Since music keeps coming up I am gonna break my own rule again and bring up a feature idea.
I really, really want a way to rate music tracks in Plex clients… but I want the rating to be either put into the file’s tags or maybe into something like an NFO file in that directory… So the rating sticks with the file itself.
My Plex operating principle is to make the media files well named and tagged so that in the event of a db rebuild, the libraries are put back in order as well as possible with as little work on my part as possible. Storing ratings in the Plex db and losing them later would be a real bummer. No, I don’t intend to lose my db and I do keep backups on another volume, but… Things happen.
The music files themselves though, they are backed up even more carefully and I can rely on their ongoing existence. And I really want my ratings baked in. Somehow. In fact I do not rate my Plex music at all now, ever, because even though Plex has been very stable for me I always treat the db as unreliable and do not do any work in it that I am not OK with losing.
I realize there are issues with modifying the files. Plex is a multi-user system after all. So who has that ability? It can’t be everyone. I am not even sure there is a standardized id3 tag for ratings. But I think those issues are solvable.
And blocking some ~2.4 Million IP’s does not have an impact?
How many of these IP’s are actually known sellers? Or is this just a huge reactionary blanket ban because you don’t actually know?
Are we, the “non infringing” users going to have issues if we move to another provider? Or it it time we all just started using our plex pass subscriptions money to donate to Jellyfin and help them?
I’m in a household of less than 3 myself and even though I don’t need to have 100 let alone 10 shares, this is the method I thought they would have gone.
One feature I’d love to have is for TV specials to be played in line with the rest of the seasons when playing via autoplay.
For example, if there happens to be a Christmas episode between season 1 and 2 then currently when you let Plex autoplay the first episode of season 2 plays instead of the special then the first episode of season 2.
The only way around this is to either use a playlist or go back to the home page after every episode, in which case the continue playing section shows the special.
I’m possibly not explaining this in the best way, but hopefully you understand what I’m talking about?
First off… this is a great chance for the community to be heard. I truly think forum is being used to help prioritize the Plex resources.
I truly want to understand how Downloads are thought of by the employees at Plex. As a Plex Pass user, this has been the most frustrating aspect of the service (as of today, it is first on your Plex Pass pitch page). What is the roadmap to fixing this or is the roadmap to abandon this altogether?
Features I’d like to see :
TV: season specific special features. We all have season dvd packs, and they come with season special features. It makes sense to support it natively
Music video library type: with music video metadata for a good background music for parties or friends
Search tags in tv shows so I can tag episodes with tags like “magic” or “Randall Carlson” and search by tag
Add ability to click in an actors filmography, and if it’s in your media library, go to that episode of the show or movie (not the how’s Main page)
Add cast metadata section in properties of shows and movies so I can edit it if imdb is incomplete
Add ability to create TV Channels based on my media libraries that show in the live TV section. I create my own channels (logo, number) , schedule shows to run at times and dates, or use a Playlist as a marathon, or just randomly , and add Filler (old commercials) at the end or at chapter breaks to replicate the old TV experience, and share that with other users of my plex. See Ersatz TV and Dizquetv. Great nostalgia factor
Add parental controls: let me tag movies and shows “cursing” or “blood” or whatever, and filter it out on user profiles so my kids don’t see inappropriate things too early.
Full x265 hdr 4k support in all apps. Too often 4k content just doesn’t work on my 4k Samsung 4k hdr TV
Preroll criteria: let me set prerolls based on a date (12-25, Jan to March), Genre, Studio, series, or just assign a preroll to a movie to play beforehand every time.
Recommendations improvement : feed in from Trakt.tv or something, so I can get better recommendations of what to watch next.
Pivot for Aired today in TV, and Released today in Movies. Right next to Recommended and before Library, add “aired today” so I can discover new episodes I may have forgotten about. I have over 800 shows, so sometimes I forget what I have
Pictures: add people Tags and geotags, and the ability to see my pictures on a map
Restore Podcast support
Add Youtube channel support
Thanks @play2fade !! I think this is a great question.
