I would like the option to force a pre roll to my clients
3 Likes
+1 for this request.
@OttoKerner said:
You should not.
Why even use plex when you can get some trailers shoved down your throat on tv?
(Rhetorical question)@ajay_zalavadia said:
not trying to force a user to watch a long trailer , but at least 20 sec pre roll wont hurt.I can only speak for myself here, but Iād be furious.
As an admin, youād be free to choose for yourself to use this feature or not.
As a user, youād be free to stop using the server of an admin who used this feature.
The fact that youād be upset if an admin implemented this on a server youāre a user on has absolutely zero value in determining if this should be an option for admins.
2 Likes
Sorry, I had to chime in here. I donāt think having the option to have an announcement that the system will be down etc, is a bad thing.
What cracks me up is the people who appear to be complaining about people using their system, and they have to play for it. Uhhhhh, its your system, if you donāt want to share it, donāt! Nobodyās forcing you to be nice and share your media with friends and family, Iām planning a larger system to do the same thing. Iām not going to complain when users connect to itā¦thatās part of the fun 
Itās a great feature to have just like trailers but if you canāt control/force the users to use it from the Server itās kind of a worthless feature to have since you canāt use it. 
Never understood why it was designed this way. By default the server wouldnāt have any pre-roll setup so it wouldnāt cause the client any issues. Obviously if the server admin setup a pre-roll then it was done for a reason with the expectation ALL clients would see it.
Carlo
3 Likes
@144steve@gmail.com said:
Sorry, I had to chime in here. I donāt think having the option to have an announcement that the system will be down etc, is a bad thing.What cracks me up is the people who appear to be complaining about people using their system, and they have to play for it. Uhhhhh, its your system, if you donāt want to share it, donāt! Nobodyās forcing you to be nice and share your media with friends and family, Iām planning a larger system to do the same thing. Iām not going to complain when users connect to itā¦thatās part of the fun
That is not a concern of this request. Instead, we are bemoaning a feature that has not been fully implemented.
If I take my time to set up a pre-roll (3 seconds in my case), I expect it to be enabled on all clients. The current implementation just doesnt make any sense. My android (TV and mobile) clients all show my pre-roll without having trailers enabled. (read: forced preroll, as designed by the plex devs). Plex web needs the trailers howeverā¦ (read: partially forced pre-roll, unlikely as designed by the plex devs). This erratic behavior needs to be fixed for pre-roll to be considered a functioning feature.
May I ask out of curiosity what you guys are pre-rolling?
For some, itās for the novelty of just being able to do it. You could create a custom intro placed before everything.
For others it would be for service announcements and other things like that. Doesnāt need to be anything fancy but could just be āPlex will be offline on Tuesday from 8pm to 10pmā type thing.
Iām using this one: https://www.flatpackfx.com/products/shadow-logo-animation-after-effects-cc-no-plugins
With my servers name (its the url) and the original logo sound. I tell myself, this will one day establish my ābrandā well enough, that my users browse the url directly and not plex.tv
Great for offering request/issue handling and motd through a reverse proxyā¦
@āJonathan Vogelbuschā said:
With my servers name (its the url) and the original logo sound. I tell myself, this will one day establish my ābrandā well enough, that my users browse the url directly and not plex.tv
Youāll know your āBrandā will be well established - the stench of your scent marking finally complete - when you notice no one is using your server, you never get invited to family gatherings or hear from your friends any more.
The rest of us will realize we were right all along, knowing how bad an idea this was, when Plex makes this āFeatureā a reality, turns it on by default, with no way to turn it off - and it pre-rolls Goat/Mule Poarne to all our family and friends.
I guess at that point you can send out that txt message or email that Reads:
Please Stand By - Server Offline Until Further Notice
Yea but itās cooler to use Plex for things like this to let people know the Thanksgiving/Christmas game is going to record and be available for those without DVR and canāt watch the game due to family and stuff.
Agreed on the value of something like that but why would I want to go through the trouble of creating a pre-roll when a simple MOTD approach at connection would do?
No one is saying itās the best approach but Plex gave us Pre-Roll and we COULD make use of it short of the fact itās not defaulted to on in the clients.
Sometime we have to mold our ways into the software we have available.
Creating pre-rolls is what got David Lean started. 
+1 As well.
I agree here. Some way of a short preroll to let users know of upcoming outages or upgrades would be amazing. I donāt have a whole lot of people on my Server but Iāll be damned if I donāt get a couple calls when I need to take it down for a moment. The preroll option is awesome, just with it could be forced.
+1 for this
@mdthejericho said:
+1 for this
like the first post pls
+1 for this feature as well.
Iād like to offer a modification to the request. While Iād like to see the ability to add pre-roll globally, in addition, Iād like to be able to add pre-roll per title (or now per collection).
Some examplesā¦
I have a selection of THX and Dolby Digital trailers that Iād like to add to certain films to take advantage of my sound system. There are also specific THX trailers for certain films like Terminator 2. Iād like to be able to not only play those trailers in front of certain films, but also trailers for specific films. I also have some regional theater chain trailers from my home town that would be fun to throw into the mix occasionally.
I think that creating a playlist of pre-roll would be needed for this. The playlist could also be used for TV showsāan example would be to play a two-part episode as a single play. You should be able to select per file or a folder of files to choose from much like youād select fan art or a poster.
For those that donāt want to view the trailers you could certainly scrub through them to the end, or perhaps a āskip intro/pre-rollā button could appear on screen like Netflix has started to offer recently that would jump to the feature immediately.
As I offer my library to a small list of users, perhaps the people that have large groups might have some thoughts on how to add more to what Iāve said here.
+1 for this feature request as well.
Iāve been following this conversation for a while now and itās kinda ridiculous in my opinion that this feature has not been added. I can understand it not being available for free users, but for us paying users (like myself that bought a lifetime Plex Pass subscription), it should be added and up to our discretion if we want to force a pre-roll or not. We are the ones hosting the hardware, invested in Plex by purchasing a Plex Pass subscription, paying the electric bill to leave our serverās online all the time, and the list goes on. With all that said, it would just be nice to get a little credit by showing a brief logo sting (or server maintenance message) to the person prior to the media starting to play! Pleaseā¦
