Welcome BACK to our annual Fireside in the Forums event!
My name is Kevin and I’m back with our amazing group of Plexians to answer your questions and listen to your feedback. This has been an interesting year, and we are excited to hear what you have to say.
This event is also a great part of one of our favorite weeks of the year—Plex Pro Week! We’ll be kicking off Pro Week this year on Monday, September 22, with another year of amazing content.
The Answers Thread
This is it! The place where we gather 'round the Fireside and answer all of the questions that have come in from our amazing forum members. Before we get into that, first, I would like to extend a huge thank you first to all of you here. If you are reading this, I am talking to you. We wouldn’t be here without you. Thank you for being a part of Plex and for participating in this Fireside. Whether you are here to ask questions, or to just read through the answers, this place would not be the same without you.
Next, a quick shout out to everyone that helped to make this a reality. There are a ton of people from our moderation and ninjas team to many other people within Plex that help to make this happen. Thank you all for your efforts here and it is amazing to say that we have been able to make this into an annual event three years running now (and hopefully many more!).
Just one last bit of info before we get to the reason we are all here. This thread will be locked. The only reason for this is that we are trying to provide a clearer Question → Answer flow. We definitely would like to engage on follow-ups and more discussions on any of these topics so please feel free to start threads for this and reference these posts.
Hey! Is CommonSense ratings integration still on the roadmap?
Answer:
Are you prescient? Do you have magical powers when looking into a crystal ball?
What a great question and I hope this is a great answer: NOW!
Yes, if you haven’t seen it already, we launched Common Sense Media on our mobile clients! You should be able to see basic information per title now. If you have a Plex Pass then you can even dive deeper and see a lot more detail and information!
I’d like to know if there’s any chance we’ll ever get full Plex on a Zidoo machine?
Answer
Love this question! Mainly because it is always really cool to stumble across new devices that I didn’t already know about. The devices that that company makes look really cool. This question is a bit of a challenge to address because I have to assume what is meant by “full Plex” here.
Let me provide two answers here: First, this appears to be based on Android. Yes, there is sideloading usually available on Android devices, but then some devices have specific challenges here. Without having any knowledge of these devices I don’t know if our current APKs could be sideloaded here. However, a couple of forum searches do seem to indicate that this is possible.
The second answer I will give here is that it does look like some of these units contain hard drive bays and the Shield was mentioned in the question. So Second scenario I can see being asked about here is whether we would support a “full” experience on the device where the server streaming/playback all occurred on the device like we currently support on the Shield device. Right now we have no plans on doing anything like this, mainly because these devices aren’t on our radar. If they become more popular or if something else changes we would certainly take a deeper look, but today, the answer is that we currently have no development plans related to these devices.
I’d love to understand what “coming soon!” means. You say that here over and over, but is that 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year?
Answer:
The irony here that we are adding in an initial “coming soon” message on the AMA questions isn’t lost on me. That is the easiest one to address. That simply means that we are working on getting the right people together to provide the best answer that we can as we move through Pro Week and that we have committed to providing an answer for that post in this AMA thread here.
However, in case the intent of this question is a bit broader - let me say that public roadmaps and promises are a big challenge at the best of times. Any commitment, whether it be a “coming soon” message or a specific date and time brings about a pressure of expectation that can be really hard to meet sometimes. If we have to pivot to tackle some big new interruption and move development time around it can be really hard to communicate that overall context to someone who is patiently waiting for that original bit to be delivered. That makes for a really tough balancing act that is frustrating for both you and us. What I am doing in my comms here is to work to get better at not giving a blanket “coming soon” message as even writing it doesn’t feel right. I would love get to where we can provide firm timelines and even something in the realm of a public roadmap, but that is a muscle that we don’t have built up yet and always carries the danger of missed expectations. So - my commitment here is to be honest and provide as much information as I have at that point in time, even knowing that may result in a message that I don’t know the timeline, as that is hopefully better than a vague “coming soon” message.
Is there an ETA for he transcode support for av1 in windows?
Answer:
Not sure exactly which was this question is being asked, so the answer here will be in two parts:
is there an ETA for transcode support TO AV1 in windows? Or, in, other words, are we looking to support encoding to AV1?
Not at this time. Earlier this year we introduced transcode support to HEVC/H.265 and that went well and somewhat paved the path for doing this again in the future for additional codecs. Right now we are working to modernize our FFMPEG stack. As these efforts are rather large we tend to work on them in a single-threaded nature so that we aren’t breaking things if we were to try and run big efforts like this in parallel. However, this isn’t a “never” answer, it just means that we don’t have this no our short term roadmap right now.
is there an ETA for transcode support FROM AV1 in windows? Or, in other words, how about HW decoding support of AV1 files in Windows?
