Plex Fireside in the Forums

General Discussions
1

Hi, you amazing Plex people!!

Welcome to our first-ever Fireside in the Forums event!

My name is Kevin and I am thrilled to be part of this event. This week I will be joined by several other Plex insiders in chatting with and answering questions from all of you.

This event is a great lead into one of our favorite weeks of the year—Plex Pro Week! Pro Week 2023 kicks off next Monday and runs all next week and will feature some amazing content this year, including a blog post with some of the best questions and answers from this week’s Fireside chat!

While we’ve been doing this event for a few years now, there is one big reason we keep putting in the effort each and every year to bring you such awesome guides, discussions, tips and tricks, and more. The simple answer is that we do it for all of our awesome users.

This brings me to our first-ever Fireside in the Forums event! We as a group started many years ago by building something amazing for the people who just love to watch movies and TV. While I know for a fact that we look at comments here in the forums and in other places and take the feedback to heart, lately, we might not have done as well as we could have in letting you know that we are listening and that we hear you. We recognize that we have some work to do, and this is one way that we can start to change that.

So welcome to a discussion and chat about all things Plex! We would love to talk about the future of Plex, your favorite current features, and what new and exciting additions you would like to see in the future. And yes, there may be some challenging questions, but we are ready for those as well. We just ask that you try and keep this as fun and civil as possible, and remember, the best questions and comments will be collected together for a blog post to be shared with the world during Plex Pro Week 2023!

How will this work? 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 here, but we are also hard at work so please have a little patience as we work to answer and respond to as many comments as possible in a timely manner.

We also may ask that specific new support requests be moved to an appropriate forum so that we can better handle any interactions needed to provide support there. And, yes, there will be some long-standing support issues that pop up here, but please don’t be offended if we first respond and then ask that further conversation be moved to the existing support threads to continue the conversation.

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, September 15.

Here is a list of some of the best comments and questions from the week for easy reference (this will be compiled throughout the Fireside event):

Thank you for participating in our Fireside in the Forums and for loving Plex. You are awesome!
—Kevin

Wednesday Update - WOW!!! We are about halfway through this event and I am blown away at the response here. A very heartfelt thank you to everyone participating and for making this such a great event. One quick note, as we are approaching over 150 comments in the thread we are doing our best to respond to as many as possible but we may miss some questions, especially on some of the bigger posts with multiple comments and questions. But we still have two days to go so keep the questions and comments coming, we :plexheart: all of them!!

Thursday Update - We continue to have some fantastic posts and great discussion ongoing in the thread below. You all are amazing! :plexheart: We will be wrapping up this Fireside in the Forums event a little over 24 hours from now so this is your reminder to please get any questions, comments, or thoughts posted today!

The first Fireside in the Forum is now closed!! The main thing that stands out for me is how absolutely amazing our community of users are. Thank you to each and every one of you for not just using this great platform we call Plex, but for reading, conversing, asking, requsting, and even complaining about this. This was amazingly positive and we appreciate you so so much! While this is now closed for new responses, we still have the ability to provide responses and will work on addressing as much as we can over the weekend. Once we complete that effort we will unpin this thread. However, just because we are wrapping up this effort, our work is really just beginning. Looking forward to seeing all you around the forums!! :plexheart: :plexheart: :plexheart:

11 Likes
6

Ok I’ll kick something off.

I use several different Amazon FireTV devices, WebOS, Xbox and Nvidia Shield clients.

Each of these have varying issues and I imagine the plethora of different clients you support is quite a task. As the underlying OS can change this can and does sometimes break Plex.

Have you ever thought of bringing out your own dedicated streamer hardware, where you can control everything from the hardware, firmware and app to give a truly awesome Plex experience?

5 Likes
7

How do you coordinate work across continents (and therefore time zones) for a single product, e.g. PMP?

8

I’m wondering if anyone can confirm that the logic in Plex to not have duplicate recordings in Series recordings is to record the lowest channel number if two exist with the same name?

9

What a great question to kick things off @e10kstarfire !! This is a topic that does come up pretty frequently as a discussion topic within Plex. The short answer is that we don’t have any plans to make this leap right now.

