What @tom80H mentioned is definitely the best, easiest way to put it on our radar. We’ll very rarely (almost never, frankly) be able to give details about what we find in an investigation or what actions we might take, but reporting the post here in the forums is definitely the simplest and quickest way to get some attention on it. Be sure to include a note about why it’s being reported.
We do definitely appreciate such reports!
I am here on behalf of NVIDIA Shield TV users, and we have the feeling that in the new organization, this device has been completely neglected. Please see the attached thread (Shield tv don't hw transcode - #206 by user23) for reference. Given the lack of response from the Plex teams, can we consider that the Shield is no longer supported by Plex? Is this something to expect in the coming year? Additionally, could you please let us know if there is anything related to NVIDIA Shield TV in Plex’s roadmap?
Thank you for your response.
Given the richness of the plex metadata (and the plex watchlist), are there any plans to support any direct usage of them too, outside of any reverse-engineered APIs, via API docs etc.?
Hi @Altimeter, I can speak to this part!
We have been working on this issue extensively. The lack of communication in that thread is most likely due to us being so focused on getting a proper fix out. That being said, we do try to communicate appropriately and as was mentioned in other answers this week, we’re working on improving this process along with making parts of our roadmap more widely available in the future.
As was mentioned in the thread, some of the employees that were tracking and working on this issue were let go. This added some delay to getting a proper fix out while we adjusted priorities and ramped up knowledge sharing, but did not affect our attention on the issue.
In fact, your timing could not have been more timely! Expect more details in that thread very soon.
Hi @rups0911, thank you for taking the time to reach out this week! 
Performance on Smart TVs is a complex problem, and I’m not going to lie: this is likely the platform where we struggle the most in this regard. The sheer number of available models on both LG and Samsung, along with the giant gap in capabilities between them, is astonishing.
I just double-checked and we have internal tickets about this very topic where discussions are ongoing, and our awesome engineers are continually looking for ways to squeeze a bit more performance every chance they get.
Specifically answering your question, it is our intention to address these issues on LG and Samsung, but unfortunately it’s not something we can pin down to one specific problem and provide a timeline right away.
I’m going to tag @sLumpy in here, who’s going to spend some time this cycle specifically investigating performance issues on our web TV app, and who you might’ve seen active around this topic here in the forums.
Alongside this, we’re also going to be making changes in our framework dependencies that we’re hoping will give us some performance gains as well. 
Are there plans to remove restrictions that Managed Users have over regular home-invited users? Since the UI for account swapping is identical, it makes little sense to me that managed users cannot access the Discover feature at all, and are unable to be invited to view a friend’s server’s contents.
I made myself and my family Managed Users years ago, and now wish I’d made separate accounts instead.
Hi @play2fade!
I have to admit, this one caught me completely off guard! I started with “well that doesn’t make sense”, then I opened our web app, tried to scroll using my arrow keys and immediately got frustrated when I realized it didn’t work. Amazing, something I didn’t miss before (simply because it’s not my workflow) felt like such a miss right after trying it once, so I can only imagine how you’re feeling if this is part of your normal browsing workflow!
I also had a chat with one of our web engineers, who experienced a very similar journey to mine! 
Afterwards we started looking into the issue and there doesn’t seem to be any technical reason why this isn’t supported!
While it’ll need some investigating to confirm we can safely add this without breaking some of our other custom key binds and behaviours, we’re optimistic. I’ve added this to our roadmap for future prioritization.
This warms my heart, and I’ll make sure to pass along these words to the rest of the team!
As a user myself, I feel the same. Plex has changed the way I interact with my personal media collection for a decade now, even before I was part of the team.
Thank you so much for your kind words 
Just got an additional question about the Plex HTPC app.
I love Plex and PlexAmp and use them for many hours every day - great work!
Some improvement ideas that would make it even better for me and my family:-
A quick way for turning subtitles on/off without interrupting the current stream so much. I am often switching subs on/off during a programme for various reasons and because of the extra steps involved it really disrupts the flow of the program. How about a long-press on the subs button to automatically select the first (of your language) subtitle to enable or to turn subs off if already on? A small tweak to the clients that could make big impact!
