Dear Plex,
As a long time Plex Pass member (5+ years) I want to say THANK YOU!
Thank you for creating such as wonderful software platform solution that has enabled myself and my family and friends to enjoy our many multimedia content items. You have allowed us to easily consume our massive libraries of music and video content across our vast and diverse range of technology hardware devices.
In a world of Apple IOS vs. Android, Linux vs. Windows, there is one argument that never requires any person to choose sides….Plex is amazing and everyone can agree on that.
I have not and do not post many things on the forums, nor have I made many (if any) requests over the years. I usually wait patiently for Plex to do their MAGIC and give me something wonderful to play with. But today will be my first forum request.
As the world is rapidly changing and running towards this new 4K (or UHD), H.264 vs. H.265/HEVC, etc, etc…there are a few things that I feel Plex needs to adapt to.
I need Plex players (all of them where possible) to provide the option of automatic resolution changing. My use case is;
I am now a proud owner of a Sony Bravia X930D (Yes, the new 2016 Model). It is an Android TV. An inconvenient observation I am dealing with is the Bravia Android software disables, or enables, certain functionalities based on source resolutions.
Example:
i. Using my Apple Mac Mini and the Plex Home theatre application, When I set the Plex app to 3840x2160 the Sony 4K TV will disable all 3D functions because the Mac Mini can only do 30fps (HDMI 1.4). This requires me to now go back into Plex settings and back down the resolution to 1920x1080
ii. When setting the Plex app to 3840x2160 the Sony TV will disable its built-in 4K upscale ability as it assumes the content source is already 4K. As you can understand I have most content in 1080p/24p and due to Plex requirements to continuously go back into settings and change the resolution back to 1080p you can imagine this is an inconvenience I believe can be easily fixed by Plex looking at the meta data of the video item being played and triggering the Plex app to change its current resolution to the native resolution of the video content item being used. And likewise, when the video playback is stopped the Plex app can automatically go back to the preferred 4K resolution or whatever res. the user has specified. If a user wishes to run 1080p as their base screen res. the Plex app could auto switch to 3840x2160 when it sees a 4K video file being accessed.
3D Content? I know some feel 3D is disappearing, but I still love watching 3D movies. I know this question has been brought before, but I am hoping that times have changed or evolved to allow 3D MVC ability. Simply put, I would like to take a 3D Bluray file (such as ISO) and have Plex Player execute the same way and Bluray players can execute it. I have read on the internet that another program called Vidon has the ability to do this. So I am hoping Plex can somehow put that ability into the Plex player or possibly transcode that ability on the server side.
The Android TV app. I know it is still beta, so I reserve my criticism of a work in progress. But how quickly can you add a buffer to the Android TV app. To my SHOCK the very expensive 4K TVs from Sony only have a 100Mbps NIC, and even so the dual core CPU they use will never go above 60-80Mbps of that. Due to my very large movie items (20-40Gbytes in size) and my desire for Direct Play and Stream, I feel a 75 – 500 MByte buffer is required. I always receive the message on the Sony TV Plex App that the network speed cannot handle the 4K item that I am playing, AND I notice occasional problems playing large file 1080P content.
ALSO…The Plex Android TV App does not allow 3D. My Sony TV disables its 3D ability when using the Android Plex app…Not sure if that is something that can be fixed on your side. Maybe the Android TV OS has an attribute or flag that needs to be enabled to allow 3D use…Just guessing, I don’t know…
And my final request for the Android TV Plex app. H.265/HEVC….Can you add a user setting to control the level of decoding used? I noticed on Apple TV (which I hated and returned the next day) it had a setting to tell Apple TV how much CPU horsepower to use for handling H.265. Yes, you can go with a weaker/lower level of decoding and it will cost you 4K picture quality, but clearly the Sony X1 processor is not up to the job of large H.265 decoding. I know some will tell me to recode these items to H.264, but given the very weak 100Mbps NIC I must avoid larger bit streams.
