Hello,
No matter which player I use, the On Desk section is limited to 40 item. Is it possible to increase this limit. I watch over 40 different tv shows a week. That’s why 40 items is not enough for me.
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That is the magic number that Plex has forced on everyone. It used to be a LOT more, I think 100 or so but they chose to reduce it to 40. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was even lower for a while.
There are lots of other numbers in Plex like this where Plex made the choice and they are sticking to it. Such as the percentage wherPlex thinks a video is fully viewed.
Plex chooses these numbers based on user feedback from their testing pool that seems to consist of about 8or10 mostly indifferent teenagers and preteens.
Plex knows what is right for the users and that is why they do not give user choices. Plex understands (at least from their point of view) that users are too stupid to choose things like “number of ondeck items” so they have chosen to remove the burden of choice from their poor defenseless users.
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I just found how annoying this was with Hellboy (2019). Tried to stop at the last 30 seconds to show the rest of the family later on… It didn’t work, lol
I found many discussions with the same problem. Some discussions are more than 4 years old. Many Plex users would like this limit to be lifted. Why did not the Plex developers in 4 years have managed to increase the limit or remove altogether. This should be a simple change in the source code, I think.
I think the change should be very simple. I don’t know the source code. But there should be a part like
For i := 0 to (Count of all On Desk Items - 1) do begin
if i<40 then <Show Item in On Desk>
end;
Now you change only 40 to 50 like :
For i := 0 to (Count of all On Desk Items - 1) do begin
if i<50 then <Show Item in On Desk>
end;
And it should work. This change can you do in 5 seconds and in the next release it should work. Ok?
I admire your optimism.
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It’s very time-consuming for me to switch between Plex and Apple TV. I watch 40 series at the same time with Plex (in the weekly rhythm) I would like to watch 43 series at the time, but 3 series would exceed the limit. The consequence would be that always the series, which wants to be looked at by me from the on-desk list disappears, if the limit is exceeded. To get around that, I watch 3 TV shows with Apple TV (but handling is much worse than Plex).
So please, take remedial action. As a rule, my weekly series consumption is always just over 40 series. It can not be that hard to raise the limit. The best way would be to completely abandon the limit, but 50 would be sufficient, at least in my case.
Oh no, the new server update has not solved this problem. I hope for the next update. For the developper this should be only a little change, I think.
I just wanted to inform you that the problem still exists. The limit is still 40. Your homepage says “Stream smarter”. Then you should also include the wisdom of the users. We can decide for ourselves how high the limit should be.
It is not going to change and it is not going to become a user setting. As much as we might want it to change the current behavior is exactly what Plex has decided, through extensive research involving people that nobody has ever met telling them that 40 items is all that anyone will ever need, that it is the best and proper behavior.
If you need or want more than 40 then, according to Plex, you are doing it wrong and you need to change to accommodate Plex because Plex is always right, even when you think they might no be.
We users are simply too stupid to know what is really good for us.
Plex knows best. Plex is always right. Plex is your media God.
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It’s more likely 40 is the magic number that limits the overhead of an overloaded app <—that won’t run on anything, but the latest and greatest, chugging and spitting right on the edge of collapse/lock-up.
50 would drop your box to it’s knees.
They’ve already got it packed to the wings with ‘Movie Reviews’, ‘More With’, ‘More With’, ‘Because You Watched’, ‘More With’ <—all the stuff you don’t kneed, crippling stuff you do need, but been removed, or trimmed, so the app will barely run on an Ultra.
All that fluff (you can’t turn off) has to be supported, so usability takes a back seat.
You know. I can see that. The more items that need to load is more time to do it. Just think is the limit was 5. I can imagine they would load extremely fast.
Shhhhh!
Don’t give 'em any ideas or they may start sending On Deck/Recently Added via Email/Txt and remove it from the app to make room for more fluff.
As an avid lifelong gamer (from Pong) I always have a good gaming box, but I NEVER run any game wide open. If you turn some things off (you don’t need) the game starts working like it probably works in development - before they added all that **** you don’t need, but at least those guys put a switch there for me to turn off stuff I don’t need… A concept totally alien to Plex.
Yeah, I still don’t understand why a user controllable setting was not implemented. It’s just odd to me they created the OnDeck interface without the ability to choose the amount it should display. But it may simply go back to, “to many causes lag”
I wonder if this is also true for “continue watching”(the movie version of OnDeck).
