’t want external media (minus things like what y’all were doing with Tidal, that was actually pretty neat). You all have an amazing product already, and it worries me that Plex seems so insistent on things that are almost in direct opposition to why I use your all’s software in the first place.
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I’m not a fan of the idea of removing music from the core Pex app: I love using Plexamp for playback but for library management it’s sorely lacking. Heck, if I try to edit my smart playlists it just crashes.
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As long as I can continue to manage my music/photo libraries from my PC and view/listen to my photos/music on my big screen Tv its ok. If I loose these abilities this will be a major step backwards.
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As a Shield Pro user, I have been getting this weird double playback issue on the stock Plex TV app for music and was forced to side load Plexamp just to play music on my TV. Doesn’t help that Plex blocked users from using Plexamp on a TV couple of updates ago too so I had to use a older version of the app. But i just got tired of using it and ended up configuring Plexamp headless and while it’s great. I feel like it was quick temporary solution for users to plex music on their Home Theater system.
But I am very doubtful that Plexamp will have a TV version since they made it very obvious they are trying to work on “mobile apps” and that shows since the desktop Plexamp is just a direct port of the app with some desktop features like a keyboard shortcuts
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I would like to point out that one of the major pieces on the roadmap called out here for next year is rebuilding the server management experience. Yes, this does mean that that effort will split out the management from the playback/consumption side of things, but we know that generally people use the current options in sort of a split fashion today. We want to cater to all of us server owners in a big way and make an amazing experience there.
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Just wanted to state that this is broadly correct! I don’t have any knowledge of this specific page and the information contained therin (this is in no way endorsing or commenting on the accuracy of what is at that link). The general comments around a development community building tooling and client integrations is a big reason that we want to help out with an open API here. We want to be a part of more amazing solutions as opposed to building higher walls that keep people out of the server garden.
If this was the messaging that came across then I feel that we didn’t do a good job in communicating intent here. The messaging wasn’t intended to read that we are only focused on providing a photos and music experience on mobile apps. While I admit there is a bit of a gap in the TV experience currently, this is absolutely an ongoing discussion internally on what we can consider doing to close this gap.
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This was answered in the fireside chat and you can find that answer here. Thanks!
Just wanted to say thank you for these comments @Shaiatan . They are heard. I have responded to similar sentiment in the recent fireside chat here. This is a tough one to respond to as you may very well feel alienated by the mission that we have chosen to follow here. We are not oblivious that people will feel this way and do not see alignment in our overall goals. It is one of the toughest parts of the job here to know that any decision we make is going to potentially greatly upset some segment of our amazing users. However, personal media and Plex Media Server remain as a big part of our vision and we hope to find ways to keep as many people as we can happy.
Appreciate the feedback. This response makes me wonder about something though: has there ever been any significant part of the Plex user base that has actually wanted things like social media or being forced into multiple apps to do what can be done with one now?
Those of us that have been on Plex for a significant number of years started using it because it was a great way to consume OUR OWN media. Personally, I wasn’t looking for another NetFlix and Plex can’t replace such services. Maybe there was some silent majority that wanted these things?
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Whatever Plex is adding, it is because it will help their bottom line, right?
So social features will either drive Plex Pass adoption in some new way, and/or spawn some other paid service… and/or, Plex will be able to sell the data gathered from users of the social features. That last one sucks but it seems pretty likely since all social media does that to its users.
I want Plex to stick around and be financially healthy so they can continue to support my personal media use. I’ll just evaluate changes as they happen and hope for the best. For the moment, I am not worried and I wish the company good luck in this new direction even though I am unlikely to use social features myself.
(Unlikely… Not impossible. I can imagine some casual social features that even I would use. We’ll just have to wait and see what is on their backlog…)
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I suppose so…which is far more relevant to address to “free” users, not PlexPass holders since we actually pay for our Plex.
