I would have given up on Plex itself a long time ago if it wasn’t for this client.
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Same, I wouldn’t use Plex either. I mean, you can’t even play some 4k bluray movies with other clients/players because of branched audio issues. PM4K is the only one with full support. Don’t get me started on their new app redesign and still not supporting subtitle adjustments, which is crucial for projector users.
Imagine you have expensive home theater setup, and the main playback for movies and shows stand on a client that is maintained for free by 1 individual in his spare time, has a lot more features, is faster, works better and if you have any QOL suggestions, it gets implemented in a very short notice.
I have never seen anything like it anywhere else in any other project. Plex company should be ashamed. I am surprised that they didn’t shut this project down yet, since it is so much better than their own garbage. My only fear is that they break some API or something and this addon no longer works with Kodi.
Knowing how Plex operates lately, they could do that out of spite. I really have no idea what people in this company even do anymore. How are they earning a paycheck when the only reason their service is useable is because of 1 dude who does everything for free with 0 publicity and 0 incentive other than help users to keep them on their abysmal platform.
Now I know that the reason PM4K works as well as it does, is because of Kodi, so I would also like to give major props to Kodi devs and people behind it. Nothing would work without them and they are the only ones with a player that play branched audio movies, which is one of the reasons why PM4K is so powerful.
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Not trying to start a Plex hate train here. That’s a lot of words to say you have power user requirements and as such need a better client than what normal people require. It’s pretty hard to shut down open source so I think any of that talk is just fearmongering. Businesses don’t generally operate on spite.
Actually? They should be proud and to a certain extent you should be grateful. It’s so rare that companies try the open source route without limits. PM4K is only possible because they tried the bold and somewhat risky approach. PM4K is a fork of their open source Kodi client Plex4Kodi.
Very unlikely. There’s no definitive way of shutting down PM4K as it simply uses the same APIs their clients use. Also: I’m in constant open discussion with them about APIs and approaches and they tend to handle and receive that very well. Not affiliated with them, but very much in contact.
Well. Don’t forget: they made the conscious decision to create an open source app in the first place, which I forked, because its development was too slow for my liking and I had specific features and approaches in mind that didn’t coincide with the Plex UI idea.
While I’ve added pretty massive features during that time, I’ve never changed the UI approach in a meaningful way, because it’s pretty much impossible to do that as a Kodi plugin. Kodi itself very much crippled the abilities of plugins by not implementing the same features they’ve developed for skins.
IMHO the biggest flaw of PM4K is the UI and the fact that it can’t be as dynamic as I’d want it to be. The UI elements are based off of fixed xml layouts that I can’t change on the fly. I’ve got a good couple of hacky ideas in mind to fix this, but those are still a long shot.
It’s also one of its greatest strengths maybe. Yes, the server separation is annoying, but I’d hazard a guess that 95% of PM4K users use it with one server, so it’s not that big of a deal.
tl;dr: yes. I agree that Plex Inc has had issues finding its place and still has issues monetizing what they do, and with the recent changes to the licensing and remote play terms, this might have created a bigger issue.
Still, it is, without a doubt, the best and most feature complete personal media management system there is. I provide an integration of the best media player in existence together with a somewhat usable UI. This is and will continue to be possible due to their open source decision way back when, and we should be thankful for that.
Edit: bear in mind, I’m not affiliated with Plex in any way, other than having certain benefits as a Plex ninja.
Edit 2: a lot of additions and corrections
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This is a very good news, didn’t know that. I thought that they are ignoring you and the whole project, which in my opinion was a good thing, because they wouldn’t meddle and mess with it.
And I was perhaps a bit harsh but every single thing that they are doing with their native apps I just don’t agree with. Could perhaps word things a bit differently but it is what it is.
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No worries. I don’t disagree with what you said, necessarily. I also know how hard it is to run a company, though, and I can especially imagine how hard it is to do that with the background Plex has.
Try paying your employees based off of an idea that hugely came from the piracy world. I get all of the decisions this company made in the past, even though I don’t agree with them as a user. It’s ■■■■■■■ hard to balance that.
Still: Reimplement watch together, are you serious? 
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They’re aware. PM4K is in the official Kodi repository under a different name, because of legal issues with naming. And yeah, I’ve been in contact with the original author of Plex4Kodi since I can remember, because he has kickstarted me with knowledge that would’ve taken me months (years) to gain on my own.
In terms of PM4K Plex Inc is not the bad guy.
