Plex Fireside in the Forum 2024

General Discussions
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Greetings Plex pros!

Welcome to our second annual Fireside in the Forums event!

For those of you who don’t know me from last year’s event, my name is Kevin and I’m a Director of Engineering at Plex. This week, I’m thrilled to be here in the forums, along with several other Plex insiders chatting with and answering questions from you.

This event is a great lead into one of our favorite weeks of the year—Plex Pro Week! We’ll be kicking off Pro Week this year on Monday, September 16 with some amazing content, including a blog post with some of the best questions and answers from this week’s Fireside chat!

So what do you say we just get right into it!?! Last year, we had all kinds of great questions around topics like:

  • Dolby Vision on AppleTV
  • Questions around support for audiobooks and ebooks
  • FFMPEG bugs
  • Offline Authentication
  • Lots of Plexamp questions
  • Subtitles
  • More requests for playback speed controls
  • And many more

This year, we are excited to dive back in and listen and respond, so feel free to ask away! We will be reading your comments and questions, and responding to as many of them as we can throughout the week. We have people in different time zones who will be jumping in, but please keep in mind that we are also hard at work, so please have a little patience and know that we will respond to you all in as timely a manner as possible.

A few important reminders:

  • We may ask that specific new support requests be moved to a forum that may be more appropriate for the request.

  • We anticipate there may be some long-standing support issues that pop up here, but please don’t be offended if we ask that further conversation be moved to the existing support threads.

  • The Fireside in the Forums event will start as soon as this post is live and the thread will be closed at noon EDT on Friday, August 30, 2024.

Thanks for participating in our Fireside in the Forums event and for your long standing support of Plex. You are awesome!

—Kevin

And… the Fireside chat is now closed. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to everyone who read, wrote, and jumped in here. This has been an AWESEOME week and we :plexheart: :plexheart: :plexheart: all of you! Thank you for being a part of Plex and we can’t wait to see you next time at the fireside!!! :plexheart:

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Hey Kevin, could you provide an update on this, is this still on PLEX’s radar?

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Definitely still on our radar! We took a few detours this year to work on improving things like downloads which has pushed back some of our target feature additions, this being one of them. This work along with some key foundational work will unlock a lot of doors for us going forward. Unfortunately this feature won’t be delivered in 2024 but is still on our radar and is a priority for the team!

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Will you reconsider the Watched vs. Unwatched indicator change or will you at least include a clientside (or better account side) option for that?

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Hey @McWanke. We appreciate Plex committing to these annual fireside events and hope good things will come of them. One of the long-standing issues for Plex has been how to manage access to discover features/content for managed users. Plex’s position has been clear on this as articulated perfectly below:

I appreciated that, controlling access to inappropriate content should be paramount. I unfortunately had incident with a child gaining access to inappropriate material that left them traumatized and brought it to the attention of the moderators here:

I was extremely disappointed, and to this day remain disappointed still that it seems like Plex is not taking it’s pledge to protecting vulnerable users from inappropriate content through this loophole. I would have expected this to be a priority and ergo be plugged up pretty quickly, but it’s been almost 5 months from the date I brought this crucial shortcoming to the forum’s attention and there still remains no action as far as I can tell. I would really appreciate some feedback on this. Thanks again for hosting this.

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In the last Fireside you guys said you would be more responsive to feedback and work to address some longstanding problems, as well as increasing build quality. I think it is fair to say that overall, you have kept your word, so thanks. Please keep up the good work.

My own highest priority remains the reliability of core features like video playback. I don’t use Apple TV myself but I am heartened to see fixes for that client in progress, with a feedback thread. IMHO that kind of thing is critical.

Since you guys have made music into a big deal with Plexamp, making basic music functionality rock-solid also seems important, and we have had improvements there too – like per-track music genres. Cool. Please keep that up too and consider high value improvements like Composer support for classical music.

I could still list a bunch of pet issues, as could any user or staffer, but I am going to hold back and limit myself to just 2.

Number one: the remote access test in the web client is terrible. It starts green, then runs the test, then updates the indicator if needed. Every few days it seems like I see a confused user post saying “why does my remote access work for a few seconds and then stop working?” They do not understand that it never worked, and the test itself is confusing. This is a terrible user experience in what is already one of the most complex topics in Plex. Your users have wasted so much time on the “why does remote access only work for a few seconds” red herring. It’s awful and you should fix it.

Number two: the music library should be more tolerant of poorly organized tracks. We see a lot of users who are new to music in Plex struggling because they aim the server at their 25 year old folder of random mp3s and it blows up. I am sure you are aware that it is possible to see tracks filed under the wrong artist in Plex. This is super irritating and it leads users down the wrong path of fixing metadata in the Plex GUI instead of fixing their files. No matter how hosed a person’s music folder is, scrambling artists and tracks in the GUI should never happen.

