Has there been any work done to be able to share a link to 1 particular item or group of items (movie, collection, album, series) so a person can access just that thing? What about sharing so the person doesn’t need a Plex account to access?
Answer:
We have done work here, a great starting point would be our support article on Single Item Access. I will note here that this is a function that isn’t used as much and currently has not been built in the new experience mobile apps, so if you would like to access and set up shares like this I would recommend the web client to start.
As for the request to share access so that the receiver does not need a Plex account, that is not something we would build. There are many services out there for sharing access to files of any type that could be used for this. From a PMS perspective, it was designed for sharing with family and friends and the risk of an unauthorized link getting out in the wild could create some interesting scenarios for that server. The risk for misuse is high enough that we just aren’t interested in building out this type of functionality.
Answers:
The (hopefully) good news here is that we are working to bring photos back to the main app experience (announcement here). Due to our focus on bringing the new experience to all our of current apps we haven’t been able to tackle new development on some of our existing applications like photos. This also means that decisions around functions like uploading photos from a mobile device to a server are not currently something we are considering. I do not know right now how we will look to grow functionality for areas like photos right now.
Which brings me to the second point here. Other photo services like the two mentioned here have both more people, resources, and a narrower focus. In order to try and compete with these we would need to build a lot more functions into server for processing of things like facial recognition and both building and supporting lots more client functions that we would need to support longer term. Honestly, there isn’t much desire or discussion here to consider competing with these other products.
Instead, what we are choosing to do is to provide a server for management of photos, a basic client experience, and an API for that server where anyone who wants to can build a richer client experience.
Is there development being done on the Plex Dash app? It feels dated and could use some UI enhancements.
Answer:
Not at this time. There have been some apps that haven’t received as much attention while we have been working on the new experience and Dash fits into that category.
Is it possible to have my tv show and movie library content be turned into a Program guide?
Answer:
EPG (Electronic Program Guides) are pretty challenging to build. However this question seems to be more focused on a request for a server-sourced live TV channel. This is an area that has come up many times before and while we have discussed how this might be designed and built, we currently do not have any work or plans here anytime soon.
Allow notifications to be sent to friends I have shared my server with when new things are added
Answer:
There is a future project planned where we will look to create messaging/notifications that will allow this. It is not currently an active project for us at this time.
Is there any hope of bringing back “watch together?” I really miss this feature and used it regularly.
Answer:
I would like to think that there is hope for this feature. But what I would point out here is that while we have announced that we decided to not build it in the new experience yet, it is still a functioning feature in many of our clients right now as I type this. The only apps that do not have this right now are the mobile apps and as of a few weeks ago, Roku.
Let me be clear - while there is echoing sentiment here at Plex that it would be a feature that many of us would like to get fully functional in the new experience apps, it is not currently on our active or planned project list. Keep using it while you can, get your friends and family to use it and while I can’t promise you when we might be able to get this onto the active project list, I can promise that we won’t forget about it.
Is Watch Together currently in the plans to return for in app usage? Will other features from the original plex apps be added over time into the newer apps? What sort of capabilities are in the plan for the API?
As for “other features” it is hard to know what to comment on here without specifics. However, what I will say is that we aren’t just releasing these apps and stopping. Releases go out every few weeks and we are continually working to grow and improve these apps as we have been doing for many years now.
For the API, this is focused on the Plex Media Server. It really isn’t something that could be used to re-implement older apps features. However, feel free to explore it yourself!
Can you please update the Roku app to take “Playlists” out from being nested underneath the Libraries?
Answer:
Good news! This is happening! We aren’t moving Playlists from its spot in the left nav when viewing a library in Roku. Instead, what we have done here is to re-enable Playlists for a library acting like a library. This is pretty much the same functionality that existed previously. This means that you can now access and favorite Playlists for a server just like you can a library for that server. This work has been done and has been pushed into the Roku Preview and will be in the next release.
My question is, would it be possible to set up some sort of “watch pool” that consists of a selection of shows? Clicking it would queue up one (uwatched) episode from each show, sort of acting like a custom programming block.
Answer:
I brought this question up for discussion internally and there was some fun discussion around it.First - we don’t have a current solution that feels like it fits the question here 100%. There was mention of using smart playlists to do something similar, here is one suggestion:
I’ve used smart playlists for something like this before, useful for shows that have a decent amount of cross over, like Chicago Fire/PD/Med, sorted by air date it’ll just play what’s next, but sometimes you can get blocks of the same thing in a row with different break schedules, it’s also not random.
The fun discussions came around where the topic of plot order came up. Does plot order here matter? Looks like some people will care and others might not (if our internal discussions are any indication). The ideas then started going down rabbit holes that included using cron jobs to update playlists and shuffling and an external process using the PMS API. So the final answer here is that we do not support this use case today, but it could likely be done with the API. Thanks for the question.
Rather than simply listing the year of release, could Plex support displaying the full release dates in the web/mobile apps and players?
Answer:
It is something that is now on our UX team’s radar to consider. One note here, for PMS titles it is possible to set a date in the metadata editing for a title, so it is at least partially available. While discussing this question someone did note that we do display airdate for TV shows, so it might make sense to do it for movies and someone else also mentioned that it might be a nice add when sorting by release date below the poster. Thanks for the post!
Will Plex ever add the inclusion of streamlink files for libary purposes?
Answer:
I do not know if we will ever support it, but right now that is not an area that we are doing any work around. I have seen this one come up a few times so there is some community support for a function like this, but as we have not explored this yet I don’t have any other information to provide here right now.
