First experience with Plex Pass (bugs, expectation, wishes....)

Feature Suggestions
1
Hello, I have all latest version from 2014.04.12 (with plexpass)
When I bought plexPass few days ago I was expecting the following to perfectly work (I spent 1h to test it), unfortunately my assumptions were not right):
- Being able to add sync music to the queue (useful in car trip with kids etc...)
- Sync an online video (like plext it + Sync -- useful in long airplane or car trip for open course, youtube etc...)
- Easier way to sync 1 music (not necessarily the full album, like just press music and propose "download", or some check box to select the musics I want to download...)
- Bug: Music Sync well on ios but they do not on my 2 android devices, one of the devices is a Nexus 7. It seems the music is locally downloaded (as some space is taken) but the ui isn't displaying the musics (album etc...)...the videos are ok)
- Play Photos / family videos: should be able to play from the folder where I click and all down (recursively)...Also should allow to play photos shuffled, by time, etc....
- Allow search while offline (local search on the sync content, like I'm planning to sync my whole music library on all my devices, but without a search that will be hard to use)
- Bug: Sometime the sync content just disappear from my android and ios devices for no reason, it might be related to shutting down the Qnap as the next day I started the qnap and they appeared.....not too sure what happened there...
 
Didn't expect but would love to see:
- Save queue as 'play list' that can be made and save on ios and the sync for other devices to pickup
- Play list (that can be share with all the plex devices and I can sync a play list and it should import the play list + musics or videos)... As you are working on the play list, another thing that will be great that is related is a "party mode" (and every body will be able to discover Plex ;)) Like being able to add music to the current queue and if it can work when offline from an ipad/ipod etc... that will be awesome (like when we do car trip for instance we add music to the current queue each one our turn, the trip feel shorter) - may be being able also to save the full queue as a new playlist can be also nice...
- "Party mode" Queue, where we can just quickly very easily add music and video to the list from any device to play, it should work online as well as offline...goes back to first item)
- Auto-update of servers and clients for msft (msft like)
- Auto start server on windows as a service (so I can just power on the machines and everything is up without even login or needing the screen on etc..)
- It will be nice if re-installing the ios app didn't loose all the sync content (like it could propose to erase all or keep sync content as that can be very long to make again...musics, videos...or worst case it could remember automatically what was on the device and sync it again automatically)
- it will be nice if changing the content folder on android devices didn't erase all the sync files but appended them or just move them to the new folder.
- Trailer of movies (in the description, a bit like netflix does it)
- screen saver should be able to play at a set of photos from a folder (recursively down) + some optional music (recursively down --- or a play list will be even better)..being able to have also a movie or family videos being play but with a music play list (instead of the movie sound) will be awesome for parties...so it seems 2 // play list might do the trick (one for visual (video, music clip, picture, family video) and one for the sound (native content or a music play list, radio etc..)
- Bug: I saw a bunch of issues when trying to control a roku movie from an iphone or ipad.
 
Great addition:
- Book library (most book format as well as pdf, should work with "sync" will make it awesome)
- Comics library (those usually are bunch of image in a folder or zip, should work with plex sync)
- TV + vcr 
- internet TV
- Concatenate all the Video menu from diff plex server as one (like I can still see of them individually as it is right now but there is the master one where all are concatenated...same thing for music, photos etc...)
- internet radio
 
Basically Plex as the potential to become "THE Multimedia station" of any house if few features are added (like play list, books, comics, movie trailer, something that plug to free university classes (I can plex it! but can't Sync it to play it offline), being able to mark a movie to be deleted in 1 month after everybody watched it (like there are movies you want to keep and some no), being able to filter movies by languages or countries will also be a great addition (like my family in law speak French and Spanish, if I could easily find at all the comedy in french or western in Spanish ;)...
 
If all those feature could be in, that will become the best media center for every house by far.
 
I hope this help
 
Regards
 
w
 
 
2

There is a discussion about almost every one of these items on the forum, which you could have read prior to buying a PlexPass.  

3

Granted, a lot of those discussions occur in PlexPass only forums, but Yea. This belongs more in the general section, where it will really get seen.


Regarding your issues, it sounds like they mainly revolve around sync and music. Sync is still technically in beta, and does have some problems. Re music, plex really has a long way to go in the way of music. Hopefully one day, but the focus is really on video content now, I think.


Some of your suggestions are limited by the operating systems, like reinstalling on iOS, there’s no way to save data after uninstalling, no way around that.

4

I spend a lot of hours every day on a computer, if I wanted to read all the plex forum to verify every plexpass feature describe here

https://plex.tv/features

that will take a lot of time....anyway I choose to pay for plexpass so I do not have to spend too much time on xbmc forums to customize it.

My suggestion are to help to make it a great product from my point of view, right now, to me, there is not much added value as it is today compare to the free version.

I understand adding hardware bring more customers but I believe solid foundation are more important with a good set of feature that are rock solid (sync is an important PlexPass feature to me).

All my comments are not just about music (even if music is advertise here https://plex.tv/features) 

Note:

- It will be nice to fix the Sync bugs I reported.

- Pity the sync file can't be copied or propose to 'not erase' them when we re-installing the app, then I would suggest to save the list of uids of what has been sync on the server and to propose to re-sync on any device (so re-convert the movies automatically if needed etc...if there is no way to do it, I guess , that might be an issue for the long run as people might want to sync a bunch of movies or music and doing this manually takes time, loosing that work isn't good, and time is what I do not have and crave for)

For the best of plex

w

5

Why are you reinstalling the app on iOS often enough for that to be an issue? I know its just one of your complaints, but why not… Just leave it installed?


Re Music: Plex does play music, so it does belong on the features page. Its just not as full featured a music server as say, subsonic or some others. That’s all I was

6

I needed to re-install it 2 times, I was testing Plex sync and after using it for 1 or 2h I'm not sure what I did but the app was crashing right away from the start so I uninstall it and re-install it but I was surprise to see all my sync content was not there anymore (it takes time to specify the video and musics..I guess I do not mind if the computer need to re-process 2 times the content as long as it save me time...I value my time to redo the sync content more)....

Will upgrading the app be the same as re-installing it, I mean will the sync content be lost? if yes then I think something need to be done so the user doesn't spend time to re-doing its sync content....

Another idea for the sync content is to either 1) have a list of what is sync on the server (that we can sync again easily, same device or another one) or to 2) press a button "backup content" before re-installing so it copied the sync content on the server and then once install we can sync/restore again (and delete the backup).....(I guess (2) is faster as it doesn't need to convert again, (1) is interesting as you can share those list on divers devices, ideally a mix or both ;))

...I'm traveling few months a year so I guess no app update while traveling otherwise the offline content is lost....

I will check subsonic, it seems to have offline playlist for music (and they seem to handle video too, I'm wondering if that works well...ah...more time to spend for testing.....c'est la vie modern....). Thanks 

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2021 clean-up: cluster of individual suggestions, bugs…