Not to go too far afield - Continue Watching has, from day one, been a disappointing/redundant/incomplete feature.
As in RARFlix, On Deck should contain anything that is ‘In Progress’ - TV Shows, or Movies. The guy that developed it works there. He also developed searching across ALL your libraries for actor items when their image is clicked. Yet, for some reason these features elude Plex - while Movie Reviews and More With permeate our existence.
With all due respect (and I really do mean that), you know what’s really funny? Someone who knows just enough coding to be dangerous giving snotty feedback about how it’s technically so easy.
Assuming that there is no inter-relation between this display and other parts of the code, assuming no performance penalties, and assuming that all platforms (which all share code) all have enough resouces (cpu, ram, swap space, etc) to handle this, your “very simple” pseudo code has one bug, and two ill-thought out scenarios:
1- Your code is assuming that “all On Deck items” is the end count. Which “today” is 40. So you’re countng to that number in your “for loop”, but then inside the for loop have an “if i<50”… Which means you have not increased the number of items on deck.
2- If you used the wrong variable in your “for loop” (bug), then it means you’re looping over every item in the library (hundreds of thousands potentially if not more), just to then check if the item is less then 50. Basically waste of cpu cycles, and potentially (if you do this enough) grinding the UI to a freeze.
3- Where is your UI code? You’ve just changed one magic number for another. So what if whatever magic number you’ve chosen isn’t what the next person wants?
4- Assuming the UI piece is also super easy, what is the theoretical limit for the lowest powered machine that can run the Client? I don’t know but assuming it’s a Raspberry Pi 2. What happens if I as a User change the number in the UI to 100,000 and my UI doesn’t load any longer? Meaning so I can’t even “fix it” to set it to a number that lets my UI load (maybe because I don’t have access to the Server)? Does that mean I have to blow away my installation because of this user error? Does this mean that my simple solution now has to maybe have some kind of math to set a ceiling per device type or resource availability? What if I implement that, the number is set by the User to a high number, then they change devices and the UI doesn’t load? etc etc.
The point is that everything is “very simple” unless you know the details both of the immediate “thing” and all the side effects.
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It’s late here, but afaik (and I should know) there’s no absolute limit on the number of items in On Deck; rather, we look through a non-infinite window to determine which shows to consider. By default it’s 16 weeks, but you can set that via an advanced preference.
I’ve set it to 100 weeks. But in the on Desk (home screen) there are only 40 items. But I’m showing 43 tv shows (each show in weekly rhytmus.). In the tv shows section there is also an on desk section. There are showing all items, but infuse is using the on desk of the home screen. I’m watching with infuse because plex is stuttering if direct play on the apple tv.
Why can’t be the on desk of the home screen also unlimited (like the on desk of the tv shows area).
It’s possibly infuse artificially limits, do Plex clients show the same 40 shows on the home screen? As I said, I don’t believe we do anything to artificially limit.
Plexweb - 40
Roku Uno - 40
FireTV - 40
RARFlix - 67
I have 100s of TV Shows that would be On Deck - were there not a Plex Limitation and the PITA factor goes through the roof when attempting to look into one of my 5 TV Show Libraries for the On Deck located there (along with every other annoying Plex “Feature” I can’t turn off getting in the way) - because that On Deck may, or may not contain all of them. If there are more than 40 - forgettaboutit - I won’t be able to see another one, until I remove one by deleting it, or marking it watched!
You would know that if you or any of your developers had more than 40 on deck items - but you don’t - and apparently you won’t take our word for it.
There is a limitation and I absolutely understand there must be a limit - 1000 On Deck Items? Not looking forward to that, but how bout a sort to the other end of the On Deck I can’t see? God only knows what’s lurking out there. How 'bout a user option to, say 100? If that staggers the device I guess the user will know that number is a little big and can adjust accordingly. It also gives the user an option to display 10 On Deck items in case that Roku 2 HD gags on ONO!
Furthermore:
RARFlix - developed by that guy you hired - shows 67 On Deck items and that includes Movies and TV Shows <— the way sane development dictates because it contains everything that is In Progress and to a user something that is In Progress needs to be On Deck - ever watch baseball? The next batter stands in On Deck. Not just the guys with a reputation for hitting it out of the park.
That RARflix guy also developed the actor image producing ALL the titles in ALL the libraries when clicked.
You may want to re-acquaint yourself with that guy. He’s pretty good.
