Hello, I would like to give some feedback on critical things related to the fairly new Discover feature and to the Watchlist feature.
First of all, I have tried other tools, methods and apps that did something similar to what the Plex Discover feature does, so I’ve gathered some experience on it, specially in the last few months.
After knowing about the new Discover feature, I decided to try it out and started adding movies to my ‘watchlist’ on Plex, and in doing so I’ve encountered some problems or, in my viewing, really critical features/options missing.
First: when I click or open the page of some of the movies that I’ve already added to my Plex Watchlist, it still shows me the option ‘add to watchlist’ instead of ‘remove from watchlist’. I don’t know if it’s some sort of visual problem or something, but I do know that it happens with frequency.
Second: in our watchlist, we really need an option to filter movies that are currently available on ‘my streaming services’ and on my personal plex server(s). It is really frustrating to scroll my watchlist, choose a movie only to discover that that movie is on, let’s say Apple TV+ (a streaming service I don’t have) instead of Netflix (a streaming service I have). Plex already has the information on the streaming services I have, because of the Manage Streaming Services option linked to the Discover feature.
What happens to that movie on your watchlist if you add it “again”? Are there two entries on the watchlist for the movie/show? Or is it just the “Add to watchlist” button is showing an incorrect state for a movie/show that you added?
How did you get a movie/show onto your watchlist if you don’t have the streaming service that the movie/show is available on? Or are you adding items from your library, then planning to use this watchlist to view them on the legit service if it’s available you subscribe to it? (not a bad idea, to “support” these items by flagging it as popular).
When using “Discover”, it honors your wish to only display items from services you chose to view. However, the watchlist (and search) ignore that selection, showing ALL available services for an item. This is because the watchlist is basically a front-end for Plex’s own metadata site, watch.plex.tv. This site displays all legal services to view an item, and displays that regardless of your server settings (streaming services subscribing). Knowing this, it’s going to be difficult to customize the data coming from the watch.plex site to include server-specific settings like that, so I understand why it’s lacking in the first place.
I’ve been adding movies from a list I created on Letterboxd some months ago, where I had all the movies in my lists from the streaming services I’m subscribed to, and from my personal plex server. I tagged them to the respective service, but the problem was that I had to manually adjust each movie once they left a specific streaming service and went to another or to none. It was very unpractical in the long run.
While verifying Plex to answer correctly what you asked, I noticed that there’s this ‘tab’ or ‘list’ on Discover, that says ‘‘Available From Your Watchlist’’, which I can click on to expand, or click on the little arrows on the right of the screen to move to the back. It kinda does what I wanted, but the problem is that there’s no way to order it other than the standard ‘Newest to Oldest’, so if I want to get to the older movies it takes a pretty long time.
And by the way, I think I found a bug on the Plex app using the browser, where on this said ‘Available From Your Watchlist’ tab, if I try to change the view from ‘Grid’ or ‘Detail’ to ‘Table View’, it bugs out and I can’t go back to the other viewing options, because the button is gone, it just says ‘Something Went Wrong’. Is there a way for me to reset my app settings? I tried on two different browsers after It bugged, and it’s still bugged.
I’ve never had reason to press it, but it sounds like it deletes all local cookies for this site so it acts like you have never loaded up Plex on this browser. Since settings like views (grid vs list), pinned libraries, and more are set per client, this should reset it for you. As it warns, you will be taken back to the “setup” screen, where you pick which pinned sources to display, and will have to re-order them.
As of the Watchlist and streaming services thing I was suggesting, I think I’ll create a topic specifically about the lack of options on the ‘Available From Your Watchlist’ list, because it’s basically what I wanted, It actually filters out the movies that are not on my streaming services.
