Not that anyone care but… I’ve decided to create a list of the issues I have causing me to have a bad experience with plex. I’ll be trying to update each time i remember something.
Music
No audio normalization ( you hear a song loud then you hear a song low)
No music visual effects
random seems not random as i always stumble in the same songs (im even trying to get stats on this through tautulli)
Playlist sorted by Band is a mess, can’t find anything ( example: you skip to the letter ‘D’ just to found bands starting like ‘The Deftones’) so what do I do? I start searching for Deftones in “The…” because thats what I read last time… but wait… they are at ‘D’
Plex amp
while playing a playlist, then adding a song to queue, takes so long, that when the music is finally added to queue the position was already long gone… so the music added wont be played unless you go backward in the list to the position you were when you tried to add it.
search only seems to return a limited number of results? … in my case was 3 results.. even if i put the exact name of the song that I’m looking for still doesnt return it as a result
Samsung tv (tizen)
can’t play lots of videos just due embedded subtitles
i have to turn off embedded subtitle manually if they are not supported and download external ones manually
Most of the errors showing up have nothing to do with the actual error or offer no information whatsoever (example: server is not powerful enough to convert video, when transcoding is off)
for some reason sometimes subtitles and video will just lose the sync
for some reason if Im using plex on smart tv and i go back to my pc to watch something else, it acts like the video is not supported, so i have to logout and login, and its working again
sometimes the interface is reacting with sounds in the background but in the frontend the screen is frozen
having played a music before watching a video, will cause a very weird behavior where the music resumes when we go back to plex menus from the video…
it is possible to login without typing the pin, the interface freezes on login screen but if you press back you somehow can go inside plex and keep watching whatever you want (its an awful security fail) 2024-04
Miscellaneous
having an item in a playlist unable to reproduce will stop the whole playlist from playing (why allow it to attempt to play to start with?)
no indication of which items are supported or not to play in the device we are using
no integration with my smart bulbs ( govee or philips hue )
transfering an item to plex directory will trigger some sort of scan or metadata update (even though the item is not fully transfer and the settings are set to “on scheduled only”), that breaks the player, causing plex be unusable until the tasks are finish or with luck if you are able to cancel in the unresponsive interface.
no music visual effects
no way to identify duplicated files
it would be nice to have a pdf reader to organize and visualize documents similar to photos
support for plugins was basically removed (?)
If im watching something in tizen, and want to continue at pc… for some reason its says my server is not powerful enough to convert video… when i know for a fact its not an issue to play it on pc, if i sign out and in on pc it works normal again
I would be nice to have SVP integration
Other Videos is “impossible” to organize or browse, some suggest do playlists, but you can’t even use a “select all” or select a whole folder… why plex why?
subtitles set to portuguese (brazilian) won’t work properly, in tv the setting doesnt seem to be recognized leaving a empty field on subtitles selected language
something weird with subtitles, sometimes you can play a video but even if subtitles are selected.. these are not showed.. even if you wait or skip forward or backward… so if a video says something in the start there are no subtitles… you have no idea what they said
Kodi - plex plugin
when i turn off subtitles ( cause i cant play the video with them on…) i have to run the video twice before it understands I’ve already turned off subtitles
for some reason sometimes it skips an episode jumping to the next after that one
When using random over the same series in two days in a row, the first item in random list is the one played in the day before (?)
Opening plex sometimes just leaves you on a “white plex page” doesnt show your login or anything from plex… just the background
Setting watched episode automatically after ending, takes long time to be refreshed, sometimes may not even refresh… induces to a mistake when you are trying to play the next one
Windows
Someting wrong with audio.. is way too low, changing the settings on multi channel and so on, does nothing… once i go back to desktop apps I’m blasted with sound because i had to put the volume up for plex
If you set a subtitle offset, when moving to another movie, even if its in a different machine it seems to carry the offset, and for some reason (probably due to being internal subtitles) the offset can no longer be adjusted (its grayed) 2024-04
Maybe I’ve been using Plexamp too much… but I thought music audio normalization was part of the package now?!
You have visualizers in both Plexamp and the mobile apps – though admittedly not in Plex Web or the big screen apps.
Plex will by default ignore articles when sorting pretty much everything in your library (not just artists but also movies, shows…). You can disable that… then “The Deftones” will show under T instead of D.