This one is in a bit of better shape. The note in the encoding answer above gives the first clue. Basically we need FFMPEG 6.1 in place in order to transcode FROM AV1 (aka decode) on a windows device. I am happy to report that this is on the roadmap and is targeted to get some attention once that FFMPEG release goes out. The FFMPEG changes have been in alpha here in the forums for some time and will be launching into beta on PMS on the next release (so feel free to check it out, we would love any feedback!). If the FFMPEG release goes well then we would like to be able to work on getting this into a future beta around the end of the year, or early next year. Please take this timeline with a grain of salt - it assumes that we get the FFMPEG update out and stable first!
Support for “iOS photos & videos” (HEIF, HEIC, etc) When will that be added to plex?
Answer:
This requires some changes to dependencies in Plex Media Server that deal with image analysis and conversion. These are big refactors to components that have been here for over a decade that we are currently working on and while we don’t have an ETA for them yet, they will unlock support for more formats like HEIF/HEIC in the future.
Plex Photos App (iOS): why can’t I download MY own content from the app??
Answer:
This has come up in multiple places before and we have discussed at a minimum enabling sharing functionality through your device’s default share menu (which should enable local saving in most cases). However, this effort has fallen down the priority list for us and isn’t something that will get attention anytime soon. A lot of the de-prioritization has to do with reverting the decision to not have photos in the main apps and the people that would work on this are now working on building the photos experience in the main apps.
What is I want to know what is the status of the NFO support, last year you said it was already started?
Answer:
We haven’t forgotten about NFO support! The good news is that this is a domino in the same row as the PMS API. Since that first domino has fallen, and we have released the PMS API (Pro Week blog post and PMS API) we now get to start accelerating on projects like custom agents and NFO support. I am happy to report that we are currently on track to get both of these features into a beta PMS build by the end of the year (yes, that means 2025)! Actual full PMS release will depend on the testing and feedback that we get during the beta period, but typically things move pretty quickly once they make it into beta.
I assist our local public access channel in Houston by helping to maintain their facilities. One area I assist with is growth, and on a number of occasions I have suggested adding their channel to the plex live lineup, with they are very interested in! How can we make that happen?
Answer:
This is a great question! We love seeing interest in our streaming channels. I personally am not involved with how these get set up and become part of the LiveTV channels here at Plex but the good news is that I can help get you to the people who do know a lot about these things! We would suggest starting with an email communication to partners @ plex.tv (no spaces) as that will get the inquiry in front of the right people. Thank you so much for the question, interest here, and participating in the Fireside chat!
Have you thought about adding something like a “pseudo TV” mode for personal libraries?
Answer:
We have definitely thought about it, but it isn’t a current target. There is a good Feature Suggestion post on this that I suggest you read through. Additionally as a bit of an experiment I jumped into that thread last month and asked for suggestions on what expectations people would have for such a feature and provided some more thoughts here. It would be great to see your thoughts on this one there as well!
I’m guessing a lot of AI-related topics are going to pop up this year. I’d love to know more about your AI-related initiatives, but I’m particularly interested in using AI for library organization and eventually library recommendations.
Answer:
Interestingly, we are mostly through the questions submission part of the AMA and there aren’t that many AI related questions. AI is always interesting. We have had AI functionality options through third party providers in Plexamp for a while now, but without the Tidal integration anymore that is not as effective. We have also built machine learning models that are used for things like pattern matching for intro and credit detection as well as the auto-sync subtitles feature. We are pretty cautious at expanding usage here mainly because these models tend to be rather large and can take quite a bit of processing to utilize since they need to be utilized locally to function.
The quick and easy answer right now is that we don’t have any work ongoing around using AI for library organization or library recommendations for Plex Media Server. In order for us to build something like this in the cloud we would have to A) pass through information about what titles are there for the AI to use or B) find a way to do it locally. Therefore, unless we could find a way for your system to run everything locally we are not going to provide that functionality. We work really hard to maintain the barrier between what media is on your PMS as yours and we do not collect or use that data in any way.
What are the plans to make finding which of the many album posters for an album on the edit page is the highest resolution or the best quality?
Answer:
This is a great question. I don’t know that we have ever explored providing resolution or quality information when picking a album, movie, or tv show image… but why not? After reading this it seems like some nice info to consider including. We have started working on bringing more server management functionality to more areas of the platform and this is a great request to consider for that work.
This is also a great spot to plug the PMS API! If you are at all interested, the API documents the ability to set an item’s artwork so you could use this to upload high definition artwork!
Are you planning on improving the WebOS app for a fast and well performing user experience?
Answer:
We are working hard to bring the new app experience to all platforms and this will include those for TV clients like LG. This is one of the tougher areas for clients as there is so many varied hardware on TVs and similar devices. This is being built on the new codebase and we will be working hard to make that as performant as we can before release. I do not have a timeline on this release yet to share here.