The longer answer is that hardware design is a different and complex activity. The capacity of computing in an amazingly small bundle these days is absolutely incredible. The challenges would not be around designing this type of hardware. One of the biggest challenges here would be resources. We are a bunch of software nerds and bringing on people to build out hardware that would meet our high requirements would be expensive, especially when we have invested so much in getting the software running on so many different clients already out in the market.

Speaking as a Plex user I would love this! However right now it doesn’t quite fit in with our current efforts. Now, the fun part of this Fireside event is that we get to point out awesome products like our HTPC builds that all you need to do is to bring hardware in order to get an amazing experience up and running.

I can add that making it even easier to run the HTPC app on already available hardware is the kind of thing that gets attention during internal hackathons!

1 Like
10

Great question @Super4Jet ! One amazing thing about Plex is that it was founded from the beginning as a remote working company. While there is lots of news out there around the changes in workspaces and remote working over the past few years, we were working remotely before it became cool to work remotely. :smile:

This includes having people all over the globe and in dealing with different time zones and work schedules. The best answer here is also probably the simplest - we put a huge focus on communication. A lot of this communication happens asynchronously via tools like Slack, so pretty much everyone here learns to structure their communications to achieve the best results. We prioritize our collective overlapping time and don’t let ourselves sit around being roadblocked in waiting for one single response. This helps keep everyone moving forward!

In addition to the asynchronous communication, sometimes just finding time to meet (video) face to (video) face can be really tough across time zones. One thing we do to make this challenge easier is to try and minimize meetings where we can and also record the ones that we can’t for anyone who couldn’t make it.

11

Is the a Plex Audiobook feature in the works ?

Is a Plex Ebook reader planned?

When will the Multiple Editions feature be fixed/upgraded to how the people envisioned it ? Currently in it’s state it is not really useful.

5 Likes
12

Are there any plans to add new features to the DVR. We’re in Football season now and I like to record multiple games and be able to watch them while recording. Currently there’s no way to resume watching an active recording.

I know we can start watching a recording from the Guide with the options of Watch from start and Watch Live. But if you stop watching the recording there’s no way to resume where you left off.

Thank you

3 Likes
13

Has there been any work done to improve the “submit issue” feature? Currently it’s janky and extremely difficult to find where issues are located in the web app unless you click on the link when you receive the email notification. More options when submitting an issue would be appreciated too (ie. Type of issue - audio, video, subtitles, etc).

I haven’t checked in a while, but the last time I did there was no documentation on how to use this feature as an admin.

14

Are there any efforts underway to improve/ streamline process of off-line PLEX usage. I’ve identified my LAN/WAN configurations and local addresses but still have only a 50% chance of PLEX working with my local media when the internet is down.

3 Likes
15

Are there any plans to update the Plex plugin framework to Python 3.x. Python 2.7 is terribly outdated at this point, and it’s really sad that Plex has not updated yet. Would love to see some interest in this from Plex’s side and revive faith with third party developers.

1 Like
16

Thanks for giving us this forum and listening to our feedback.

First I would like to say that though I am rarely one to hold back when I feel like something is off, I use Plex daily and I appreciate the team behind it. I have worked in software for a long time and I know what it’s like. I have been the PM that deprioritized popular requests for good reasons that were impossible to explain to the public. So… I get ya. I do.

My hopes for the future of Plex are in three areas, in priority order.

Stability and GUI consistency

IMHO, nothing is more important than continuing to improve Plex’s core function: playing any media on any device. Anything that interferes with this, like transcoder glitches, should be a very high priority. Other core media functions like live TV and DVR functions, plus downloading content for offline viewing are also critical.

Ranking almost as high is unifying the GUI to the degree possible given the varying capabilities of the clients. For example, different Plex clients mark watched programs differently. To be blunt, UI/UX differences like that are just bananas.

Quality of Life issues

The forum is full of what seem to be pretty reasonable requests for changes and additions, such as continuous autoplay. Most of the time, these requests go unanswered for a long, long time. There are a lot of opportunities for small improvements, too… Some are even cheap text changes! But such updates are rare.

As a PM myself I know you just cannot get into the weeds with every user on every pet issue. At the same time, there seems to be a lot of missed opportunity for affordable and meaningful QoL improvements and a somewhat more open discussion with your users.

If there are philosophical blockers that prevent you addressing popular requests, please let us know. For example @elan has made it very clear that there is a particular vision for Plexamp which does not include making it act more like a conventional desktop app, even when run on a desktop OS. While I disagree with that design direction I know the score now, and I will stop beating that drum. But we’ve never gotten that kind of clarity on other hot topics.

