Plex Fireside in the Forum 2024

[iceloon]

Can clients be allowed to connect directly to their own servers without going through the official plex service?

[tdeverx]

I love seeing all the work going into getting the tvOS player up to speed and stable, but i cant help but wonder if there are any plans to update the UI/UX? Apple resigned their default player and as such, over the years many apps and services have now adopted this interface. While the work you’re doing now is not UI/UX specific, is there any plans for this to be a focus at some point?

[zekyl314]

Thanks for the Fireside!

A few questions:
1 - I’d love to see a way to easily delete a single DVRed show, instead of having to traverse multiple menus.
2 - When you watch a DVR show, it marks it watched, which is expected. However, if I re-record that same show, it never seems to auto-delete after re-watching it. Would love to have some way to have these be auto-removed within a specified time like you do when a new show is recorded and then marked as watched.
Thanks!

[hokierulz]

For Live TV&DVR recordings that are in process and have “minutes after end” (extra time) set to extend the recording, there is currently no way to start playing the recording during the “extra time”. This limits the usefulness of Plex for timeshifting sports, which is an important use case for me. I know this was brought up in last year’s forum, but do we know if it is on the roadmap to be addressed?

Thank you for providing these feedback sessions!

[McWanke]

@nx6

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?

Thanks for the question @nx6 !

After consulting with the this does appear possible to do in the clients that you mentioned, so I am going to add this to our backlog. No promises on timing here, but definitely something we should be able to dig into once we clear out some current projects!

[McWanke]

@ChristianKent

Any plans on making Music only accessible via plexamp? or at least have an option to segregate it? Having a large music library makes everything slow for users who are not interested in Music.

Hi @ChristianKent !!

One comment here - we don’t ever want to lock a media type to one specific player, so we would not try and say that the only way you could access a specific media type is through this one single client. However, to read into the spirit of your question, we are always looking to optimize the experience which includes things like making clients as performant as we can make them and there are some things in the works that we will be announcing very soon around this topic!

[McWanke]

@davealton

For years, watching something on Plex doesn’t update its watched status in the Downloads

Hiya @davealton !!

Yeah we know about this one. It is a bit tricky to try and get right as managing watch state gets complicated pretty quickly. We are going to try and address this one. I have mentioned here that not only do we have enhancements that have rolled out for Android downloads and the same enhancements for iOS rolling out in the next release, but we are also looking to step back and re-evaluate the entire downloads experience which will let us target gaps like this in that effort. So it is definitely on the radar!! Thanks for your comments!

[ChristianKent]

@McWanke

However, to read into the spirit of your question, we are always looking to optimize the experience which includes things like making clients as performant as we can make them and there are some things in the works that we will be announcing very soon around this topic!

Thanks for answering my question. Yes, I keep hearing that something is being developed to address this. Any teaser on what direction that might be?

[McWanke]

@LeviDavis

I don’t know if anyone will take notice, but it seems like no-one seems to help with issues that have been expressed so many times, that it seems like all Plex does and create the apps and not address user issues

Hiya @LeviDavis ! Thanks for joining the Fireside chat with us!

I took a pass through some of your referenced posts and it sucks that you are having so many issues here! I see that there are quite a few people jumping in on your threads, both affiliated with Plex and some awesome users who are looking to help. While I am not up to speed on all of the issues, I can assure you that all posts get on them and we do try and help everywhere we can.

With that being said, it might be worth considering closing down the many threads and opening a specific thread (or threads) for each of the individual issues, along with relevant logs, to try and consolidate the information together. I know that this may not feel like a great response from your end, and I apologize that I don’t have more solutions to present right now, but if you want to tag me on these posts I will see what I can do to help more.

[mightydh]

I do appreciate these fireside chats, gives us a chance to voice questions.

I only have a couple that are top of mind from the product side and I think worth bringing up:

1. 10 year old request for plex to acknowledge there can be more than artist per music track. I would even go as far to say I’d pay a bounty for this. This is the only holdback for plexamp (there is no second place for music players) to replace all of my other music services. “Various Artists” doesn’t work, then again I doubt it ever was planned to be a long term fix. Direct example, link
2. Nvidia Shield TV extras has never worked on a per season level. This would be great to have working on the Shield, every other lesser device is supported. Example, request, best link
3. An easy win, give us users a global lock for posters on movies, and upcoming TV shows. Movie posters are changing randomly to Gracenote’s, and we all know how the quality of Gracenote posters is unbelievely poor (netflix’s autogenerated posters are better) - a lock would be nice. Direct link to request

These have been my major pain points with plex from a product side for the past decade.

[TheDaveAbides]

Will TV Extras at the Season level ever be added to the Big Screen experiences (Apple/Android TV)? Years ago, you updated the TV agent in order to expand the Extras feature. It seems like it hit a wall, since extras at the season level were never added to what I assume are not fringe Big Screen platforms.

Also, I second my support for a Virtual Channels feature. The Channels app has a great implementation of this, and there are other docker containers that I’m sure you are aware of as well. I’ve noticed Plexamp has some fun/whimsy built in, which I think the Plex Server could use. Maybe it’s not possible due to existing contracts with your FAST service. But if you could build in some of your tech that can build radio stations, why not add that to video? A fun way to connect people with their existing personal media collection.

[McWanke]

@iceloon

Can clients be allowed to connect directly to their own servers without going through the official plex service?

Hi @iceloon !!

This is a common request and it would be awesome to make this happen. However, we choose not to implement this until we feel like we have a reliable, secure method to make this work. There are a LOT of people that would like this, me included! It does come up often and is definitely in our backlog to try and figure out in the future.