Those users are not following your rules but my point is, the rules are hard for a lot of people to follow and are inconsistent with how a lot of people choose to organize their personal files. It’s great to have best practices but Plex should not explode if they are not followed, either.

We also see experienced users who are making an effort to organize their music by the rules still having problems, because the server is intolerant of errors.

“My other music servers don’t have this problem,” people often say, and that is fair criticism.

I have two specific suggestions here. One, as I already said, fix the issue that can cause artist/tracks to get scrambled.

Two, improve support for poorly organized music. I am not proposing changing all the normal rules and organization requirements. Leave that stuff alone, but you can add something new to help us out.

Here’s an idea: how about a new special Album Artist called “Singles?” It would get special handling, kind of like “Various Artists” does. Anything in the Singles folder would be exempt from the requirement to use an Album folder, for starters, and this folder would allow any user file structure they wish – people like their folders. The goal is that anything in the Singles folder shows up in Plex under the Singles Album Artist, and Plex is OK with there not being an Album structure. Tracks in Singles still have Artist, Genre, and Title which is enough to get by and use smart playlists. If Plex can look up metadata for these tracks, great, but if it cannot it should not blow up, either.

(I guess you’d have to tweak Sonic Analysis to function on music without albums, but each track already gets scanned, so hopefully that’s not a lot of work.)

“Singles” support isn’t just the onramp for people with messy collections. My music is organized how Plex wants, but some music can’t follow these rules. For example, I have a bunch of club music from Beatport and the concept of an album just doesn’t exist for these tracks. I have made a fake Album Artist called “Club Tracks” for this music and there is one giant “Club Misc” album in there. I do the same for some other album-less stuff like DJ mixes. But that’s not a great solution for reasons you can easily imagine.

Improving this issue is the new feature I want most in Plex!

Thanks for listening.

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Hey @pommesmatte !! :wave:

We worked really hard earlier this year to make sure that the watched vs unwatched behavior was standardized across all clients. That was definitely an area where we found a few inconsistencies. Since this has been released, we have received some good feedback like yours around people requesting the opposite - meaning unwatched flagging vs watched flagging. I can confirm that we have heard this feedback. As far as changes here? I don’t know the answer right now. I have passed this additional feedback along to some of our product and UX folks to review again. Thanks for your comments!

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One feature that I enjoy is season and episode specific featurettes for tv shows. My two questions:

1.) Will season specific featurettes/extras for a show be adopted to all streaming devices? It is currently on Ipad and IOS products, but hoping that it will come to Fire TV.

2.) Can you add commentaries as a category for a tv show extra? Currently adding “-featurette” but prefer commentary description.

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Hi all, thanks for doing this again, just wanted to add few questions to this.

  1. Don’t plan to add Dolby Vision profile 8 support to the Apple TV client

  2. Can we get an option the the Apple TV to output all audio as LPCM allowing HD audio in some degree to the Apple TV side

  3. You mentioned earlier this year about removing support for plugins and 3rd party scanners, with this in mind do you have any plans to add audiobook support in the future?

Thanks in advance

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The info overlay has not worked on Android TV for the longest time (although there is still the setting to turn it on or off)

I think it has been replaced with Nerd Settings, Can the rest of us (Not just Ninjas and Staff) please have Nerd Stats for Android TV:

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Thanks for your answer. The thing is, I never saw anybody asking for that change in the first place. You had unwatched indicators and everyone was fine with that.

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Hey, I’m very pleased to see this event happening again.

I wanted to ask about a specific feature. Displaying the names of audio and subtle tracks as listed on the track names from the MKV header. This Feature Request was closed and marked “implemented” a couple years ago, but it still does not exist on any platforms that use the Smart TV interface (LG WebOS, Samsung, PlexHTPC app, game consoles).

Is this feature going to be coming to these other platforms?

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Hi @blim5001 !!

I am flagging this for the team. I agree that it would be a nice add for any of our clients. However, we do offer a Playback Info screen with some of the info from that mythical :wink: Nerd playback view. In terms of timing? It won’t be this year but is worth consideration for a spot on the roadmap!

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Hi, thanks for doing this again.

The quality of the metadata in Plex’s database (and thus the database used by the new scraper) is atrocious. I made a few dozen threads in the metadata forum. There are weird nonsense AI descriptions. Default poster suggestions are across the board bad. Several movies seem to be subject to copyright claims and have no default posters. Release dates are weird all over the place – I reported several dozen that were off by more than 5 years but I have literally hundreds that are off by a year or two.

Some of these issues have been fixed silently in the intervening period. I got a reply from moderators once or twice. Lots have been completely ignored. Just talking about box art, here are five unresolved issues (I have another 5 or 6 that are also unresolved for box art, and then the other sets of issues above):

Since I didn’t get replies on any of these, I have generally stopped reporting the issues. I went ahead and fixed literally thousands of posters in my own library as a result of the switchover to the new library agent.