The truth is that this is impossible to quantify in any sense. I have seen lots of instances where we have something on a roadmap or we brainstorm an idea and we see that idea or something close to it posted somewhere. A lot of these would probably be chicken-and-egg type of scenarios and it is simply impossible to know where something truly originated. We would also have to contend with something that was originated in multiple place at different times independently!
Pretty much everything you describe is true within Plex. Employees are always welcome and encouraged to introduce ideas and help in prioritization. I think that we definitely see things more as an us-and-us mentality as opposed to an us-versus-them mentality. Not sure if you would be surprised or not, but we all use Plex too and almost always our wants and ideas are strongly in parallel with those of the wider community.
I think the answer here is: probably more than you know. We read - a lot. Here in the forums, reddit, and in other places. We launched our new search functions today and I dropped the link to some threads from those sources in our team channel not too long afterwards! We take feedback seriously and a lot of the tweaks and iterations we make come directly from user feedback. I would also hazard a guess that we haven’t really released anything “original” that hasn’t been dreamt up and posted somewhere in a long time!
And this is where it gets tricky. There was never any intent to step back from, or appear to step back from our users, that just accidentally happened over time. We never intended to have 10 year feature request threads. We are a business. There are always considerations that we aren’t going to get into publicly. Sometimes these revolve around agreements with other companies. Sometimes these are limitations due to hardware or a vendor’s requirements. Sometimes we push forward into areas that we feel will be beneficial in the long run even if they seem more minor now. So, yeah, this answer is probably as boring as you thought it might be .
I also had a comment from another employee on this one. We often get feedback like “but it would only be a single line code change!” along with frustration why we don’t just do that. I promise you - if it was that easy we would take that easy win. Using the 3 little pigs as an example here, if we were trying to hang a picture in their houses then it is pretty easy to drop a nail into a big stick in the wall of a stick house and hang a picture. But if the house is made of straw we would have to build underlying support into that wall to hang that same picture (or sometimes rebuild the entire house!). Or the brick house may be in the path of a new road and is slated to be bulldozed in a few months so tackling the extra effort now might get that easy win, but take a lot of effort, stop work on other projects with more impact, and be ultimately thrown away once the bulldozers arrive.
But… if I could leave you with one thought here, I would set aside the feature requests, the new codecs, the edge use cases, and the cool new must-have-its and I would leave you with this: the people here are AMAZING and they all truly do care. We aren’t told to care, we don’t have indoctrination sessions on how to communicate with users, and nobody is forcing these people to jump in here and respond this week. In fact, I volunteered to run this event by myself not having any sense of how it would go nor of how many people would ask awesome questions or how many of the people I work with would take some time out of their weeks to provide thoughtful and targeted responses here. I am absolutely floored at the results. We do consider ourselves users and we want to treat you how we would want to be treated. We do this in our work and now we are going to get back to closing the loop on communication. So keep those ideas coming!
My workflow is the other way around: I rate with plexamp while listening to the music and I bake the ratings with python code and the plexapi library into my files from time to time for the backup reasons mentioned.
The script is kind of tricky because the individual setup has to be catered for: operating system(s), individual file paths, non-standardized rating schemes which may differ from software to software. But it can be done even if you are not very familiar with scripting. So I have an idea of the complexity of the task.
My wish in this regard would be to refine the way plexamp allows the rating of tracks in car play. Right now you can only toggle one star (=5 Stars, 1 star or none). I would very much appreciate if I could rate right there in half-star steps (without endangering traffic of course).
Thanks again for this great piece of software which lets me rediscover my music in a way I have never imagined!
Hi @JJohnson74656 !! These are some great callouts! We are going to take extra time once we wrap the Fireside chat to review the multi-idea posts to make sure that we don’t miss anything here.