I cannot comment much on your other remarks.
The only thing coming to mind is you might want to disable automatic library updates. With that enabled, Plex will be notified by the OS about new files added to your library and Plex will scan those files – obviously that’s going to be a rocky ride if the transfer is doing some overtime. I suppose in such a case it might be easier just to trigger the scan manually when the file transfer is done (another alternative could be to transfer the files to a different folder only our media HDD (that’s probably the part taking time to copy/move)… then you can simply move if within that HDD to its target destination in pretty much no time (causing no glitches with the automatic scans).
This is a Samsung limitation, not Plex. Subtitle compatibility is handled by the client as far as I know, and is why you have issues with subtitles in Kodi also. The audio sync is probably an issue with the subtitles used. I would check to confirm that the sync issue happens with both your included subs and the external ones.
I can’t comment much on this other than lots of other people, me included, feel the same pain with this and agree.
This would be an absolute pain in the ass to implement as it would require the Plex team to confirm the capabilities of every client they support and then come up with a clean way to present that to the end user. I like the idea, but I definitely understand why this doesn’t exist.
I don’t understand why this is even an issue. With everything that Plex has to deal with, squashing bugs, implimenting way more important features, etc., why would anyone want them to divert that attention to smart bulb integration?
Go uncheck Scan my library automatically, Run a partial scan when changes are detected, Scan my library periodically in the Library section of the server settings. Also the behavior that you describe here leads me to believe that your server may be woefully underpowered as even with a library of 2K films and 20K episodes of shows I can run server maintenance and still watch on quite a few devices with no issue.
For this issue, read this article on why random is not actually random like people expect in this case:
After you do that, look for the Smart Shuffle setting, I believe that Plex calls it that, and turn it on and you should get closer to, if not exactly, what you are expecting.
Not going to comment on everything else as I don’t use Plex for music and use a Shield TV as my client. For the general stuff, I don’t really use playlists (I only have 4 and when I used the one to watch Star Wars: The Clones Wars in chronological order it worked fine), second point I agree with @Blkbyrd . 3rd point, I can understand why you might want this, so that the bulbs would dim or turn off when starting your media, however, I don’t have a smart home and many smart home devices so again not something I’ll comment on.
The last point in your general section I will actually say something about. I suggest to use a staging folder on the same storage system first so that the file is fully there (I’m assuming you are transferring the media from one device to another). After that copy is complete move it to the final destination.
To clarify that. I process my media on my one system, Computer A. My Plex system runs on my server, which is a full server but I set it to also act as a NAS as it’s a 4U system that can hold up to 36 drives. Once I finish processing stuff on Computer A, I transfer the files to my server in a staging folder I have. Once everything is finished transferring to that server, I will then move the files to the appropriate folder within either the TV_Shows directory or add the folder to the Movies directory. Doing that gives an “instantaneous” move (I see some delay but it could be because I’m doing it over a network share) and prevents any issues like you are experiencing.
Well I do not really have a dog in this fight but I do know of people that want automatic adjustment of lighting when they start to play a movie. But the people I know that want that use harmony or similar devices that include the ability to control smart home devices.
Personally I prefer to control my lights etc through Echo and Harmony devices and using Echo routines I can say things like “Alexa, play Roku” and my system turns on what is needed and sets the correct inputs. However I prefer to control my lighting with separate commands. I have other routines that control my lights.
I tested having one command to do both functions but I found it clumsy and I do not always want the same lighting levels for watching TV. So I have routines like “Dim” and “Bright” and “dark” and others. It is not always a good idea to do everything through one command even if it is possible.
I said smart bulbs but i was referring in general, like the tv strips which play colors behind the tv according on whats on the screen.
For my tv i got Govee immersion, but since i dont have plex integration im force to use their camera on top of the tv… It has some issues, like if you have other lights in the room it will afect the color of the lights.
as for pc i have to use the philips hue app.
Also notice that philips is attempting to sell a “useless overpriced box” to achieve the same thing, but by connecting hdmi on philips box it will remove some of hdmi features due the box limitations for what i understand…
might not be that hard… if you think all they have to do is “try play it once the background” if doesn’t play means its not supported. Maybe a routine task would be enough… No need to do any technical stuff.