Edit: also, I’ve existed in the Plex game for over a decade now I think. It started with Sub-Zero, which they were very aware of, because it was one of the most used plugins back in the day (it was even in one of their plugin promotion blog posts back then :D)
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Also, even though I am bashing on their incompetence, as you can see, I still shelled out money for their lifetime Plex Pass after announcing subscription for remote play. What irks me is that I wouldn’t use their services if it wasn’t for PM4K in the first place so essentially I purchased PlexPass and gave them money because of your work on PM4K.
I hope they understand that PM4K is important and not just an afterthought.
That is really good to hear. I never knew how this worked before today so thank you for some insight.
As we’re using official APIs, maybe, maybe not. PM4K exists inside a niche of a niche of a niche. It’s certainly not very important to Plex Inc, but that’s also not really important to me as long as I provide value to you and by proxy to them.
I started doing all of this for my wife, as I did with Sub-Zero. She has a progressive disease that requires her to have great subtitles, where that project stemmed from, and Bazarr basically has its quality from there as well.
PM4K I created because I didn’t like the Android player issues back then.
Ultimately, now, since about 5-10 years ago, I’m doing PM4K as a replacement/coping mechanism for having moved to management instead of software development in my professional career. I get my instant gratification from providing something to you guys, which is something you don’t really get to have while in a management position.
Edit: corrections
Edit 2: to clarify, you guys are easily the most motivating factor for my work on PM4K by now. Since I’ve “solved” the subtitle issue, I’ve just been thrilled with your engagement. So yeah, the initial spark was for my wife, but she doesn’t really care about the continuous development of PM4K (unless I fix something that annoys her or provides a real benefit such as watchlist)
Edit 3: yeah, some info in here is private. I know what I’m doing 
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The info in your post is so illuminating.
Firstly, I’m delighted that you’ve found a passion, albeit from a difficult starting place. That the passion benefits all of us so tangibly is great. I use PM4K daily for music and video and it rocks.
Secondly, it’s good to know about the collaborative relationship you have with Plex. It’s something I had wondered about and it’s reassuring.
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I should have a fix in the next beta that’s closer to the handling we had in 0.8.0-beta12.3, to avoid having to use the alternate seek crutch.
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I have a movie collection with 276 items, organized alphabetically, up to letter Y. If i scroll down past the first 240 items, the last items in the collection disappear (are not shown) and are replaced by the first items, which are displayed again (eg. from 11 Rebels (2024) onwards), basically doubling them. I forgot to take notice where it ends, but I’ll check, if necessary. On my PC, where PMS is located, the collection displays fine, without vanished or doubly displayed items. All other collections are displayed OK, but all are far below 200 items (second largest is 129 items).
I’m on the latest beta and the device is Ugoos AM6B+ (CPM A14 build, based on CE 21.2). I’m not using caching at all (never did). Everything else on PM4K works well.
L.E. NVM, went to the addon settings and set Library Item Request Chunk Size (which was at 240) to a value higher than the number of the items in the largest collection (360) and that did the trick.
Interesting, that means that there’s an issue with the chunker. Noted, thanks!
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Yeah, before applying the same “fix” on multiple devices with Kodi/PM4K (a Google TV television set, Shield and Windows PC), I checked and the same problem was present on all of them.
Added to the list of things to check in 0.8.1. Fully focussing on getting a beta with the watchlist proof of concept out, for now.
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Mine is set to the default 240 - no issue, well over 1000 items showing normally. Maybe it’s something unique to your server, or file naming?
Might be, I have no idea. I haven’t even noticed it until yesterday, but since I have found a workaround, it doesn’t bother me anymore. Also, just to be sure there’s no misunderstanding, I’m talking about a collection, not a library. Libraries are displayed correctly, even those with 1000+ items.
I will check not the file naming, which I think it’s fine, but the very name of that collection itself, which is the only one to include a special character (diacritics, I guess it’s the English name for it).
L.E. Nah, it’s not that (special letter), tried without it and with the default value of 240, the problem reappeared. Whatever it might be, I can live it it since there is that workaround.
Ahhhh an actual collection. I don’t have any large ones, sorry, can’t test.
First watchlist implementation 95% done for movies. Shows should be pretty straight forward now.
Seems like playing back items available on a different server, that you also have a connection to, but isn’t your currently selected server, will work seamlessly without user interaction.
That this works without much effort is a great sign for possibly “merged” home views in the future.
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@panni Thank you for all that you do! I have read through most of the info I can find about pm4k here, on reddit, and the CoreELEC forums and have seen you mention that the look and locations of things in pm4k are basically hardcoded and would be pretty difficult to change.
What would need to happen to be able to skin pm4k similar to how we can with Kodi in general? Have there been any discussions with anybody at Plex that might be helpful?
