Pro Week ‘25: Fireside in the Forum AMA

General Discussions
41

Question:

Something really annoys me about the player is the forward button(And right arrow key) is there a specific reason it was made 30s? Would really love it to be 10s or customizable backward and forward timings. Also the ps5 plex app doesn’t have a playback speed option, why is that missing?

Answer:
That’s something that annoys some of us too, which is why we’ve added the ability to customize both backward & forward actions in the new apps on Android & Apple devices (check it under Settings → Player Experience)!

This will be available in all other platforms as we rollout the new Plex Experience over time.

As for playback speed on PS5, there were technical issues in that platform that unfortunately led to us not shipping the feature there. We tried, but ultimately we couldn’t ship a new premium feature that was fundamentally broken and outside of our control to fix.

2 Likes
42

Question:

The Plex HTPC app has excellent pass-exclusive features like adjustable autoplay timers and rewind on pause. Are there plans to bring these features to the standard Plex Desktop app for Windows?

Answer:
Yes there are. When we bring the new experience to desktop we will not only be bringing these features along, but also plan on bringing back older functionality like we used to have in PMP (Plex Media Player) where you can switch the UI between more of a tv/big picture mode and a responsive usability mode.

43

Question:

Is there any thought to having the ability to use both EPG and XMLTV. And if this already exists, can I get instructions on how to utilize both?

Answer:
This does not exist right now. These Fireside sessions are always fascinating to me because I always learn something new every time we do this and this question is one of those scenarios for this year. It turns out that we have a note in the code that:

Note: All lineups for a DVR must be from the same source; i.e. all Cloud EPG lineups or all XMLTV lineups. Mixing of Cloud EPG and XMLTV lineups in one DVR will not be supported.

So that is an answer, but I honestly don’t know why as that note was from 2021. So while it is an answer here, I do not know if/when we might take another look to change things here or add additional functionality.

1 Like
44

Question:

why is it that after all this time, plex inc is still not all that great at bringing people from the community into the fold to have us help you evangelize and help roll things out? There are several people who are high-signal QA capable folk, who try to help y’all improve the quality of new experiences etc– but you won’t roll out anything alpha to us, instead using some random youtuber who’s making a plex-pro-week video about it?

Answer:
We have several programs for users to get early access to our products but they do vary depending on the app and scope of the testing. These opportunities are designed to get our community’s feedback before a new feature is rolled out to all users.

  • Plex Media Server Betas: Plex Pass subscribers can access beta versions of the Plex Media Server, which allows them to test new features and provide feedback on the core of the Plex experience.
  • Mobile App Betas: For both iOS and Android, we offer beta programs. On iOS, you can join our TestFlight programs, and on Android, you can sign up for the beta channel through the Google Play Store. Note: Sometimes the TestFlight beta can be full and we realize this is frustrating. We are constantly working to free up slots but this is a limitation on Apple’s App Store.
  • TV Apps: Roku offers an early channel (Plex Preview) and tvOS has had a program on TestFlight called Plex Experience Preview for about a year. In both cases these are updated on a regular basis. These are essentially beta or even alpha-level builds that give you a sneak peek at new features and allow you to help us test them.

We’ve also offered more targeted efforts for projects like Plex Media Server FFMPEG6 upgrades on our forums and various tvOS playback investigations. So all of this being said, Plex will continue to try and find fun ways to get more of our users testing the software early on a regular basis. In parallel to these efforts, we are also discussing internally how we might be able to relaunch a user testing program (Ninjas), but want to do it in a way that is impactful for both Plex and the users testing new software.

45

Question:

Will we ever be able to DVR any of the Plex Live TV shows?

Answer:
As you might have guessed, there are copyright reasons that prevent us from allowing DVR functionality on Plex Live TV shows currently. However - the question here is whether this will ever be possible. I am not involved with the discussions on bringing in new channels but I am happy to see questions like this coming up a couple of times around this AMA and will definitely be passing the interest along to the people who are involved here.

46

Question:

I’d love it if I could stream directly off my Plex Server without needing an internet connection, just my intranet. Why?

