Please reconsider sunsetting manually installed plugins/channels. I totally understand if you no longer want to support in-app installed ones, but even if it’s only a small percentage of we users who use them, for us, they’re a godsend. I really don’t want to have to use kodi just for a couple of features. Please!
Edit: Phrasing as a feature request: Please resume support for manually installed plugins server-side with the ability to access them in all plex clients. No need to support the plugin directory or even particularly support the plugin API. It would be great if you could release a more robust plugin API 2.0, but let’s start with what we already have.
+1 as well here. I’m not sure that the subtitles search stuff will rival Sub-Zero, and there’s several plugins like NBC I use on a regular basis (especially since it works better than, say, the roku native app).
Please don’t just cut off features like this, unless there’s an established migration path to similar functionality.
It’s probably sites like NBC that are part of another problem not really talked about. Many plugins scrape data or link to videos on other sites against the TOS of those sites.
Reading between the lines, I don’t think Plex wants to encourage this type of thing moving forward for obvious reasons.
If Plex’s Live TV service would stop locking my entire HDHomeRun and preventing other devices in the house from using any of its tuners, I’d be a billion times more comfortable losing the HDHR Viewer plug-in.
I know that’s not your fault, but I had to vent somewhere.
I’d guess you’re onto something here. On the other hand, considering that plex’s entire ecosystem depends on the goodwill of users in terms of using legal content, I’m not sure I see why plugins should be treated any differently. And in any case, there are countless plugins that are entirely above board and useful that are going to get caught up in this decision.
I suppose I just don’t see the need to kill manual installation of plug-ins. Nobody expected plex to provide support for them and nobody ever will. Not maintaining the directory is entirely understandable, but let’s leave it at that if at all possible.
I know they won’t change their mind, so it is what it is.
I can say that my better half is already disappointed at the impending death of the plugins. She used them to watch her favorite shows 5 days a week. This was one of the reasons I paid for Plex. I paid for appreciation that this was an option, not because I thought it was something I got because I paid.
It is a true bummer though. There are days where I use the plugins more than I watch my own content. Guess I’m one of the rare few.
When I first read that Plex would be discontinuing plugins because less than 2% of users were using them, I was worried that Plex may have taken the wrong message from plugins’ lack of use. Were they not used because people don’t care about plugins, or because the plugins experience didn’t live up to expectations?
I am firmly in the camp of believing the latter, and it seems that the Plex team may be too. I am heartened that they included in their statement:
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.
I sure hope they have something to share soon!
On that note, I’d like to take a moment to offer my opinion on why plugins failed, and what I would find to be more useful.
I initially loved the idea of Plex plugins, and installed more than a few. And then… I never used them. Why?
Nothing in Plex ever reminded me about the plugins. They were just there… if I never clicked into them, I didn’t know when there was anything new.
When I did click into the plugins, they didn’t track when I’d last opened them, so I still had no clue what was new.
Navigation was entirely via dull text-based content trees (DLNA-style ). No icons/pictures/previews of content.
No search. (I probably can’t stress this enough.)
Too many dead limbs within the content trees leading to a message of “No content.” (If the folder is empty… gee, don’t list that folder.)
Here’s where I think plugins need to go for a re-envisioning:
Ideally, I think plugin channels should work like RSS feeds. When visiting Plex each day I could see a list showing everything new that had been posted across all my plugin channels since my last visit.
I’d like to be able to search for things from the main menu of Plex and find things within the plugin channels. And I’d like to be able to search within specified channels too, of course.
I want to “subscribe” to particular shows or content within the plugin channels, and have Plex alert me when new content matching my criteria has been added.
Finally, I want Plex to (via opt-in feature) start making recommendations about things I might like based on what it already knows I like. This could apply to both plugins and DVR. If I opt-in to share information about my library with Plex, just like Netflix knows what people watch and makes recommendations based on that, Plex could do the same. (Plex is now doing recommendations with Podcasts, so I’m hoping that’s just the beginning!)
just chiming in with the rest of you 2%-ers.
really really dislike the direction plex is taking with all this removal of features.
subtitles work perfectly well from plugins, and ill be shocked if its as good as subzero. why are you re-inventing the wheels?
frustrated with all this, and i know nothing we say here matters. but i guess venting helps me.
plugins are what made me get a lifetime plex pass.