When will we get the auto download feature to return to Android devices?
Answer:
Great question! Downloads is an area that we wanted to focus on with the new app experience. What we chose to do was to build from the ground up. This meant working to create a strong, stable, and fast foundation, then building on top of that foundation for all of the rest of the download features that existed previously. I went into a bit more detail here if you are interested.
As for our next steps, we do have more downloads work on our active/in progress project list and it is getting love and attention. I don’t have any timelines to provide today, but this next round of work includes quite a bit of interface cleanup based on feedback from all of you and starting the buildout of downloading additional groups of content (aka things like playlists) and also smart downloads (that would include auto-downloads of things like next episodes).
Answer part 2 from @hsousa here:
Short answer is yes, we will bring back more advanced/smart ways of downloading content in our apps. The new app also brought a completely redesigned downloads infrastructure, that we’ve been working hard to make sure it has a solid foundation that we can safely build features on top of.
We are currently in the design phase for some of those next features, which will include things like better organization of downloaded content, easier way to manage it and yes, the ability to for example only download the next X unwatched episodes.
These changes are not going to come all at once, but please know that this feature is near and dear to our hearts and we’re treating it with the love it deserves.
Answer:
Thanks for the thoughtful context around the question. This is a pain I’ve felt myself, and you’re not entirely wrong when you wonder if this is a limitation with how collections were first implemented many years ago, and how the PMS infrastructure evolved over time.
The short answer is that we currently have no plans to support nesting collections. However, there is work planned to restructure how collections and playlists work in PMS that would allow more flexibility into what types of data are included, which is an area we would like to grow at some point.
With the release of tvOS 26, will we see audio passthrough supported in the Plex app?
Answer:
Short Answer: no.
Longer answer: no, but it is not because it is our decision to make. We have confirmed that while there are many reports that passthrough is included in tvOS26, that is actually an incorrect assumption. Check out this post for context.
Since there is almost always a follow up question here, let’s go ahead and address it:
Are there any plans to support Dolby atmos on apple tv?
Answer:
From the PMS side of things we cannot currently support it today due to the version of FFMPEG in use on PMS. However, there is good news. We have been working hard to bring that FFMPEG version forward for quite a few reasons. One of those is so that we can support things like Dolby atmos. The FFMPEG6 builds have been in alpha for a while now (a forum search should give you more information) and these will be going into a PMS beta very soon with a goal of releasing this year.
This will unlock our ability to add in Dolby atmos support on PMS. Then we will need support on the client side. While checking with our engineering teams on this question I got a solid yes that we will be able to provide support here, but do not have an eta on when that will land.
Since then, we have had no replies to our posts and threads about the issue, and the issue has not been resolved. Can you please tell us what your word means when you say things like this and then nothing happens? It certainly feels like Plex staff are saying words to keep us quiet, but then not following up on those words. Also - One year later, can you give us any update on this issue please?
Answer:
Yeah questions like this aren’t fun but I appreciate you taking the time to ask. It isn’t fun from your side since it is still an open issue. It isn’t fun from my side as I do try hard to set and manage expectations, but even the best attempts here can fall flat like this one has done. I did some digging here and unfortunately when building responses I can check with a team, confirm some information, create a ticket, but all of that does not mean that that ticket will be prioritized and addressed. This appears to be a case where that prioritization has slipped through the cracks and I do apologize for any expectations that my messaging in the last Fireside may have set here.
As far as getting this looked at now - I will be honest that it is very unlikely to occur due to our effort for these clients is focused on getting the new experience ready to launch there (as I commented in a previous LG answer here). I would like to think that there is hope here as the new experience will be using as much shared code as possible and that assuming this works on other platforms there is a decent chance it might work here, but I am not going to claim that and it will need to be validated once we have released that client.
When is the ability to locally host/manage Clear Logo images coming to Plex Media Server?
Answer:
We will build this, but I do not have a timeline to provide at this time. There is a bit of work to do no the PMS side of things to properly handle the images and we want to get this done just need to find the space and people to do it. This is absolutely a target for us, we just have to find a way to get it done.
Are there any plans to look into how the new apps are reporting quality settings back to the server?
Answer:
The qualities reported by the client to PMS educate the server on what the device is capable of playing alongside with the user’s preference. This means selecting “Maximum” quality should either direct play/stream a 480p video, or transcode it (if required) up to 480p as well.
So, while we have no current plans to change how qualities are defined in the client, what you’re describing seems to be a bug, because PMS should never transcode a video to a higher resolution than the original, regardless of what the client asks for. If that’s happening, please create a thread with logs and sample data so we can investigate.
