Well said. I’ve got both Plex and Emby right now and primarily use Emby because they have so much more functionality and the devs are EXTREMELY responsive to users. They respond to everyone in a matter of hours. That doesn’t mean enhancements are introduced frequently, but they listen AND respond. They seem to be running into the same issue every dev team does though…too many bugs to track down.
As for Free TV…ugh! I don’t recall seeing anyone ask for this. Linking to our Netflix and Prime accounts yes, but not free garbage TV.
I’m pretty sure the Free TV is more a sponsorship thing. & them getting money from Crackle means more resources to implement the stuff they want, & was probably pretty easy on the developers because they just add something given to them by the other side’s developers & test it
I highly doubt it. Plex has been adding useless features for a long time now and it’s given zero time back to implement features that users are asking for. Only new features I can think of in the past few years is Watch Together and Skip Intro. Other than that it’s been pretty sparse.
That’s not what I meant, what I meant was that it’s a thing that probably took very little time, a thing that more people are going to appreciate in these troubled times, & probably brings them a small amount of revenue. & that revenue is important if we want improvements to happen
Not directed at you, my apologies. It sounds like we’re not in big disagreement.
I think it’s downright weird how much time and attention people spend in the forums saying that Plex is wrong, that the human beings at Plex only do the wrong things, haven’t made any improvements, etc. The amount of negative conjecture just makes me sad and tired.
Sorta wish I hadn’t said anything, I don’t want to add to the negativity.
@Volts LOL I never said anything about them getting rich. Far from it. Only point, and the point made repeatedly in this forum is that as users we’ve been BEGGING Plex to bring us some features that we’ve actually asked for. But, sadly, it’s just more of what no one is asking for. Was Free TV in the top 5 features that you’ve been waiting for? If it was, well…that’s weird, man.
Hah, no. It definitely wasn’t. I like the music videos though.
“They would have said they wanted a faster horse.” - mis-quote of something Ford probably didn’t say anyway.
If I squint I can see how maybe the ad-supported content fits in with other stuff they’ve rolled out, and I can imagine that somebody at Plex has an idea of where they want to take things.
I like what Plex gives me today, and that’s why I use it and paid for what I use. I’d enjoy more transparency about the road map, but it’s not something I expect from any small business. There has been more communication from Elan and a few employees recently, and I’ve appreciated it.
I don’t mean to call you out specifically, either. It seems so common across the forums. People criticizing and complaining about Plex having “lost their way” while asking for specific features and improvements.
If I was a human being at Plex it would really bring me down to read that stuff.
You’re good. I totally get the frustration. On a different Feature Request I keep trying to PLEXplain that the “Simple” thing they are talking about isn’t simple, I tried to make a suggestion that would give pretty much 90% of what they are asking for, without causing problems that make it pretty much a Snowman trying to move to the Yucatán Peninsula. But all I got was a bunch of responses about how simple it was & how “So many” (like 300) had requested it.
The thing is that the harder a feature is to implement & the more it would negatively impact existing users the harder it is to implement. This one doesn’t seam like it would be too hard, but I don’t actually know. If it’s a much requested feature but it hasn’t been implemented I guarantee there are reasons we just don’t realize.
On that note, making a suggestion that would make it easier to implement would be a step in the right direction. For example, Subtitles have Language Code that you add to the file to tell Plex what to tell the user it is. For multiple cuts they’d need to have a similar thing, so it has to be Something without Spaces that you could put on the end of the video file like the language code
Like:
Big Trouble (2002).DIR.mp4
Would be labeled Director's Cut
While Big Trouble (2002).MST3K.mp4
Would be labled Vusual Commentary &
Big Trouble (2002).POP.mp4
Would be labled as Pop-Up Features &
Big Trouble (2002).DEL.mp4
Would be labeled as With Deleted Scenes
While Big Trouble (2002).mp4 or anything in the folder, Banana.mkv, Big Trouble house walkthrough.avi, Mom's knitting vid that got put in the wrong folder.mov
Would get labeled as Unknown with the bit-rate or just as they are now
Yeah I’m in your shoes there. The “why can’t I have this feature, it’s so OBVIOUS and SIMPLE” makes my eyes roll back in my skull.
