Hi there,
as we all know Apple and Google have very strict rules for Carplay/AndroidAuto apps. No Video, Photo, ect.
I think that a Plexamp version whould be a great solution, because both platforms allow music apps.
It would be nice if app could access the synced music content from the main app to reduce cellphone data.
I, too, would love to be able to use a lightweight music app like Plexamp on my iPhone to stream my own music library, rather than from Pandora or other service.
It was my first idea when I read about Plexamp, that it would be nice to get a lean app for the phone too to play the library from home wherever I am. Now that I use and enjoy! Plexamp on my laptop I am even more curious to know if we can’t get it for our mobile devices as well?
Btw, it works like a charm on my surface pro and I use it a lot. Even in the tablet mode it is easy to use. Great job, thx!!
@jrcorwin said:
How about all the issues with primary Plex features and functions? You haven’t taken part in a non-Plexamp related disccussion since October.
I’m not the only person in this company If bugs and features aren’t being prioritized properly, or teams aren’t communicating with our community, I’d love to hear about it, because that’s unacceptable. But there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to be aware of everything on these forums, so I tend to focus on an area where I think i can have meaningful impact.
@jrcorwin said:
How about all the issues with primary Plex features and functions? You haven’t taken part in a non-Plexamp related disccussion since October.
I’m not the only person in this company If bugs and features aren’t being prioritized properly, or teams aren’t communicating with our community, I’d love to hear about it, because that’s unacceptable. But there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to be aware of everything on these forums, so I tend to focus on an area where I think i can have meaningful impact.
@elan, you are the CTO! We have been telling you this since months and still you don’t react.
Communication is not only poor, it’s almost non-existant
Critical bugs don’t get fixed for months throughout to board … on all plattforms, in all products
There’s no clear roadmap, no strategy. At least it’s not communicated
New features are introduced although core-functions are buggy and flawed (transcoding, sync, UI/UX, …) since months or even years (when was Home Theatre scrapped???)
You made it absolutely clear to us that you don’t feel overly responsible for all those problems. But then please tell me … who would be, if not you, the CTO!!!
I’m not the only person in this company If bugs and features aren’t being prioritized properly, or teams aren’t communicating with our community, I’d love to hear about it, because that’s unacceptable. But there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to be aware of everything on these forums, so I tend to focus on an area where I think i can have meaningful impact.
Totally understand you can’t monitor everything, if there is a better way to escalate concerns/issues please let us know, otherwise everyone is just going to start putting @elan on every post. Here are a couple threads where fundamental things are broken in Apple TV and Xbox, with no commitment from Plex support on resolving it.
I’m closing this thread with my reply, because it’s veered off-topic, but i want to make a few points:
Communication might not be perfect, and it’s definitely on the list of our new year’s resolutions to do better, but it’s not “almost non-existant”. There are employees and ninjas (who escalate issues to employees) in plenty of threads, helping and engaging. Are they in every single thread? Clearly not.
“Critical bugs don’t get fixed for months … on all plattforms, in all products” is again, a vast exaggeration of reality, which is (same is true for all software ever written), there are a number of bugs which greatly exceeds the capacity of the team to address, so prioritization takes place and some get fixed, some don’t. Are we always perfectly aware of every issue? No, and we strive to do better. Is everyone’s definition of a critical issue the same? Clearly not.
“There’s no clear roadmap” ~ there hasn’t ever been an open roadmap. This is not uncommon for a commercial software company. Internally, of course, we have one.
“New features are introduced although core-functions are buggy” ~ it’s always a tight rope to walk, and we’ll never make everyone happy. If we spend time fixing bugs, someone will say “why haven’t you added this new feature like collections we’ve been asking for”; if you add the new feature, everyone with a pet bug will be angry we added the new feature. You literally cannot win. Again, we strive to make the right balance between the two, and I’d never be arrogant enough to say we can’t do much better at it!
“who would be, if not you, the CTO?” ~ I just want to clarify that the role of a CTO of a company is generally technology choices and roadmap, not product decisions and roadmap (that’s our chief product officer’s job, my co-founder), not executive decisions (that’s the CEO), not scheduling and managing the engineering team (that’s the VP of Eng) and not product support (that’s our customer success and QA team). Now I am also a co-founder of the company, so I care deeply about it, and spend most of my waking hours working on Plex in some capacity, which sometimes goes beyond the traditional CTO role (which is why I’m in here chatting with you fine folk).
@bryananderson ~ appreciate your measured response; by the number of emails and DMs I get, people generally find a way to reach me But reaching out to me should be a last resort, if everything is functioning right. Generally when it gets to that point, I bring the issue to the team and ask them “why weren’t you aware of this?”
I took a look at the posts you linked:
The Apple TV “buffering” issue: There was at least one thread where an engineer from the team made a number of posts and engaged with the community. The investigation led us to believe that there was an issue with Apple’s media stack for non-segmented video streaming. At that point (this was our bad) we lost the thread, and eventually I learned that we had removed a setting which people had been using to work around the issue (disabling direct play so that it would force a cheap remux and use the segmented stack). At that point I made the executive call to restore the setting, and we did shortly after. The last post has a summary. At this point I feel like the issue is basically resolved with that workaround being restored for people running into the issue (I don’t see it, e.g.)
The second Apple TV post appears to be one of those frustrating ones where there’s a single visible issue which can be caused by a number of different things. Bottom line is the ATV isn’t able to get the data fast enough, and there are a handful of reasons in the few pages I looked at: One guy had a faulty Ethernet cable; another saw it with Plex Cloud, which implies there might be a bandwidth issue between cloud storage provider and ATV; it might be Direct Play coupled with the buffer limitations with non-segmented media. It’s definitely not a universal problem though; I use the ATV every single night and I’ve never seen the issue. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem (or a combination of multiple ones), of course!
The XB1 thread has got numerous ninjas and employees responding, and it’s nearly impossible to pull out a single critical update. Yeah, some people hate the change. But others (e.g. this person thinks it “works great and takes very little time to relearn”). I’m not sure what you’d have me conclude from it.
Again, I’m closing this thread because it’s strayed way off-topic. I welcome anyone who wants to reach out via DM or email to do so.
[edited for a misstatement on my part about roadmaps ]
If bugs and features aren’t being prioritized properly, or teams aren’t communicating with our community, I’d love to hear about it, because that’s unacceptable. But there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to be aware of everything on these forums, so I tend to focus on an area where I think i can have meaningful impact.
But reaching out to me should be a last resort, if everything is functioning right. Generally when it gets to that point, I bring the issue to the team and ask them “why weren’t you aware of this?”