I was just about to ask for an “Editions” tag for TV Shows… Any update?
Answer:
Yup! This area has received some attention and work. It has been been worked on at the server level. It has not been worked on for clients yet. We will need to finish that work before it can be released. Our immediate project list is pretty full, but it is being considered for our next work cycle. My fingers are crossed that we can find a way to get this feature released sometime next year. Also, to be clear, the way it has been built is for editions of shows, not editions of episodes.
In the new apps, what will be the destiny of the Music Videos functionality? And in a related note, is there any thought to representing Music Concerts in a similar way, or with a dedicated scraper/library, perhaps that may even deep link into my music?
Answer:
The Roku client is the first one with both the new experience and music enabled. The quick answer is that we did specific testing on videos (which tend to primarily be music videos) to ensure that that functionality is preserved there. The longer term goal is to preserve that functionality as we bring music into the other clients on the new experience.
As for concerts? That one is a no as we have no plans for metadata around concerts. However, we do allow you to edit your own metadata for PMS titles and with the newly released PMS API documentation and upcoming custom agents we might see someone create something that could solve this at some point. It would be awesome to see a solution like that.
Do you anticipate the redesign / new code base to be faster for those of us with mobile devices and also using the TV tuner? Additionally, will permissions on collections see any new love?
Answer:
Anticipate / hope that it is faster? Of course! Is it that way right now? I have seen reports of it being faster and I have seen reports of people saying it is slower. I honestly don’t think there is a definitive answer that fits everyone here as so many people have different sets of variables on their setups that can affect things. What I do know is something that I mentioned in a discussion with an engineer here. Just because these apps are released doesn’t mean that we are done with them. Now we get to work on things like optimizations and I would hope that after the apps have matured a bit we can confidently state that things are at best a faster experience and at worst an equivalent experience in comparison with the previous apps.
As for collections, there are a few projects on the horizon around ratings controls and collections work. Will this work specifically address the use case you have brought up? I don’t know specifically there, but hope that the new features and projects provide at least another path to a solution for you.
The ability to pull up a movie or tv show episode and see the music from that particular piece of media. Are there any plans to reincorporate that type of feature?
Answer:
Unfortunately, no plans right now. Without the Tidal metadata source this one is tough. Feel free to make a request for it in the Feature Suggestions forum area if you want.
Hi i love anime so my question is any way to add changing which voice cast you see ie see the English voice cast instead of the Japanese?
Answer:
There is no current ability or plans to create this ability right now. Feel free to make a request for it in the Feature Suggestions forum area if you want.
Whats the story behind the urgent security patch that had to be applied to PMS and why couldn’t we access Wikipedia information of actors and actresses for a short time while browsing our library via an internet browser?
Answer:
We received a responsible disclosure of a vulnerability through our bug bounty program, fixed the vulnerability, and released a patch as urgently as possible. This is our intended process for handling reported issues like this.
We also did our own investigation into various data to see if we could find any evidence that the vulnerability was being exploited (we could not). Going into a bunch of technical detail right away would only serve to put people who hadn’t yet updated at unnecessary risk, so we focused on getting people to upgrade to an updated version.
The vulnerability allowed people that you’re sharing your server with to use an API endpoint to discover your authentication token. We’ve since addressed this remotely by disabling sharing on vulnerable server versions, so this can no longer be exploited regardless of server version. We’re appreciative of all the people who use our bug bounty program and responsible disclosure to make Plex as safe as possible.
Also - the second part of the question around not being able to access actor and actress information was not related to the security patch in any way and was most likely an internet/networking issue where that data could not be fetched successfully for a period of time
I’m running on Kubernetes and I was wondering if there are plans to offer options to decouple the database from the app itself in order to support a more modular architecture? it is possible in the near future to also decouple certain CPU heavy tasks like transcoding into separate worker units?
Answer:
The short and quick answer here is no. We have no plans to do this at this time.
Is there a way to change configured GPU in plex without crashing the current transcodes?
Answer:
Pretty straightforward here - no - this is not possible to do. I always get a little bit nervous with definitive answers like this as there might be some example out there of someone getting something like this to work somehow, so let me amend slightly: No - and if there was a way to do this we are not interested in building out this functionality.
Are there any plans to release Plex on the macOS App Store with the same interface as tvOS?
Answer:
The short answer is yes, but: We plan on bringing the new Plex experience everywhere we can, including desktops, be haven’t really decided on details such as self-distribution like we do today vs. Mac App Store.
The cool thing about a unified codebase is that it allows us to be much more flexibile with platforms we release in, but there are still challenges that need to be overcome like platform-specific issues around playback, supported formats and sometimes even filesystem quirks.
As for when that will happen, well right now we’re focused on getting the TV apps finalized and rolled out, while also addressing issues in the mobile apps. There is also a set of features aimed specifically at server owners we’d want to make sure are implemented before that happens!
Is there any hope that Plex will ever support multiple artists per album?
Answer:
The short answer is that we aren’t working on this one now but it IS on our radar. (So - yes - there is hope!)
The challenge here is that this is a decently big change to how PMS stores data. It definitely isn’t impossible, but we need a solid plan on how we want to do this before we start making changes here. It has been getting some more attention lately and there are even some ideas to be able to return both a newer data structure as well as the current one for more backwards compatibility. We will be sure to let you know if we get started working on this one.