It’s painful to recognize that I’m probably just as bad. “You don’t have to do all of this extravagant stuff everybody else wants, if you just do the thing I want, that would be MUCH EASIER and should obviously satisfy everybody else, too…”
I think that what you’ve just described is actually super complicated too.
Different editions have different release dates, dimensions, reviews, run lengths, and other metadata. What should be displayed?
Which edition should be the “primary”?
Different ratings mean library sharing & permissions need to be considered.
How does a user choose to sync or download a specific edition?
I’d like to put specific editions into collections. Can I?
What if I have multiple files & encodings of the same edition?
For each edition, should the date match the original movie, or when the special edition/extra was released?
Who is the curator/librarion for edition naming? No matter how many edition names you can think of, I can think of a few more.
Adding “edition name codes” into file names makes file naming and matching even more complicated.
Which metadata provider can Plex leverage for this?
Yeah, definitely. I was just going off of what whoever was saying about having the “Play Version” menu JUST have labels. So I was trying to think of a solution, obviously not a perfect one, but one that might lead more knowledgeable people, & ones who care more, to a good solution
In my example I think it’d just be like the regular way Plex does it now. The Highest Resolution Version a device can play would be the “Primary” version
That’s a VERY good point, I hadn’t even thought about the Obviously Adult But Rated PG-13 Movie.UR.mp4 Unrated versions. Though it would be more complicated maybe there’d be a way to include a rating restriction to a tag like UnratedUR
That’s an issue that already exists, when someone syncs they have no control over version anyway. I’m sure there’s a Feature Request for that, & those people are probably having the same “But it’s so simple” discussion on their page
This one is something that if you’d want to do you’d probably have it listed as a different movie, but is definitely something that people would want, but again goes to a separate issue, like I’m sure people who have The Lord Of The Rings movies in their library want an Extended Edition playlist & a Theatrical Edition playlist which is currently not possible with the Play Version settings anyway. So, again, that’s a separate issue
I think It’d just be the same as it is now, You’d have Fierce Creatures (1997).DIR.mp4 & Fierce Creatures (1997) [SD].DIR.mp4 & they’d be displayed as: Director's Cut 1080p 9.4Mbps Director's Cut 480p 1.1Mbps
For what we’re talking about it’d be nested within the movie, so those would just be the same as the movie, there’s no editing that on special features, & again, if someone wants them with that different they’re probably gonna have them as 2 separate listings anyway
That’s the thing, from the PLEXtory I can assure you that the choices would be limited. And they most definitely would be decided by whatever Plex Hierarchy normally makes decisions about those things. I know from my specific desires I’m certain I’ll have to just accept that limitation. Like Movie Special Features, we have a list of what we can use
-behindthescenes
-deleted
-featurette
-interview
-scene
-short
-trailer
-other
If you want something else too bad, so sad. No Gag Reel option, so I sort those as a Short. We know Plex will never give us more than a few options, We can suggest what we want, & hope that if enough people say “I’d really like that one too” they’ll choose it for their list. Like in my above example the Director's Cut will likely make the cut, the Deleted Scenes one has a decent chance, but I am 90% certain that the Visual Commentary one will never see the light of day, I list it because it’s something I want, but I know it will get not a lot of call. Even though there are a handful of Movies that DO do a Picture-In-Picture commentary, I do not expect there are enough, & the number of people who are going to want a Standard version of Santa Clause Conquers The Martians (1964) to sit next to a MST3K version are probably limited to myself & the 12 other people who purchased the BluRay version of the Best bad Christmas movie of all time. Then the Pop-Up version I wouldn’t expect to make the cut either, but I have hope because a number of movies like “Birds Of Prey” have a Bird's Eye View special feature.