I think the thing that’s frustrating here is:

  • All of this stuff was fine with the old agents. I’m aware of the fact that a combination of the streaming services’ needs, copyright risk, changing data license models, etc. led you guys to make your own database and use Gracenote(?) for covers, but the result is really significantly worse.
  • In addition to the tons of actual weird junk posters and crappy, poorly composited posters, even “good” posters are bad: almost all of them feature huge closeups of an actor and many of them have actor names and other text on the posters. I get that this is Gracenote’s decision, and I am sure an algorithm was designed to maximize engagement or maximize some other KPI but it’s really at the expense of poster quality. Most people prefer relatively clean posters, and prefer the use of director/studio-approved key art rather than just random shots of actors.
  • Despite things getting worse on the metadata side, I’m happy to fix issues myself. But unlike the old agents, I can’t go into the source data and fix the issues because you don’t have any public or API backend for your data that’s user-editable. So I can’t fix anything myself.
  • That’s fine, I’m willing to report issues to you so your staff can fix the issues, but it seems like you don’t have the staffing bandwidth to do so or don’t agree these are issues.
  • Frustratingly, there appear to be several users here in my boat who volunteer their time writing scripts to automatically surface and report metadata issues – anything we can do for free, Plex is better situated to assign paid staff to. This is a perfect job for something like a GSOC project; developing heuristics and rules to automatically flag low quality metadata.
  • No other product that uses movie or TV metadata suffers from these issues right now, just Plex.

It feels a little bit like metadata is something you’re reluctantly doing because it’s necessary, not something anyone on the team has any real passion about. It seems underdocumented and understaffed. That’s a real bummer. The scrapers and the library metadata are, after video playback, the single most core functionality of the software.

All of this combines to make me have very little faith in Plex’s efforts to dive DEEPER into managing metadata, for example with the currently-in-preview user review function. If you can’t handle movie level metadata, moderating user reviews is going to be an absolute nightmare. I have experience moderating multi-hundred thousand user websites and my day job is text-as-data for user generated content online and you guys are not set up for success if you choose to take this on.

Please work on improving metadata quality in an actionable way (not just “it’s a priority for us”).

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Hiya @blackzwe !!

I am sitting here doing what I normally try and do for a post like this - try and make sure I understand it before responding. I am also working to read through the thread that you linked in here. So how about we move this discussion over to that thread and we can keep the discussion going there.

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Separately from the metadata issue, I think the Downloads feature could use a fair amount of love (notwithstanding the first reply in this thread saying that the Downloads feature was a big focus this year). When the last major revision of the Downloads feature was released, a lot of people reported a lot of bugs and missing functionality, particularly when the download is occurring via remote access (for example, I’m downloading a movie to watch on my train home). To me the most crucial issues would be:

  1. Allow pause/resume for downloads
  2. Fix whatever causes some downloads to sometimes restart at 0% (I suspect some of this is iOS storage limitations)
  3. Provide more useful feedback to users about the state of downloads than just the %age bar. Speed, ETA, and notifications when something isn’t working would be a bare minimum.
  4. Basic controls like “automatically delete downloaded movies X days after watching” would be useful, and in keeping with how most video apps work.

A lot of great features Plex has added over the last 5 years seem to have the problem where the feature launches and it’s a good first attempt, but people immediately flag issues and it takes years for iteration. Obviously resources are limited and you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good, but it seems like maybe there’d be a benefit to setting the threshold for a viable feature launch a little higher even if it means fewer new features.

Thanks.

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@BanzaiInstitute thank you so much for your words here. While I like to think of topics like communication and interaction with you, our amazing users, as areas that there never is an actual finish line and we can always keep improving, it feels great to know that it sounds like we are a bit ahead of where we were last year. Thank you!

As for your comments and issues - for the remote access flow we will definitely be touching this next year and it is something we will work to smooth out here.

On the music library item - these are some good callouts. We are working towards doing everything we can to focus our efforts on providing the best server experience possible and suggestions like this are good reminders of areas that we can focus on for improvement. We have a generic “video” library that in some ways handles things like what you are talking about here for videos, sounds like investigation for music is needed as well. Or, if nothing else, the ability to not have such an album-centric view of music organization.

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Thank you

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Thanks for the post @SeekingAdvice !

You asked - and I am glad you did! We rolled out quite a few enhancements on Android earlier this year and iOS users can rejoice :tada: as many of these enhancements in our next release!

But we aren’t done yet! Downloads IS STILL incredibly important to us - so much so that we have stepped back and taken another look at it and are already hard at work on rebuilding this functionality from the ground up.

Lots of cool stuff coming here and thanks again for jumping into the Fireside chat to ask about it!

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