You’re much better off with a philips ambilight TV for this sort of thing. The lights on the back react to anything displayed on the TV as all the processing is done by the TV.
They’ve been around for at least 10 years and there are models of philips ambilight for all budget ranges.
I believe they also integrate with other hue bulbs but I’ve never tried it.
Looking at your list again I noticed this.
This sounds like you don’t want the pretty much universally accepted and agreed upon sorting method used by pretty much everything to exclude articles (The, An, A in English) from the sort title so as to not, essentially, have “multiple alphabets” within the sorting (think A-Z normally and then within all titles that start with A, An and The an alphabet of A-Z repeating in there).
I don’t personally understand why people would want to exclude ignoring articles, but to each their own and Plex has a way for the user to decide what words are considered to be grammatical articles and have them excluded from the sort title. This is an “Advanced, Hidden Server Setting” which you can read about here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201105343-advanced-hidden-server-settings/. That will explain how to enable those advanced settings and also gives you examples for the different settings (ArticleStrings is the one you would be interested in).
To save you some time, you would want to set the value to ArticleStrings=“” which would tell Plex that everything is fair game to put in the sort title. After you do that, it appears from searches on the forum I read you will want to do a metadata refresh (either the whole library or just specific albums/movies/series) and it should update media that already has the grammatical articles removed from the sort title. **Hint: I would suggest refreshing metadata on a couple of movies/albums/series individually before doing a full refresh of metadata for the entire library (if you decide to do that).
I would think that this would resolve your playlist complaint, just remember it will impact all library types, but I have a feeling you won’t have an issue with grammatical articles being included in the sort title for your other libraries you might have.
Little confused about this one as one of the benefits of Plex is supposed to be if the media is in a format that the client can’t play, it should get transcoded, unless of course you disabled transcoding from your server. However, like @Blkbyrd said, that would be a huge PITA for Plex to implement as they would have to confirm the capabilities of every client they support, so don’t really see that happening honestly. The issue with your idea is how would Plex play the media against a client in the background without having that client connected to verify if it can or cannot play it? Clients initiate the communication to your server, not the other way around, plus you might only have 3 distinct clients connecting to your server and then one day get a 4th client and now Plex wouldn’t know what is compatible with that client so it would then have to go through all your media again to verify if it can or cannot be played (again if the issue of how Plex would do that didn’t exist). Lastly, if a client is able to get a software update that then allows it to support a new codec that’s another round of checking that would need to be done.
my problem is my server doesn’t seem to be able to handle transcoding with some media, no matter if its on fast transcoding or slow or automatic… it just keeps stopping each 5 seconds, so it like the feature doesnt work for me…
and seems to create issues for other people using the same server so I had to disable it
but just to make it easier to understand all my complains are because things don’t work in my context, maybe I’m missing something.
For instance… the transcoding… my NAS already brought Plex support i didn’t had to add anything special to it… so how come doesn’t work well with transcoding(?) for what i’ve read on internet from reviewers on nas and so on… doesnt seem to work much better even with Top NAS
NAS aren’t particularly powerful computers and video transcoding is pretty demanding. You can take a look at the NAS compatibility list to get a reference of what you could expect from your NAS.
Some NAS manufacturers promote the video streaming capabilities of their devices – and some even deliver on them… though not all those architectures are fully covered by Plex. If your NAS is e.g. using an ARM SOC, Plex will most likely not be able to use the built-in iGPU for transcoding – while the bare CPU is too weak to even think about transcoding your media.
Even on systems that support hw-accelerated transcoding, some tasks will remain with the CPU (e.g. audio transcoding or burning in subtitles) – this can already be too much for some NAS.
That being said… you can use a NAS perfectly fine with Plex if it fits your use case (e.g. no 4K transcoding, no burning in of subtitles, clients that’ll preferably direct-play your media). It’s just not the 1-size-fits-all solution that’ll cover all those bases for you.
What NAS do you have? I had a Synology DS920+ NAS, and it can do hardware transcoding. Based on CPU usage, using HW transcoding, it ought to be able to do maybe 8-10 streams at once. But on SW transcoding, it craps out at running two at once. I made a mistake and disabled it, and it was painful to watch something.
And I think Synology NAS’s are one of a few brands (QNAP also) that have CPU’s good enough to run Plex on.
