We’re happy to announce a beta release of the brand new Plex for PlayStation 4 v2 app! The beta version updates the app’s UI and features to bring it in line with our other big screen apps.
How to install the beta
Update the Plex for PlayStation 4 app to v3.13.25
Open the app and select the user menu
Slowly and firmly select the new Enter Early Access menu entry
Accept the confirmation prompt
Profit!
What’s new
Brand new big screen UI
4K and HEVC video support (only available on the PlayStation 4 Pro)
EAC-3 support
Live TV
News
Known issues
Empty glyphs in some preplay summaries
No HDR support yet
No theme music support yet
Reporting bugs
If you encounter any bugs please post a reply in here with the following information:
PMS version:
PlayStation model:
App version:
PMS Log
Turn on “Log to Media Server” under Settings -> Privacy so we can see the PlayStation 4 logs as well
It’s annoying to have to choose the audio track. The Roku app, and the Plex Media Player automatically choose the surround audio track for me. Like may others, I include a stereo AAC track as the first audio, and the surround track as the second audio for all of my video files.
I understand that I can manually choose the audio I want, but that forces the Plex server to select that track all of the time. In effect, it becomes the “default” audio. So, if I choose the AC3 or EAC3 track in the Playstation app, every other app defaults to that track. That results in no audio in some apps, or a transcode if I “Continue Watching” on a different device, or even choose to replay it on another device.
The Roku and Plex Media Player automatically select the best audio - no selection is made, and if you move to another app, there’s no need to select the audio best suited for your device, because no selection has ever been made. If the Playstation app could incorporate the way Roku and Plex Media player handle audio, I would use it. Unfortunately, if I use the Playstation app, I have to manually choose the audio track - which forces me to choose the audio track in every other app, forever and ever, Amen.
On the positive side, the app looks great. Unfortunately, the audio shortcoming didn’t allow me a real test, because I don’t want the server to default to a specific audio track by manually choosing the best for the system.
Subtitle size change support!!! Yes! Great to see this had finally arrived. Can’t wait to give it a good try and see how it works.
Is transcoding still completed on the Media Server at the moment? I noticed that some of my videos that the Xbox 1 S can play still buffer a loton the PS4 (as the media server can’t transcode the high Res and bit rate fast enough for play back), unless I use the pre-coded version.
Thanks for the update! I’ve got a problem with a high bitrate (98MBit/s iirc) 10-bit HEVC file that stutters like crazy, the video is direct streaming while the audio is transcoding from DTS. To be fair, none of my other clients can handle it either. I can post logs later, but assume it’s the Star Wars 4k77 4K version on a PS4 Pro.
Also, any chance we could select subtitle tracks on a per-series basis? It’d help greatly with auto-play and anime series. Most of my DVD rips have separate subtitle tracks for watching the English dub (sign-only translation) and Japanese audio (everything translated), and it’s annoying to have to fix everything every episode.
@leelynds It’s indeed not a bug the way the current audio track selection works. PMP and Roku do make use of some platform capabilities to implement this functionality and it’s something we’ll look into bringing to other apps, including this one.
@Larnu Transcoding is done on the server, the device is not capable of running a transcoder. Codec support is almost identical to the current app, with the exception of EAC-3 support and 4K/HEVC support on the PlayStation 4 Pro, so it may be the case that some media will still need to be transcoded. Give it a try and post some server logs if you’re seeing unexpected transcoding.
@androvsky That does seem pretty high, and if it’s an average it will have peaks that can be much higher, so I’m not surprised that the PlayStation 4 struggles with that. You won’t find many devices that can handle that sort of bitrate. As for your feature request, please feel free to file it as a server feature as the client would need help from the server for this!
Any chance to have it so that when it auto plays the next episode, if I have subtitles on for the current playing episode, it will also turn them on for the next auto play episode.
So is this brand new big screen UI still 720p? I tried the new version on my PS4 Pro with 4K display and UI looks very blurry compared to other apps and games.
@primetime43 Hmm I can imagine that behaviour having some rough edge cases. But will bring it up internally.
@tomyun Yes, for now the UI is still 720p as we try to keep the app stable. Increasing the rendered resolution increases the app memory usage and we need to make sure that doesn’t cause any stability issues.
Please please please don’t stick with the ‘Playing Next’ 15s countdown between episodes.
My use case here is playing kids shows, we usually put it on random shuffle of a whole programme. On the current PS4 app it jumps straight to the next episode. New UI it now has this 15s countdown which makes for grumpy kids! Have experienced this with Plex on Amazon Fire so have always liked the PS4 not doing that.
It makes sense if you’ve only played 1 episode as you may not want the next 1 but when you’ve selected shuffle on a whole programme it’s annoying having to wait.
More people want the auto play next episode than those that don’t (for a long time). Tell the kids to stop being so privileged and to have patience (for 15 seconds) and relax.
It already does autoplay the next episode though?! It currently does it with no delay.
As I said, I understand adding the screen if you’ve only played a single episode but having already chosen to shuffle a show then you inherently want it to play the next 1 so adding the wait screen doesn’t add any benefit.
Oh and thanks for the view on my kids privilege, very constructive
I have to agree than 15 seconds is a long time. I agree it needs a bit of time, but 15 seconds is a lot. I realise it isn’t like Netflix, which starts the countdown while the credits are playing, so why it’s longer though. Configuring the timer is really the best of both worlds and I suspect it would be a client not server side setting.
@Moussa not sure if bug but the early access mode won’t allow the deletion of TV show seasons anymore. That was a feature I used often from my PS4 after I watched a season of a show that I didn’t want to keep anymore.