Answer:
Thank you for this question. This is one of the tougher areas that comes up quite a bit for a lot of folks.

First - let me address local auth. We do not support local auth and have no plans to do so. I do recognize that there are many requests for this and that other personal media solutions provide this, however, it is an area that we have chosen to provide an online authentication for and will keep using that going forward. This does mean that we are choosing to not support a permanently local/offline Plex Media Server experience.

However - I can acknowledge that our handling of a less permanent offline state is not as solid as we would like it to be. We are exploring other authentication solutions such as, JWT authentication for PMS API auth that we hope will show us paths for providing much better support for intermittent or shorter-period offline scenarios for already authenticated clients. We have also started working to make the new apps more resilient to shorter-term offline states. We will continue this work and hope to create solutions that provide a much more robust temporary offline solution in a way that just works better for everyone.

Until we can get to that state - there are things that you can do to better enable a temporary offline state right now, but they are a manual function that you will need to prepare for in advance and setup while you have an active network connection. There are lots of posts about this in the forums - here is one from 2019 in the Tips, Tricks, & How-Tos forum area that might help some people get started here.

2 Likes
47

Question:

Could we please have a feature that says just send the data stream and then the browser envronment can do what it can?

Answer:
This is an interesting concept. I am bringing it up with our teams here for discussion, but we do not have any work currently happening along these lines and it is not something that is on the upcoming project list to work on.

48

Question and Answers
Rapid Fire Response:

Can we get an update on the current status of an Audio Book Library?

No current work is happening here right now

Will there ever be a slideshow functionality added to the Photos in Apple tvOS?

Current target is to bring parity with the current app in the new experience. Please feel to request this in Feature Suggestions.

What are the current plans for this app and will music always be included in the app?

Please see this post for more information.

Is there any plan for local server authentication?

Please see this post for more information

49

Question:

Is there potentially a future plan to revamp the web pvr interface, potentially add keyboard fast forwarding similar to that found in normal playback, and address other PVR web client playback issues in the near future?

Answer:
I am going to assume that “web pvr interface” is in reference to app.plex.tv and if I am getting that assumption wrong and this answer is not making sense then I apologize in advance.

We do have plans for future projects here. While the projects aren’t focused around specific issues, they are focused on bringing some of the benefits of a shared codebase into more clients and as we do that we are looking to cleanup bugs and issues wherever we can. As these are future projects, I don’t have the insight or context to go much deeper here, but I know that they will start by working current functionality before we get to any new feature additions.

1 Like
50

Question:

Are there plans to make compatibility tracks more accessible to decrease the need for transcoding?

Answer:
We had a quick debate on what the intent and meaning of what “compatibility track” means here. This answer will assume that it means the encodings of the individual video and audio tracks inside container files. If I am getting that assumption wrong and this answer is not making sense then I apologize in advance.

We generally try and support as many codec as we can for playback for these tracks, but transcoding vs direct play is a function with many variables. We may fully support things on the server, but the client may not. Most codec support on the clients is inherent to that client and we can only use what exists there and we do encourage everyone to do a bit of research to see what your own devices are capable of. Additionally, we did explain some of this in one of our Pro Week videos around transcoding that you can find here.

1 Like
51

Question and Answers:

There are quite a few here and feel free to add your voice to the many posts in the Feature Suggestions area for many of these. This answer will focus on two questions:

  1. For music libraries, could we get better support for scanning external repositories for music info, not just the couple already included?

We have no intent or plans to add additional sources of music metadata right now. However, we are trying to build out functionality with the PMS API and custom agents so that anyone can create an ability to add more metadata to your media. Please check out this answer for more information.

How about a decent Search feature?

Let me just say - search is hard. There are a lot of sue cases to consider - some people just want to search their own media. Some people want information on any title or person from almost any movie or tv show. Others want to know where they can watch a specific title. We have invested in making our search better and have future projects still focused in this area. What you are asking for here is an area that we have considered - which I would describe as an advanced search where different filters could easily be applied to more quickly find the titles and information being searched for. And yes, we agree, that TV remotes are not fun as input devices when trying to build out a rich experience!

