Plex dev teams ...Lets get back to the core reason / features why we like Plex please

General Discussions
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@Spineless said:
I persoanlly think that the Plex team has taken on more features than they can manage. Many actual core audio (music)/video (movies/tv) experiences are broken. The Windows and Xbox clients are trainwreaks and they haven’t seen updates in ages.

Personally, at this point, DVR and hardware transcoding are “nice to have” features. They don’t make or break the service, so it doesn’t make much sense to invest heavily in them while simple core scenarios are severely suffering.

@Spineless agreed, my suggestion is Plex should do a pole and allow people to vote and they then direct their limited resources to the majority.

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@huntjules said:
@bsheperis my comments where Plex should do a pole and allow people to vote whats important. Everyone has their requests, video, series, films, music are all top, but we can’t forget many people want to include tv, tv is all part of the modern media centre… but Cloud and Pictures probably are not on most peoples top 5?

There are certainly some features and capabilities within Plex that are more sought after than others. The real issue is Plex tries to support everything, even the most obscure hardware, with a relatively small team of developers. I am sure it is extremely difficult to test every Plex feature across all of those devices prior to every release. Perhaps they should reduce their scope?

I don’t disagree that Plex should prioritize addressing defects in their releases above adding new capabilities. However, I do think they are doing a good job balancing fixing issues while trying to enable new features (i.e enabling Plex to be capable with the latest OS or hardware releases). Problems not addressed for months/years at a time is unacceptable… but so is not supporting 2-Factor Authentication or IPv6 (new feature requests).

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@huntjules said:

@Spineless said:
I persoanlly think that the Plex team has taken on more features than they can manage. Many actual core audio (music)/video (movies/tv) experiences are broken. The Windows and Xbox clients are trainwreaks and they haven’t seen updates in ages.

Personally, at this point, DVR and hardware transcoding are “nice to have” features. They don’t make or break the service, so it doesn’t make much sense to invest heavily in them while simple core scenarios are severely suffering.

@Spineless agreed, my suggestion is Plex should do a pole and allow people to vote and they then direct their limited resources to the majority.

Taking a pole, using majority result - to drive direction and progression (should) certainly be an amicable perspective. The key here is the balance between “what the user’s want” and the direction that management believes is in the company’s best interest(s). These can sometimes present some dichotomy, thus a ‘funny’ balancing act.

In any case, progression cannot jeopardize existing functionality - and - existing functionality needs to brought to a viable baseline before more progression occurs. Given that recent progressions appears to have had a negative impact to the existing feature set.

Certainly don’t want to start a religious discussion on a specific topic, but would think (feel free to suggest otherwise) that hardware transcoding [if available] should be functional in order to support a wider range of possible clients. Isn’t there a corresponding dependency on ffmpeg - and all that it would require to operate properly. Could some of the transcoding issues stem from newer versions of ffmpeg or any of it’s dependencies?

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@huntjules @scorpion7 I do not mean to seem disrespectful, but the correct word you’re looking for is “poll.”

In my opinion, it is important that Plex continues to explore avenues until they find a feature that can hold them steady. I personally don’t use the News tab since you have to change servers to access it, but I certainly don’t want it shoved down my throat and forced to be a part of every Plex server. So in the end, I think it is good that it is separated.

@jayz78 I do think DVR was a smart idea, even if it was “half-baked.” It sometimes happens that what wins customers isn’t the amount of features, but the stability and usefulness of current ones, as I think everyone has made clear here. Therefore, I believe that bug fixes should be prioritized. New features, including ones that are requested by users, should come second. When a company has a good product, the users do the marketing.

@bsheperis I don’t think reducing the scope would be a good idea, especially when Plex’s market is media streaming. Ideally, Plex should be on all devices that stream media or else they will be losing potential users. I think what would help is prioritizing certain mainstream platforms, such as Windows and macOS. It is much harder to diagnose problems on “server” machines where every environment is different. The majority of users probably don’t use dedicated Linux servers to stream media, although the tech-savvy will. It’s all a game of statistics and as @scorpion7 said, “a funny balancing act.” I think that’s why Plex wanted to force opt-in everyone to usage tracking-- however, I personally disagree with the tactic. I am glad that they changed their minds and made it optional.

Some things that I am really looking forward to in the future is a possible eBook or PDF library option alongside audiobooks. They can already display images with a gallery, so I’m not sure how much more work would be required to make this feasible. It seems relatively easy to implement.

I actually did submit a bug request recently, a pretty important one regarding embedded fonts crashing the built-in transcoder. When they switched transcoder libraries, they lost support for certain shows with subtitles. It took them 3 months to fix it. I am thankful that they did fix it, but I would have expected a little snappier service for something so severe. I mean, this isn’t some random or insignificant bug that was happening. This was a bug that breaks Plex’s main streaming service. For me, that means being unable to watch some of my favorite shows. I am glad that I have a Plex Pass so I could get the build early, but that honestly should have been given out to all users and not just the paid subscribers. Who wants to pay for something when they can’t even watch their show?

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@dragonmel said:
@huntjules

The thrust of your message is appropriate. However. I am going to have to disagree on your ordered list of priorities… for the majority of plex users…
And I agree with @Spineless

While I agree that the wheels are once again coming off the bus at plex… its because

  1. The backend is failing… both the general release and the pass versions lately have had major issues… not installing correctly… crashing, remote/local connectivity, and the DVD/Live that is no longer beta is worse now than at 1.5.x… lasly the backend in concert with point 2… is no longer able to deliver content… movie content… what we are ALL here for… correctly and at HIGH QUALITY

  2. The front end clients are a mess again… tvOS client is transcoding just about everything, direct play/steam completely broken… PMP is making strides slowly but its 5 years+ late to the party… but the big issue is how between back and front end… plex is no longer able to reliably play content at the highest quality the server/client combination is capable of…

The Automatic Quality has been severely broken and has had to be disabled on just about every client to get it to work at all.

Plex needs to start proving the HOME THEATER experiance again… period.

I agree with everything written here. In the past 6 months, I have had videos just randomly stop playing for no reason. I restart them and they continue just to die again. These are devices that had worked perfectly for years. I have had files that refuse to play at all the used to play fine. The second annoyance is how it scans in new items if you go through the web and issue a scan it will find the new item display it for a split second in on deck then it will disappear until the entire scan is finished and show back up. The basic playback is the most important the reason to go with plex was the client support emby could never match the client support but not it seems emby might be edging in front in this area.

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I’ve been using plex since the beginning and bought a life time as soon as it was added, am an avid supporter. But even now I am testing alternatives I’m sad to say! And yes so far it looks like Emby.
Unfortunately everything in this thread is true, but as you can see still no response from Plex, That is the cold hard FACT.

I added this just to bump this up and try to get someones attention.

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@DMackG have a look of this topic : https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1557176#Comment_1557176
There is some constructives conversations with plex employees