This would all be sans-matadata because there is no Metadata involvement with Special Features, Subtitles, or Versions
The reason I used the naming codes is because it’s a system that already exists, both of which are handled by a dumb call from the Scanner & not the Metadata Agent. It would be a “simple” (I use this only ½ ironically) If/Then, that’s part of the point of having it use those conventions’ structure that is already there
I should have said that I know all of those things CAN be answered, in one way or another. They’re semi-hypothetical questions. Any answer will probably make half of the people super happy. Another 7 loud crabapples will complain that “Back in my day, Plex cared about users.” Then again, those 7 are crabby as a hobby.
One genuine complexity here is that things like Gag Reels and Deleted Scenes are quite different from Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut.
Even Visual Commentary is different. That’s specifically associated with a particular cut of a movie, rather than being a different cut.
Also I laughed again at Obviously Adult But Rated PG-13 Movie.UR.mp4, because that’s basically an entire movie genre.
I’m adding anything described as “the Best bad Christmas movie of all time” to my shopping list immediately.
Edit: I genuinely wish that alternate VISUAL tracks were common enough that it was worth talking about. Commentary, pop-up, PIP, whatever. I adore audio commentary tracks. Both of these were fun reasons to buy DVDs and took a major step back when streaming got popular.
I’d definitely recommend it, but for optimal viewing pleasure you have to get a group of people who have no problem making fun of it when you watch it. The 1st time I saw it was after my Dad had had it for years but nobody had ever watched it. We were doing a Christmas Movie event at my house where everyone brought their favorite movie & we voted what to watch (My house did a Regular Themed Movie night once a month) we couldn’t decide & I had my parent’s massive DVD collection of Christmas movies & I jokingly suggested it. We ended up doing our own Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary while watching it & it was so good it became a Christmas Tradition for the next 5 years
The Gag Reel was me talking about how the category for special features doesn’t exist. We as PLEXians know & accept this. So we use what is available. I was making a comparison to what could possibly be available. The idea that we could ever get a Custom Named version is shooting too high, because we know that will never happen. You’ll never get a The Richard Donner Cut tag, but a Director's Cut or Visual Commentary are the same in THIS context. They are different files that you select between by Choosing Play Version they are actually playing a different file, but still get counted as “Play History”. The Whole point of this thread can be narrowed down to “We want to be able to have names on the different Versions in Play Version so we can tell them apart”
I totally agree that adding names to “Play Version …” would be better than the current common practice of:
Adding cuts as multiple files on the same Library item
Using “Play Version …” and blindly guessing
Getting angry when you guess wrong
Using “Play Version …” to guess again
(Edit: just to note, Plex doesn’t recommend doing it that way.)
Adding names there would be an improvement for that workflow. I don’t think it would be the same as really implementing a “Multiple Cuts” feature though.
And my guess is that it won’t be implemented like that, even temporarily. I think that in the Plex data model, Versions already have a purpose.
Not true, The Versions are there like an afterthought. Years ago, I’m not sure exactly how long, When you started to play a movie that had 2 versions it would ask which version to play. But the information it gave for the versions was not the most useful, with the exception of if you had an SD version & an HD version. But this was back in the days when if you added 2 of the same they would be shown as different things with the same name until you “Merged” them into 1. When it got to the point where Plex would automatically merge things if they were different versions of the same you still had the option to “Split” them apart. There are times I wish we still had that Merge/Split option. But I understand it’s gone & we have to live with it as it is now. Hopefully if this version option is implemented there will be a Pop-Up version like there used to be, but this time it will have more useful information. I think the reason it went away & into a More menu was because people didn’t want to see a popup asking if they wanted to play the HD version when on an screen that couldn’t play it, & didn’t want a popup asking if they wanted to play the SD version when they are obviously on their High-Def Flatscreen TV. So if there are not tagged versions it’ll just play the same way it does now, auto-detect the best version this screen can handle & use that. That way it will only affect those who want it & use the Tags & not annoy the pleebs who don’t