The replacement is going to be a paid plug-in store. The writing is on the wall. This is the direction that Plex has decided to go. They don’t care about user input anymore as seen in the “private test” of the mobile app redesign.
Every move made in the past year is pointing to additional paid services through Plex. Cloud Storage gone, you bet it’ll be back within a year and cost money. Plug-ins gone, you can bet there will be a plug-in storefront in a year. This in addition to the addition of a “News” and “Podcast” section where they can inject sponsored content. They have never ever denied this in every forum post calling them out because they know they can’t because it’s one hundred percent true. They don’t care about the user any more, at this point it is gain every dollar or Euro or whatever as quick as possible because this ship is sinking.
A lot of Plex features don’t get used because they aren’t fully functional the way users need them to work. Cloud Sync was cool but only did about 90% of what we needed it to do. Conversions the same way. Plug-in about 80%. Why couldn’t I setup a plug to act like a library to the user and grant individual access? Plex Home is great but not if you ever have internet outages as you can’t login to your local server without the net. Look at the state of Live TV/DVR 2 years in, can’t even allow family members to record, etc. News and Podcasts that can’t be turned off at the server level and forced on clients. The list of “unfinished features” is long and makes using them hard to do.
The trend is that Plex gets a feature to the point of it being a marketing list bullet item and then they move on to the next “great item”. There is not a properly thought out plan of how the feature will actually get used and how it should be built. Everything is RAD development and it’s showing more and more as the days go by. Plex is also now built for them vs for the user. This has always been the case actually. Example you can’t allow a user to download a file as that’s only for the admin. You can’t determine what users on your system can access Live TV or Record and can only share with home users. These are arbitrary decisions based on how they want the product to work vs how the users want the product to work.
Until this type of mentality changes expect other things to get pulled as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the conversions yanked next since it doesn’t work well with the streaming brain due to not thinking things out before coding.
Sorry to vent but the list of disappointing decisions being made just keeps growing and things are getting worse, not better IMHO.
Plex Plugins is a huge deal for me. I use it constantly to access on demand shows from NBC, ABC, FOX, CW, CBS, ect. Sure this is free content and you can access it directly form their own apps but using Plex Plugin strips out advertisement and commercials. So it’s a deal breaker for me if Plex removes this feature. Can somebody recommend another service as a alternative to Plex Plugins that accesses NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS free on demand content that strips out commercials/advertisement like Plex does?
That’s probably the heart of the issue. They are presently using content not belonging to them and removing the mechanism for them to make $. Nothing is free. These networks don’t give the content away but mix in the advertisement with it. Instead of charging you access they monetize the streams with advertisements.
You’re best alternatives is going to be using the official apps from ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, etc.
I have created my own plugins to access streaming sites where I have a subscription and also some local radio stations so that I can do “everything” from within Plex. Rather than losing support for plugins I would like a better support and wouldn’t mind an app store where you even have to pay for some plugins. I would also like to watch Youtube and Netflix from Plex, a “one-stop-shop”. Jumping around between different devices or using websites to access streams just gives me a headache and I tend to listen and watch less…
Since I have developed plugins myself I fully understand the problems with plugins failing for every little change in a website layout if the service you are accessing doesn’t have a proper API and for some websites it may be illegal to scrape their content (e.g. when the content is sponsored by advertising). Emby, for instance, write that plugins are not allowed to be “Using ‘web scraping’ techniques to obtain data from a web site.” and that would invalidate all my plugins.
Most likely I can use one Plex server with support for plugins and make sure it is never updated, while I have another one for movies and music but again, I want one single integrated app for “everything”.
What alternatives do we have? Kodi is too messy for me (even if it is much faster than Plex, which is nice) and after testing Emby 3.5 for my music and movies, it wasn’t very stable and I had some problems with the user interface (only tested the web UI). Their plugin policy is the real deal breaker though.
Just don’t distribute them.