No idea. I don’t want to speculate, but again, many of us PAY for Plex. We don’t pay for Facebook or other Social media platforms except via the Faustian fine print we all agree to when we sign up. WE are the product in those cases. If Plex does something like that I hope those of us that pay for it can be pre-emptively released from the Matrix and they allow us to just use Plex for media like we signed up for. I don’t want to be a product in the product I pay actual $$$ for.
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Appreciate the response - heh, I know I was bit cantankerous in that post, so apologies.
I get it. I want Plex to succeed, and I understand not everyone is going to like everything you all try. That’s fine. Ultimately, as long as those “overall goals” include maintaining the core features around personal media (e.g. what Plex has been from the start), and all the other stuff remains optional (preferably opt-in vs. opt-out), I can “see alignment”.
Looking forward to what features may come in that vein - especially the future of Plexamp.
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I am really happy to happy to see Plex will integrate nfo file support. I have three shows I’ve collected over the years from EWTN (a Catholic related channel). I have the shows in my tv shows library but they are not listed in TVDB or TMDB. So I’ve had to manually add the titles and other metadata. I’ve also been playing with Jellyfin. I have a friend that wants to cut the cord eventually and thought that might be a cheaper entry point for him. I notified that Jellyfin supports nfo files. So I created them for those three shows since I have the Jellyfin pointed to the same media folders as Plex. They have worked out great. Plex nfo support will be super helpful in the future if I have to move my library to a larger hard drive or a newer server or just repairing things after a crash that involves a plex reinstall. So thumbs up to this news.
Thank you @McWanke for your insights shared.
I just want to state that my whole focus for all this is not to have all kind of external apps (though I can see good use cases for these).
For me, it’s all about adding custom metadata once I add media to my libraries. So, for me, I would love to see a method of linking (new variants) of third-party (my own) metadata providers to my PMS and initiate metadata addition to any “refresh metadata” process on the PMS. Adding metadata to a whole library at once from an external is not my use case and I would not want to do trhe book-keeping of what’s newly added to any possible library of mine.
Plus, your classic legacy way of adding 3rd party agents is a layered one… one agent can add data and another may (or may not) overwrite it. Therefore, it is possible for one agent to add local age ratings and another one to add descriptions to the same entry on the same scan.
This concept is a fantastic and very flexible one. Would hate to see it “gone with the wind”.
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It took an hour of reading, but I’m finally here!
My Thoughts on the Big Changes
I think the focus on Plex Media Server sounds like a fantastic idea! It’s a huge step in the right direction! And it’s a breath of fresh air to hear anything from you guys. I paid for Plex Pass, but I felt like I was paying for a dead product to up 'n disappear.
Hearing anything reduces the stress that the hours I poured into my Plex library over the last two years (after cutting the cord) aren’t going to suddenly disappear. Not yet at least.
I’ve honestly been stressed out about the fact that at any moment, Plex could up 'n remove custom agent support. The fact that there are going to be first-class alternatives is a major stress remover. Now I gotta worry about social features that probably shouldn’t exist in this platform.
Open API spec
The goal here is to focus more on adding features to the server that may or may not appear in the current Plex client app offerings. This is to allow the community to add their own client apps that don’t need to be on 100 other devices.
This way, you can get a comic book reader that supports or runs on Plex’s API, but it doesn’t have to work on 800 TVs; it could simply be a desktop experience. It could even be a feature added to an existing native desktop app.
API Questions
Is it a generic document store?
Are we writing the code to say “this is an eBook object” where you’re providing us with a generic document store? Or is it something where you have to add the feature, so we can build a client app off it?
RSS and OPDS feeds
With the API opened up, wouldn’t it be possible for me to implement something like this myself? Someone can write a service hitting my server that can provide this feed.
NFO questions
I know what an NFO file is, but I don’t know how to format one nor what Plex expects to be in there nor exactly what you can do when customizing one. Can you post an example of what one might look like?
Updating NFO files
How do you keep NFO files up-to-date when doing a “Refresh Metadata”?
Do I have a webhook on my server that writes to the NFO files on my NAS or is it something where Plex can ping my web server to get metadata on media files?