Could you make the ‘Continue Watching’ direction configurable? I’d prefer to have older items on the left-hand side as I normally don’t want to watch something I’ve recently watched so end up having to scroll all the way to the right every time.
The Plex Client on my Samsung 2018 TV has become quite laggy - any performance improvements that can be made?
When restricting libraries to other users, can ‘Other Videos’ be a separate category instead of being lumped in with ‘Films’? This would make it much easier to manage access to libraries properly.
My ISP has recently introduced CGNAT (which more and more ISPs are doing now) so I am unable to use Remote Access unless I purchase a static IP address from my ISP. Is there another solution that Plex can do for Remote Access in this scenario?
I use TVHeadend on a RasPi as my TV Server and in order to use this with Plex DRV I have to use a 3rd party emulator like xteve or tvhProxy so that Plex thinks it’s a HDHomeRun. This introduces extra overhead. Can Plex DVR discover other TV servers like TVHeadend directly?
The Aural Fixations (Top Artists, Albums, Tracks…) in PlexAmp are great, but they don’t use the viewCount value when producing the stats for the ‘All Time’ option. This means that all my tracks that I migrated from iTunes don’t count here, and it’s only plays from Plex that seem to count. Can this be changed to use viewCount instead when ‘All Time’ is selected? I could then use this to get the perfect view of the music I’ve played over the years.
will Plex go back to supporting its core product, local video and its players, instead of Plex AMP and FAST?
and before you state that you do, only plexamp gets fast updates, recognition, troubleshooting and all the attention. @elan post count is only contained in the plexamp category and he will fix any and all problems with that product while everyone else ignores the more important parts of plex.
thanks.
3 posts were split to a new topic: Playback error for partially watched
What about incorporating things from like Tautulli, most of the info is already in the plex db.
Yes! We would like to find a way to provide an ability to migrate a user from a managed account to a “regular” user. This is on our roadmap, but no ETA at this time.
Hi @Mitzsch !!
This is an area we put a lot of effort into, but can be challenging across quite a few clients. I can promise that we try hard to keep everything in sync to the best of our ability. In regards to the comment about smoothness - I will point you to this response.
The plan is to add them back! We heard the feedback and this isn’t just planned, the work is ongoing and should be rolling out to clients over the next few weeks. This is definitely an area we will continue iterating on until we make it the best it can be!
Had to check in with some engineers here, but this is a client limitation, it has nothing to do with the underlying OS. The good news is that the question sparked some great conversation today and we are going to take a look to see if we can’t make this experience better.
Happy to report that there are no plans to do that! Glad you are using and enjoying it so much!
First of all, I enjoy Plex for many years now and it‘s a great product! I also really appreciate the Fireside thread, it is very informative.
Sorry, if my question has been raised already, but by skipping through the answers, I haven‘t found it yet.
Is there any chance of making it possible to import m3u playlists into Plex, be it automatically or manually? Edit: talking about music playlists here, not IPTV.
2nd edit: HEIF/HEVC support for images/videos would also be a great addition!
Thank you and keep up the good work!
Are there any thoughts to all for manual editing of intro detection or secondary intro markers? A lot of content has network or production cards at the front of episodes followed by a show cold open, which is then followed by the opening credits/intro proper, but plex typically only tags the network/production cards as the “intro” and does not tag the actual opening credits.
There are third party options like IntroEditorForPlex that try to meet this need, but the secondary markers are wiped anytime new content is added to a season.
Thanks!
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.
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 
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…
I’ve been following the ATSC3.0/AC-4 saga for a while. Any updates on that?
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.
Firstly I’d like to say that Plexamp changed the way I interact with my music collection, I’ve refound artists and bands I’d long forgotten about and when I look at my server stats, music, and my toddlers tv, are far and above any other media. You should be incredibly proud of that application, thank you!
