I have just wasted quite a few hours of my life following old and outdated advice about how to use a Plex client to play DVDs from my MacMini’s (Plex media server) DVD drive… Only to discover that all the posts and advice has been superceded by a bug for which there is no sign of a fix that I can find.
OK that was annoying. But what was more annoying was that searches brought up no information on this feature - or it’s off-the-air-status. And there are references to actions that make no sense to me yet. I still have not been able to fathom what it means to “add an application” to the Plex client. If this is still something that even makes sense in the current version I have to ask, why doesn’t a search on “adding applications” lead to clear descriptions of what that means, what it applies to, and how to do it?
But here’s the flip side. If it doesn’t makes sense any more and it isn’t a part of the current versions. It obviously once was. So why doesn’t the aforementioned search lead straight to an explanation of why it was deprecated and what replaced it?
Having nothing at the end of terms and concepts that are in currency across the vast number of posts and blogs and other Plex community contributions is very poor support.
An agile product leaves a trail of bit rot and information death in its wake. Supporting it has to acknowledge and deal with that.
So… I have subscribed. And as one of the paying customers here is a ‘feature’ request I really hope someone takes seriously… A comprehensive, complete, indexed and searchable, oh, and well written end user manual for Plex that stays completely up to date with the agile folk who are iterating the code-base / feature set. And one which intelligently mops up the trail of decaying support information left by previous iterations.
We are working very hard on a brand new manual/wiki page.
Kind of off-topic, but wanted to answer your question:
I can add to this that adding applications was only possible in Plex /Eight which was a few years ago. That feature was not brought over to Plex /Nine, at least not to Laika which is the current PMC version (0.9.5.4).
It is possible that you can play DVD's in PHT, which you now can download as you are a Plexpass subscriber. But I have honestly not looked into if the DVD feature is in there as I have not been using a computer with DVD drive for a couple of years. I know Tobias worked on getting it at least semi-working, but I also know there is discussions on the future of that feature. It might be a feature which wont be around for much longer (absolutely nothing is decided yet though).
With that said, PHT is open source. So anyone with knowledge can add DVD support if the devs decide to not mess with the optical drive/DVD support anymore. For example bring it over from XBMC.
Very glad to hear the manual/wiki will (soon?) catch up to current Plex 9 public releases. And I think it would be very helpful to have PlexPass release changes included--perhaps a note in each relevant wiki section, indicating changes that are pertinent to that particular functionality. That would be useful to all Plex users, including PlexPass members.
Early 2021 clean-up: implemented (see http://support.plex.tv/articles/)