What is a Custom Agent?
You talked about custom agents and how we could write them, but I don’t know the difference between an agent or a scanner or how any of that works.
I have AbsoluteSeriesScanner and HamaTV installed, but I don’t know the specifics. It all seems really complex with the limited documentation available.
Storylines data type
Plex is very specific when saying what a “Movie” or “Show” means. What I’d like to see is a way to group storylines together. We’d need to rethink both shows and movies into a completely new data type.
Common to both
Both movies and shows have:
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Specials/Shorts → Supplimentary movies or episodes that go between episodes or count as their own season.
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Special features → Optional content that’s not required to watch as part of the storyline. For shows, I find that special features are associated with a specific season like how they’re grouped with specific movies. It’s rare that I find a set of special features that are global to the whole storyline rather than a particular season unless it’s part of the overall remastering effort.
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Multiple editions or cuts. You might have an open-matte and widescreen version of a show or in the case of IGPX, there’s a Toonami cut only made for the US and a Japanese director’s cut. These are completely different versions of the same show that need to share similar metadata.
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Multiple variations/optimizations of the same video file such as a 4K HDR and 1080p non-HDR version, so Plex doesn’t have to guess how to tonemap. Sometimes though, the different versions aren’t the same thing. One of my 4K discs has an extra minute of footage in the middle of the movie.
Episode reordering
Plex has this weird dependence on sequential episode numbering.
In terms of movies, I can create a collection and rearrange them however I see fit. I can rearrange shows in a collection as well. If I break my seasons into separate shows, I can also rearrange those. But episodes? I don’t have control over them.
Episodes are just short movies, so I’d like to treat them the same way. Sometimes, Plex groups movies together into collections. I can then rearrange the movies in those collections. I’d like to be able to rearrange episodes too!
And I don’t want to rearrange episodes just in a specific season, but anywhere in the whole Storyline. Let’s say there’s a season of 26 episodes. Episodes 1-13 might be grouped together, then a movie occurs, then episodes 14-26 happen. Making it a bit more complicated, that movie was actually episode 2 from season 2 (which only had 2 movies).
It’s still nice to have the “Season” grouping for episodes, but I’d like to see them act more like a folder on your phone’s homescreen rather than these fixed categories.
I have plenty of examples where:
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Specials are sprinkled between episodes of a season.
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A season includes only special episodes back-to-back, but they need to be moved between episodes of the main season.
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A movie goes between seasons.
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A movie goes between episodes.
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A movie replaces an episode → Mobile Suit Gundam ep 15 is now a feature film. The original episode 15 isn’t even on the US release!
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The metadata for the DVD ordering on TVDB doesn’t match the more-extensive metadata of the “Aired” ordering. Sadly, each TVDB ordering has its own metadata, so you often don’t get metadata for specials when using DVD ordering.
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Folders vs Collections. Right now items can be in multiple collections, but ideally, I’d like to use them as folders where items are only ever in a single one associated with a storyline.
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Shows with alternate storylines, but the same name. For instance, I wanna group all Mobile Suit Gundam in a single category and then further group them by their timeline. This is a two-tiered Collection approach Collections are treated as folders rather than categories.
Services like Crunchyroll support episode 0 → pilot episode in the first season and summary episode in seasons 2+ as well as episode 6.5, an optional summary episode that goes between 6 and 7.
Episode reordering requires a completely different thought process and a lot of extra data on how to group and associate episodes on the filesystem differently to how you want them to appear in Plex based on your preferred watch order for that Storyline.
My thoughts on other data types
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Audiobooks → fits into the existing Plex system because audio-playback is already a thing, but you’ll need to add a 3x playback mode. If this existed in Plex, it might be easier to finally dump Audible because there’d be a market for personal audiobooks. I know they exist, but not for everything on Audible.
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eBooks → This could be a whole app all on its own. I wonder if other companies can integrate your Plex library into their apps, so you could use something like a Kindle but keep your books and “watch time” in Plex.
