Plex Fireside in the Forums

General Discussions
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Long time user here. Got my money’s worth of my lifetime sub a long time ago, I’d say. Happy to see 2023 was a bugfix year, it was much needed. You guys are in a tough position, between platform support, locating consistent revenue, and dealing with cranky power users. I’m always impressed just to see you make it another year. Haven’t seen @elan in this thread yet. You ever get another dog?

Here are some things I’d like to toss out.

  1. Many of us have been in the local media game for 10+ years now. Our large collections can be unwieldy to manage. One area Plex could improve in would be in our ability to control and manipulate the database. I see there’s been some posts about a forthcoming API. This is exciting and welcome news. Here are some specific situations i’d like to see improved.
    A. When media falls outside the typical boundaries of “retail release of professional commercial production”. I hope this will cover aspects previously not under our direct control or required severe wrangling, like adding actors to movies.
    B. Physical file and directory manipulation, as in being able to rename and reorder files based on their Plex metadata, would be huge; as would either embedding of metadata or an easy import/export process based on metadata files that match the media’s name. Libraries move; sometimes infrastructure re-builds happen, and anything that can mitigate the painful process of re-loading metadata (in particular, anything the user has added or changed) into the system helps. I saw mention of better NFO support. This would be great.
    C. Control over special situations like episodes better suited for airdate naming - I’ve tried to add some of my personal copies of NFL games into my library, but last I tried, it was an awful experience. If Plex DVR records a game, things look pretty good, but if you want to add something yourself and have it integrate alongside, you will fail.
    D. Bonus infeasible idea - why not go big and add external DB support? You’ll be homelab heroes :slight_smile:

  2. Playback skipping - I skip around in videos a lot. Sometimes it’s not about watching the whole episode, but just being able to quickly refer to the right moment or moments. Huge gains have been made here, but inevitably, if you just keep moving around faster than Plex can keep up, it will fail in ungraceful ways, sometimes rendering the server unresponsive for a period of time. I hope you’ll continue to make progress on this. Maybe a bookmarking feature for videos could help users like me. In my fantasies, scripts are as easily accessible as other metadata and we can search movies and shows by quote. Of course, we do have subtitles…

  3. I’ve been following the ATSC3.0/AC-4 saga for a while. Any updates on that?

  4. One more for fun - Chiptune support. I noticed there’s actually no feature request for this, so maybe no one cares. But I figure since there are open-source libraries for playback (1, 2) it might be not too hard of an ask, if things like fine-grain control over looping is forgone.

Thanks for reading and taking my input into consideration (assuming you do). Best of luck in all your future endeavors, Plex employees.