Please restore this feature
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Many people are using an older version of Plex for Windows, (1.41.0.2876), because it’s the last version to support “Advertise as Player”. I’m using it as well, I see it suggested all the time on the subreddit just for this feature alone, please bring it back.
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Very little usage, maintenance costs.
As a software developer for a child company of the gold standard in healthcare insurance*, I can truly sympathize with your need to lower the maintenance costs of your applications and platforms, especially considering how many companion apps are available on a very wide variety of devices (to which I sincerely applaud you for).
You also have usage data available to you which the community is not purvey to, so you probably know what your users use, how they use it, and how often they use it.
However, I wouldn’t trust your usage data so much to determine what the user’s WILL use. There are a lot of caveats to usage data, some notable ones being users abandoning companion apps/platforms because of a lack of features, or, in the most extreme (in my opinion) case, bugs.
The Android client, particularly the Android TV client (I’ve tested on Google TV and SHIELD TV 2017) has more issues than I’ve ever encountered in any mainstream production application in my entire life. Many MAY have gone away recently, but so many remain.
The Android issues, combined with pulling critical integration features like what this thread highlights, illustrates that there’s some larger issue other than simply high maintenance code cost simply as a result of too many features.
Your core user base is obviously power users. No one I know uses Plex except myself. That’s because I’m a power user. Power users like features, preferences, openness, integration, and flexibility. Removing Advertise as a Player from the aforementioned apps/web alienates your core user base.
I would have been flagged as a user that didn’t use these features. Now that you released credit detection, but gutted auto-play of the next episode (from the beta, likely because of code maintenance cost), I want to use PlexAutoPlay because the developer (and OP) of that is willing to adopt the cost of maintaining that code.
Now he cannot for critical apps. Now, you do not have the data showing that I would have used this feature, along side all of the people who won’t take the time to write a post on here saying such because they feel it’s utterly hopeless to even bother complaining since companies rely on usage data too much.
Contemplate data unions in your usage data and also how data subsets you’ll never know about affect them dramatically. Usage data is a very dangerous slope.
I will take this time to say, in my exceptionally strong opinion, that all of the development time you’ve spent on these “Discover” features are utterly pointless. I get it, you need to evolve, because companies who do not evolve, die. But when companies alienate their core user base, they become boring and truly useless or versatile.
I don’t have the answers, but I warn against losing the vision for Plex (whatever you felt that was or is now). If the vision is simply profit, then I guess time will be the judge of that.
In best regards,
Nick
(*Obviously, none of these statements represent the opinions of my employer, particularly since they have no relevance to Plex, other than to demonstrate my appreciation for large, complex, sensitive, and high-availability systems.)
+1 to return this feature!
Please restore this feature.
I thought I’d done something to break this on my setup and recently decided to spend some time to fix it. Now I’ve found this thread it all makes sense. It’s really sad 
surely you can at least add it back into the web client? If not, could you open source the communication specs so that we can create a browser plugin to advertise as a player and then control the playback etc that way?
I’d be up for creating a plugin like that, or alternatively patching the web client code such that it loads a js control script that we can maintain as a community? You don’t have to do all the work yourselves, I suspect most of the users of plex are software developers or at least very capable tinkerers.
Please restore this feature.
Plex for Android 9.26.0.2526-beta has restored this feature, and hopefully the desktop version will be restored as well.
This thread was never about Plex for Android.
@PlexSupport please bring back this feature why removing sth that doesnt hurt you at all
can you please bring it back there are so many people that would love to get this feature back aspecially almost all users replying here do have a payed subscription
For those looking for an alternative, Emby seems to have APIs to support this: PlayOn users rejoice! Automatic commercial skipping has arrived! - Plugins - Emby Community
@mhiggins I tested this and it supports remotely-connected clients as well which Plex never supported.
Plex dev - are you seeing these comments?
Come on y’all…
+1 For this. I’ve become tired of waiting for Plex to make configurable the forced 15-seconds wait before autoplaying the next episode.
I’ve resorted to seeking out 3rd party plugins (PlexAutoSkip) which thankfully still works great for my Roku player, but I’m upset that support for the API has already gone away from Plex’s flagship players and isn’t considered important enough to maintain.
You’ve got a pretty big community of developers generously volunteering their time to improve your product, making it more attractive to potential clients. It kind of behooves you to continue supporting their efforts. Look at what just happened to reddit after they attempted to monetize their API and killed 3rd party app support.
what an utterly useless reply this is.
I can’t imagine maintaining an open API that i’m sure is still used internally causes very much maintenance cost. if it does, get some competent developers and handle your technical debt.
omg why didn’t i think of that?
Wow, and @corvus2606 thought your previous reply was useless. WTF is wrong with you, do not realize you’re speaking with PAYING CUSTOMERS? Like me - a LIFETIME Plex Pass user and your flippant attitude is VERY disturbing. No one loves Plex as much as I do but your responses here are very much making me question that.
So, how about we get an actual answer? A reasonable, technical reason that:
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You’re removing working features for what seems like non-user benefiting reasons
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That auto-skip isn’t ALREADY A FEATURE FROM YOUR DEVELOPERS. What you SHOULD have thought of is adding this very much requested feature but no, you’re here being a smartass to your PAYING CUSTOMERS.
I’m sure others agree.
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Purely speculative, but with the multiple devices and app configurations, it looks like the most rational thing to do for Plex is to kill the Plex Desktop app which is way too complex and replace it with the web version and push Plex for HTPC everywhere possible.
It seems that until HTPC (which should really be 3 apps/libs: core / ui / platform-specific) reaches feature-parity with the ‘old’ Plex Desktop (which somehow seems to have grown to mobile and forked somewhere along the way) we users are in for a bumpy ride and the devs have a never-ending flow of new code to test / regressions to squash. The most logical approach is to port feature per feature and limit scope creep to keep the codebase sane and testable, at the cost of frustrating power / long-time users.
As an ex iOS / Android app dev with 300k users, I can tell you it’s a case of “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”.
But being snarky to customers on the internet, even if they ask a question you answered 10,000 times, is not something you want to do.
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!!!..so this is why my “cast” button is greyed out now. Searched all over the web for an answer and found no mention that this was removed…and never even heard of “Plex for HTPC”. Would be nice if you let us users know when you move a feature to a different product instead of just getting a mysterious greyed-out button.
Please restore this feature. Thank you for considering.
