I see that this has been a bug since at least 2015, based on threads here. This spoiled the finale of Big Brother last season and has already begun to spoil this season by putting in screenshots from the end of the episode.
This seems to be a bug because in other threads it has been insisted that the frame selected is from 25% into the video to prevent spoilers. However, this isn’t working as intended. Plex is often choosing frames from the end of episodes.
It’s such an issue that someone made an add-on to address this bug: [REL] Static Media Assets Agent
Is this still the only way to address this? This seems like such a trivial issue for Plex to fix and it completely disqualifies Plex as an option to watch shows. Why would it take 5 years to fix such a basic function?
What screen shot are you referring about?
Plex picks a frame from toward the end of an episode occasionally to display as a thumbnail for that episode. There is no way to play the episode without seeing the spoiler.
Edit: The latest offense is actually a spoiler from exactly 50% through the episode, not the end.
It has been suggested for years that Plex always choose from real early in the show/movie or that it be a user choice/selection. Plex has been totally deaf to the requests and there is no reason to believe that they will suddenly change their position of totally ignoring this request.
This is killing me. The most anticipated stage of the Tour deFrance today ruined because of the thumbnail. Why pull from so far into the video? Plex literally couldn’t have picked a worse frame!!
There is no way this was random. Plex is getting this still from somewhere.
Def random if you look at some of the other thumbnails.
How amazing(and most unfortunate), out of 2739 seconds Plex picks that second as the thumbnail.
The only other option til a fix is to enable local media assets and include a episode thumbnail of your own.
57 people smashing those +1s like crazy - and 9 votes (like it matters).
If Plex wants to make this Voting Sham more believable they should insert some instructions about how voting works into each Feature Request Thread - 'cause apparently the voting public (lol) doesn’t get it.
Plex should also come clean on how votes are tallied and weighed. I mean, do we need 10 votes or 1000 to make something happen? It all seems very ‘Placebo’ to me, but I’m a born skeptic.
Incidentally, a long time ago an employee argued with a bunch of users on this matter, saying that Plex was pulling thumbs from early on, but stubborn users kept insisting (and providing proof) this was not the case. Eventually, the employee capitulated, swore there was a fix, and it seemed to work for him quite reliably, but the users couldn’t prove it and that’s pretty much where it ended.
The Ruining of Sporting Events by Plex is a condition that just shouldn’t take a Feature Request to fix. There should be an option, on by default, that when ticked off simply does not generate a thumb - or at the very least - a generic thumb should be inserted, perhaps one that reads: Sporting Event: See Details.
I have no idea how the gearing of this would mesh together, but I do imagine it would take Plex working closely with Users until a solution was hammered out - and that right there pretty much makes it impossible.
I would help you out with a vote, but I already burned one of them on another feature request that’ll never, in a billion years, make it to the work flow list. I’ve only got 4 left, so… good luck.
The problem is that request was created back in August 2015. Way before the vote button. And of course, no ones +1’s were converted to a vote when we move to discourse. It’s very sad to let them all go like that.
I finally got around to installing the plug-in to address the spoilers, [REL] Static Media Assets Agent.
It no longer gets picked up by Plex. Sub Zero and another Plugin are there but this one won’t show up. Double checked permissions, and re-downloaded. No go, they killed it and gave us no solution.
Edit: I don’t know if this is a recent addition or not, because I couldn’t find it before, but Emby has this ability and that is my solution. Just updated my SSL cert for it and now I’m golden.