Additional Media Management and Playback Capabilities

Everyone has a favorite idea, from better support to music, to audiobooks, to ebooks and comics Some people even want more of the ad-supported free content. I’m not gonna vote for anything specific here, I just want to say that Plex’s vision on media management and playback should be shared with us, and we should see meaningful progress on executing it. If no new media capabilities are on the horizon, OK, but let us know that too.

Thanks for listening.

1 Like
17

Not a reply, just an agreement:

I don’t have internet issues, but I always worry about the day when it might happen. I’d like for a way for my local clients to LOCALLY authenticate to my server, giving me full features (and managed users access) when connecting to my local server.

Basically, I am worried for the future, where possibly Plex’s own authentication servers go down. Even if it will require creating certificates and importing these into a local client device, I’d like for a way to authenticate locally and bypass Plex servers if the need arises.

2 Likes
18

Thanks for the question @thartmann! Huh… learn something new every day. I guess I have never tried to do that exact workflow that you described but yeah what you are saying makes sense. We are always looking to enhance our DVR functionality and this looks like a good one for the team to investigate and consider as a future roadmap item.

3 Likes
19

Some of us have movies on our Plex servers with DV profiles 7 or 8 with compatibility ID 1 (for profile 8 files) and ID 6 (for profile 7 files.) Dolby Levels are all level 6. I’m using a Shield TV Pro right now to view them.

The Apple TV 4K will be able to support Dolby Vision 8.1 with the newest tvOS.

Will there be any support for Dolby Vision in Apple devices with the latest software, especially if the container of the file is MKV?

If it does, I would upgrade my Apple TVs from 1080p models to 4K.

EDIT More info

Dolby Vision profile 8.1 has a fall back to HDR10, 8.2 to SDR and 8.4 to HLG.

The iPhone uses profile 8.4

Infuse will currently play profile 8.1 remux files.

Source (a few months ago:) Reddit - Dive into anything

Also important to state:

Maybe more streaming services will be using profile 8.1 for the HDR10 fallback instead of profile 5 that has no fall back. For Dolby Vision profile 5 and 8 have the same performance only the fallback is different.

If your remux files are profile 7 you will still get HDR when you play them back. If they are profile 8 they will play back in Dolby Vision now with the latest version of Infuse. Infuse does have problems with some profile 8 files and will play HDR instead. If you or the person who ripped the Blu-ray did not convert the profile 7 to profile 8 you still get the HDR10 fallback.

Demystifying Dolby Vision - Profile Levels, Dolby Vision levels, MEL & FEL - Home Theater Lobby - AV Discourse Community Forum (SG)

1 Like
20

Thanks for the question @kazz3r24 !

We are actively reviewing the “submit issue” and other communications features in the apps and hope to get them into a much more accessible place in the future. This answer will be a bit vague and I don’t have any timelines due to the work still being in the design phase, but I will confirm that we agree this stuff isn’t the easiest to find right now!

2 Likes
21

Plex mobile experience is behind other similar applications such as Infuse and Youtube.

When will Plex offer playback speed controls on mobile?

3 Likes
22

Back in Feb some of us in the community tested a alpha build that plex worked to circumvent a ffmpeg bug related to multi tags. See Only one embedded genre tag being read - #49 by drzoidberg33 for details.

Does plex plan on adding this anytime soon? Testing was positive at the time.

2 Likes
23

Regarding “favorite current features,” I can say that my primary use of Plex is for listening to music and displaying my photography. I have just a handful of movies (30 or so), and a single TV show (a travel documentary show).

I wouldn’t mind moving away from broadcast/cable TV entirely, and using streaming content servers (even ad-supported ones). But Plex’s streaming content suffers from the same affliction that all ad-supported streaming services do – there seems to be no attention paid to where ads are injected. Most TV shows, having been “ad-supported” when they were created, have natural break points where advertising was intended to be interjected. But I have yet to encounter a streaming service that respects those points. Instead, ad breaks are inserted seemingly at random, often in mid-sentence of someone’s dialog, or otherwise disrupting dramatic moments. I think it’s safe to say that, until this one failing is eliminated, ad-supported streaming services are dead to me.

Does Plex have any plans on addressing this problem?

2 Likes