[anon5074910]

@BanzaiInstitute

Isn’t that what we should be doing though? If it is an Xmas song, give it the Xmas genre, and when it is Xmas time, use a smart playlist to play those tracks. IMHO no special support is needed because you already have the power to listen to this kind of music when you wish.

Just try and use a built in radio for artist or any of the built in stations and the xmas songs will start VERY quickly. TBH, radios are completely useless to me as I have a pretty large music collections with a lot of seasonal music all of which are tagged with Christmas Music genre.

Plex needs a way to filter these out when using the built in radios/stations and I believe there is a feature request for this but its been ignored. Last I checked I believe the CEO said something along the lines of just remove the seasonal music from your main library and put it in its own library. While it would work its the WRONG solution to the issue.

I solely use my own playlists because of this one issue and haven’t used a station or radio in well over a year.

[sixones]

@blim5001

This is what I don’t get, the feature is already there in the AndroidTV client just obscured by a flag. Why can the flag not just be enabled for all? (But I see Chuck has jumped in, so will have to wait and see what happens.)

Nerd Statistics during playback will be available in the next beta release of the Android client, you will be able to find it inside of the Playback Settings whilst you are playing something. Wasn’t quite as simple as toggling a flag, but things were being worked on to get it released!

[McWanke]

@sixones

Nerd Statistics during playback will be available in the next beta release of the Android client

What?!?! Sweet!! Thanks @blim5001 for bringing it up and thanks @sixones for jumping on this and knocking it out!!

[davealton]

Thanks so much for the reply! It’s nice to have confirmation that Plex is aware of the issue. Unfortunately if the next release’s improvements are already in TestFlight, they don’t fix this specific issue, however it’s great to hear that Downloads will be a priority in the future with a rewrite. I love Plex, but Downloads has definitely been the part that has had the most issues for me.

[Ascii-227]

Hi guys,

Thanks very much for the concept of the Fireside chat. Its nice to be able to read through some queries and responses in a relaxed manner, away from the pressures of individual issue threads!

I wanted to ask if you aware of the issue many of us are having on Smart TV apps. It seems that sometime this year, many of us lost the ability to play audio only transcoded streams. When we play the same files fully transcoded there is no issue at all, but when the TV does not support an audio stream and plex uses the Direct Stream method (with transcoded audio), it buffers forever and loses connection to the server.
The server logs say: Failed to stream media, client probably disconnected

This has been confirmed on LG and Samsung TVs, which I believe both use the PWA version of the plex app.

The most recent thread about this seems to be here:

DTS LG C2 fail to transcode

Server Version#:1.40.4.8555-fef15d30c Player Version#:5.85.0 Hello good morning For a few days now, when playing some content with DTS audio on my LG C2, it stops transcoding forever and finally the conversion fails, leaving me without seeing the content. It’s strange because it always happens in the same minute of the movie. It happens in almost all movies with DTS audio. Anything to be able to do? I think a few weeks ago this did not happen and the transcoding with DTS worked correctly. …

But there are also many of us discussing this on the relevant thread on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/1ah2vxp/stream_buffers_when_audio_transcoding/

Can anybody there let us know if you are at least aware of this issue and it may be looked at at some point in the future?

Thanks very much

[maxgingold]

Thanks for doing this! Looking forward to seeing all the questions and answers.

I recently had a multi-day power outage, followed by a multi-day internet outage (the power company workers cut through a fiber line…). Since then I’ve been trying to find a way to be able to watch my Plex server (MacOS) content via LAN, without internet connectivity, using my Apple TV Plex app, but haven’t really been able to find any reliable way to make that doable. Is offline LAN functionality something that could be made easier in the future?

[tom80H]

@maxgingold

Is offline LAN functionality something that could be made easier in the future?

Plex Fireside in the Forum 2024

Hi @iceloon !! This is a common request and it would be awesome to make this happen. However, we choose not to implement this until we feel like we have a reliable, secure method to make this work. There are a LOT of people that would like this, me included! It does come up often and is definitely in our backlog to try and figure out in the future.

[d2freak]

@McWanke

Thanks for answering my previous questions to the best of your abilities. Can I have some more?

1. Is it still on the table to be able to choose/prioritize some of the metadata sources of the new Agents? This has come up from time to time and some devs has said that it is something they are looking into. I understand that some of the magic can not be tweaked but for example the “Genres” is currently pulled from multiple sources, creating a mess of duplicate and messy genres. Discussion here Source of Genre Metadata - #2 by dokuro. Being able to choose the sources here would be beneficial. The same with “Year” which is currently pulling wrong metadata from IMDB sometimes. See this post for more info Cabin Fever 2 gets the wrong release year. Follow the link there and you will also see from @OttoKerner that this is even known. Being able to instead chose TMDB (for example) would be beneficial.

2. This is about translations in general.
   First about “Genres”. They appear in both translated and not translated forms. An employee said last year that they are looking into translating it themselves but nothing came of this yet. Any news?
   Second is about album reviews. They sometimes appear in non english format. This is not a crowdsource error, they come from non-english sources. A moderator once said that they simply has no way of telling the language of those reviews. Fine but don’t fetch from there then. Any news on resolving this? Discussion here Getting lots of German album reviews?

3. We spoke about this the last fireside, but I never got the sense that the discussion was finished. Creating a music cloud. For “listen together” or music discovery or such features. You said it was simply too much but at the same time said that the database scales well to volume. Is this idea truly impossible or no? Any other social music features coming that doesn’t require cloud support otherwise?

Thanks for taking the time!