It’s not uncommon to wanna sync up audiobooks and eBooks either. I think these two go hand-in-hand.
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Comics/Manga
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Manwa comics (tall vertical comics) that you read top to bottom in seconds.
Plex as a Social Media Platform?
Unlike others, I don’t understand this business move.
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I understand “we want to provide customers with a product they’ll pay for”.
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I understand “it costs a lot to support every device in existence”.
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I don’t understand how “we want all the money” is gonna help us out as customers.
Per that other post in the fireside chat, is it really that Plex has 16 MILLION (wow!) active users? Congratulations 
!
Where did this come from?
From what it sounds like, these non-community folks are excited to let Plex look at all their personal pictures and documents and use that to help build a profile to sell to advertisers.
It seems unbelievable to me that the “unplug me” platform Plex is pivoting in this way. I assume that people in charge of the business have a closer relationship to customers than I do, so they probably know what they’re doing more than I would, but as a customer, this doesn’t make me see a long-term future with the company.
You know what I don’t want? Ads and telemetry on my own personal media server.
The future of Plex Media Server
I don’t see a good future for Plex. I understand that different parts of the company have different priorities, but let’s say 99% of Plex’s income comes from ads and spying on users. Why would Plex even bother with the 1% of maintaining the home media server part of the business with the massive overhead that requires?
If you’re gonna keep supporting that 1%, then it needs to funnel into your bottom line; therefore, Plex Media Server will need the same adware and telemetry as the social media product. If you’ve invested all that time and money into spying on users, it makes sense to take advantage of it on the remaining 1% of your horizontal initiatives; otherwise, you’d simply kill off that product line altogether or sell it off to another company.
I’m not seeing a healthy future for Plex Media Server since it’s going to run counter to the company’s revenue streams. Please tell me how I’m wrong 
!
The fact that the fireside chats occurred and this thread exists are evidence things are going in the right direction for now. You guys are trying to regain customer confidence, and aside from the social media elephant in the room, it’s working!
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Over in the Plex Labs Forum, Elan said something about a planned or forthcoming pre-built SD Card image for making a “headless” Plexamp on a Raspberry Pi. In light of the recent announcement concerning the “unbundling” of media types into multiple Plex Client Apps, I guess Plexamp is the new Plex Music App. Great.
Can I expect a similar SD card for the Plex (video) app, PlexPhotos, etc? Maybe I could dump Roku altogether and get uncompressed 4K video over wired GB Ethernet. This would give me a Plex Appliance, which is yet another appliance Dear Wife won’t like, but we know TiVo is on its way out (they apparently dropped OTA for example) and we’ll probably want PlexTV to be the replacement. We already have an HD Homerun tuner and fool with it some through Plex. The Plex DVR and Live TV experience on Roku or Android isn’t as good as TiVo but we’ve accepted we’re not going to replace the TiVo unless there’s some miracle at Xperi and maybe not even then. It’s sad but. On the upside, Plex Discover looks really promising, but to really make it work it’s going to require Prime Video, Hoopla, Internet Archive (?), YouTube, PBS, and other streaming apps on the Raspberry as well. IOW, a whole new platform with a tiny market share for these guys to support unless “PlexPi” can provide (say) an Android emulator for them to run in.
Another problem with this is we’d want the TV display and the current Logitech Harmony Remote (yes, I know) to be the “head” for such an appliance. Maybe there could be another solution for input and navigation like a tablet or a wireless keyboard/mouse combo, but this is clunky compared to a one-handed remote with physical buttons. I don’t know what could be done. Not having to know is what was so attractive about TiVo versus the HTPC (remember that?). Maybe clunky is the price of loose integration – it always has been.
Very promising architectural direction for clients anyway. I’d love to see the backend revisited to move away from “files” and towards “containers” so PMS can support CD, DVD & Blu Ray Images with Cue Sheets, Album-at-a-Time FLAC+CUE and the like. But I understand that’s baked-in pretty deep.
Good work. Feeling better about Plex.
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