I think we can all agree that podcast support in Plex is a hot mess. I know it can’t be fixed overnight, but a few overall changes would greatly improve its usability! Currently, I use Plex to manage and consume all of my media EXCEPT podcasts. Let’s change that!
By default, a newly added podcast is sorted new to old. This is a good default, as it’s what most users probably expect, however, it comes with consequences in Plex. When sorted new to old, playing the latest episode of a podcast will then queue EVERY previous episode of the podcast, whether the episodes have been played or not. If anything, an episode’s played status should be respected and not added to the queue. To avoid this behavior, sorting needs to be changed from old to new. At least this gives a somewhat expected result with the queue if listening to a podcast in order. However, as before, played status is not respected, and every newer episode is added to the queue.
(Every episode below episode #170 in the screenshot below has been marked as played, but is added to the queue when the podcast is sorted new to old.)
Using the web interface, there is no visual indication of whether and episode is played/unplayed. As far I as know, they only way to know is to select the options for a specific episode and see if you can mark the episode as played or unplayed.
On Deck seems to only half work. It’s accurate for some podcasts, but for others that have had episodes manually marked played/unplayed, it doesn’t seem to get updated.
For the podcast Reply All, I marked all episodes as played, then marked the 2 of the 3 latest episodes as unplayed. It now no longer appears under On Deck, even though you can see it shows unplayed episodes on the My Podcast tab.
If you start listening and have an episode in progress, it will return to On Deck.
I’m sure I forgot something, but these are the major annoyances that really limit usability of podcasts. Sorting and queuing is absolutely broken and should take priority.
I have a few suggestions for how podcasts are handled in Plexamp, but maybe we can get some of the above handled first!
(On a side note, in the web interface, clicking on Podcasts will always take you to the Recommended tab. It doesn’t seem to remember the selected tab.)
Feel free to post other issues or complaints, but please keep it constructive. Let’s not have this turn into a Plex hate-fest. That won’t accomplish anything. 