I did want to take a moment to mention that you should be able to do this right now! If you take the time to add labels, then when you add a managed user to your home you actually get fine-grained access management if you select “None” for the profile restrictions. Once you do that you can either filter out titles with certain labels (a blacklist approach) or only allow titles with certain labels to be shown for that user (a whitelist approach). Good luck!
I was wondering when this is going to pop up! I think I saw it mentioned in passing in one other comment - but I am glad you asked it directly here. This is an important area for us to improve. We are actively working on this right now and hope to be rolling updates out as we go over the next few months and into next year. We still have a decent chunk of work to do, but this is a top priority and we are working hard to get this right!
Are there any plans to fix the seamless branching audio sync issue on Nvidia Shield?
Some bluray discs use seamless branching to store multiple movie versions on a single disc. When ripping this disc to an MKV file it creates some audio sync issues on the Shield when the disc has Dolby TrueHD audio enabled (DTS-MA works fine). The same file works fine on my PC and Android phone, it’s just the Shield.
The video and audio go out of sync at specific chapter markers (at the branching cuts). When rewinding the movie in Plex the audio is temporarily fixed but goes out of sync at the next branchign cut.
An example for this is the Extended Cut of Black Hawk Down around the 14-15 min mark. There is a Reddit post that might give you more insight into this issue: Reddit - Dive into anything
I just tested this client a little bit and see an option to rate movies on the media info screen that we show before playing a movie and also on the post play screen. If you have a specific screen or location in the app (especially in comparison to the other clients that you mentioned) that you are referring to it would help us to address this scenario better. Thanks!
Any plans to improve playlist and music database management? Standard features such as sorting, searching, filtering playlists, the ability to view if a song/album/artist is in a playlist directly from said song/album/artist and then add/remove that song from said playlist directly from that page, (Similar to how I can open an actor and view all the movies they are in that are in my system), the ability to search and detect duplicate songs, the ability to backup/export your database/playlists/ratings, the ability to save information such as rating information to the file so that if the database does get hosed you aren’t required to go back and rate hundreds or thousands of songs again? At the very least, can we look to get a connection with another music management software such as Media Monkey or iTunes or Music Bee or whatever to let us use their tools to manage our music collections?
Any local extras containing the word “opening” or “ending” in their filenames are displayed wrong. For example if you have an extra called “Alternate ending #2” it will display as just “Ending”.
This is a nice request, just not sure how we would make this happen. We might get some benefit here from the alternate ordering that has been discussed elsewhere in this Fireside chat. Other than that? I think you have already called out the clunky workarounds that will have to be used here for now.
So many great questions in here, so many terrific responses in this thread as well. Well done, everyone!
I have a few specific feature questions that I’m hoping could be addressed if there is time. Apologies if any of these have been answered in these forums before.
I know this is one of the most voted upon features and this one may have been addressed by the Plex team already, but will nested collections be implemented down the road?
Will there ever be the ability to turn an existing regular collection into a smart collection, and vice versa? I think this functionality would be super useful for many users!
Also related to collections, will it be possible to have mixed media collections in the future? Let’s say I have The Lord of the Rings movies, the TV show, and audiobooks and would like to see all of those in the same row, will this be eventually achievable?
I do know that you can create a collection under each library using the same name and it will allow you to see the other media collections for LotR as additional rows when you click on a collection, which gets us close to the desired result, but not quite.
This feature would also really shine when it comes to viewing a Recently Added row on Home and it would show all new movies, series, etc. together.
Thanks for your time! I’ve really enjoyed this fireside chat.
It already happens, or at least does on the plex clients I’m using (Windows, Android TV, and Android mobile). Specials play in the correct location without any workaround or intervention on my part.
Apologies as I know this will sound vague and won’t feel like much of an answer - but we always want to improve the experience and there is always an internal Plex running conversation around customization and our primary user experience. However, these changes can also be some of the most controversial and we know this so we never make them lightly!
.