Thanks for the kind words, @richardap1! As one of the folks on the team that uses Plex mostly for music, I have a personal interest in helping make that experience the best it can be. There are many ways we can improve yet, but we are proud of what the entire team has built so far, and we’re happy that you’re enjoying it!
To your specific points…
Is Plexamp going to move out of labs and become a “full” Plex product?
Yes! Well, technically, it already has!
We didn’t state it explicitly in our July announcement about Plexamp now being free for all users, but extending access was a necessary step to graduating Plexamp from being a Labs initiative to a fully-supported client app.
Are you looking at other ways of monetising the music element of Plex and Plexamp, with integration with other streaming services
Integrations with other services are challenging not only from an API perspective, but also contractually. We’ve definitely had wishlist ideas, but we’re not working in this area currently.
if I Play a track from an album, and I have two versions of that album, standard and deluxe, then both appear in the stats. Being able to group releases would be excellent.
Apologies for getting slightly into the weeds a bit here…
But yeah, two copies of an identical track will share play counts (“identical” meaning MusicBrainz considers them the same recording and they matched to the same GUID). We don’t store which specific instance of identical tracks you listened to. This is by design — and is helpful in scenarios where, for instance, you replace an album in your library with one of a higher quality; we’ll remember the plays the tracks had before, because they were stored by GUID and not tied to a previous track ID that’s now gone. It’s a design choice not everyone will agree with, but to your larger point… yes! We’re always looking for ways to improve library management where we can. 
I’d love to see more artist cross connections, for example the metadata for artists and albums contains numerous references to other artists, bands and albums. It would be great to see those hyperlinked so we can jump between objects.
Yes! I really want that too! The linking from artist biographies in particular though is a tricky problem. Say there’s a reference to another artist that doesn’t exist in your library. Where would the link point to? Would access to TIDAL affect it? What if it points to an artist on a shared server? What if you have access to that artist on multiple servers? What if that access changes? It gets… complicated. 
It’s not impossible, of course. I agree in principle that having that functionality would be useful!
finding new material can be tedious. I know Tidal integration helps here, but having a section for similar artists that are not in my library would be great.
Totally agree! We surface recommendations like these in Plex Web — for instance, on an artist page we present Plex Recommendations on TIDAL and Artists You Might Like (from shared servers) which are artists similar to the one being viewed… but we don’t show those specific content rows in Plexamp, and off the top of my head, I don’t recall exactly why… 
But I’ll make a note to investigate. I agree that those, or something similar surfaced on Home would be helpful here!
Thank you again for your feedback!
A post was split to a new topic: Broken libraries after database optimization
I wasn’t trying to imply that nothing has changed. But I was being intentional in saying that things haven’t “shifted” away from streaming content (the context of the original question) or personal media. If you have fewer people, then you broadly have two choices: do less, or do it more slowly. (You could argue those are the same things framed differently, but I think the framing is important.) So the question felt like: with fewer people, are priorities shifting away from X? From personal media, from ad-supported content, from discover? And the answer is no. There are plenty of things that will progress more slowly, or that can’t happen simultaneously. To give a simple (if vague) example, within that Discover umbrella, there were two teams that consolidated into a single team. They haven’t necessarily changed their ambition, but now they have to decide what order to tackle things that they might have had the capacity to do simultaneously before.
A lot of this is predicated on the idea that ad-supported streaming has been a failure. I’m not going to do a deep dissection of company financials here, but it’s important to realize that that’s not true. We bring in more revenue from ad-supported content than we do from Plex Pass subscriptions. Both are important to us.
So, if ad-supported streaming isn’t failing to bring in money, what happened? Well, like I said, I’m not going to do more than scratch the surface on financials. But generally speaking, when investment markets feel like everything is awesome, investors tend to look to invest larger amounts of money and value growth above all else. When investment markets are tighter, investors tend to look to invest smaller amounts of money and value profitability. A few years ago, we took a large investment and made a big bet on growth. It hasn’t been a failure, but it hadn’t grown to the point of sustainability yet. So we made the tough changes that we made and now we’re back to being on a path to profitability. And that path includes personal media, ad-supported content, and discover features.