1 Like
52

Question and Answers:

Can we expect design and feature parity between clients in the future?

This is definitely one of our goals. While it is impossible due to hardware, capability and OS differences to provide a truly identical experience across all clients, part of this new experience work is to try and get as close as we can here.

Are some platforms planned to be deprecated?

We have no plans to deprecate any clients at this time. If that was a decision we would communicate a sunset notice well in advance to try and keep everyone informed.

What things have you learned during the release of the new app experiences this year (mobile, Roku)?

Do I need to pull out my Admiral Ackbar here? :sweat_smile: We have learned a ton. There are some markets like automotive or mobile phones where they do this every single year and have had to get good at it. We don’t do this as often and try really hard to make the experience a positive one. That may not always go as we intend or hope. Before this year we hadn’t raised prices in over 10 years and we hadn’t updated out UI in 7-8 years. What I will say is that we never set out to upset or alienate any part of our community. We still strongly support personal media and the home server experience. We will learn from this and use that to find ways to do better.

If Plex plans to implement features utilizing AI, will there be the option to opt out for users that don’t wish to use AI?

Please see the answer posted here.

Is there any update on NFO file support for local metadata management?

Please see the answer posted here.

2 Likes
53

Question:

I have many friends who have families and would like to create sub-accounts for their children so that they cannot watch all the horror and action movies rated 18+.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Although I allow multiple streams per user, my friends’ sub-accounts cannot see my data.
Why is this not implemented?

Answer:
Managed Accounts were built and intended for people within your household to access and use your server. We have specific functions and age limits that enhance the limits that can be placed on these. However, the library sharing functionality was never built or intended to handle this use case of managing access for managed users on an account with a shared library.

I have achieved a solution along these lines by having a separate library with kids movies and making a second account that I shared this library with and then let my kids watch after I signed in with that account. I have family members that have also used this same library share in this way.

We do have some projects planned around enhancing content restriction controls for managed accounts and I will flag this use case for consideration there, but this question seems to be focused around content restrictions for a managed user against a shared library and that currently isn’t part of the scope of these upcoming projects.

1 Like
54

Question:

What are your plans on improving the UX of resetting the password?

Answer:
I don’t have any plans to share right now - but this is something that the server team has taken up and is starting discussions around how this process can be improved.

2 Likes
55

Let’s talk Plexamp! I have grouped most of the Plexamp questions together and had a chat with the Plexamp team about these and it is a bit easier to address these all at once from that chat! So here we go for the mini AMA around Plexamp:

Question: I would love to know if there is plans for PlexAmp to be added/compatible with Android TV?

Not likely in the near future just due to competing priorities.

Question: Would love to have PlexAmp support smart speakers (Echo’s etc) in the way Spotify does

They have software running on those smart speakers, not likely something we’ll be doing.

Question: Are we going to hear more about the next version of Plexamp?

When it’s ready, it’s ready.

Question: Should we expect to see any significant improvements and/or upgrades and/or new features come to Plexamp / music in Plex, within the next 6-12 months?

Several are in progress!

Question: Are there plans for a Plex or PlexAmp app for Android Automotive?

Send us a car and we’ll get right on it. Otherwise too little demand for the work.

Question: Sonos - When I try to AirPlay my Plex Video content to my Sonos speakers, it will only play one thing and then stop. Also: Plexamp does not integrate as a Sonos Service very well

Sonos integration can be buggy, and we’ve considered removing it because we don’t think it can provide the quality we want it to.

Question: (Please allow us to sort our Plexamp playlists. My playlists are getting huge and I need an easy way to sort and search for an artist or song)

Coming.

Question: Looking for Plexamp to have the ability to work without an internet connection with all the radios and shuffles and mix building and everything it normally does, but to only use the files that I have downloaded to the phone. Is this possible?

Plexamp is a client-server app by design, and relies on the power of functionality of the server for many features.

Question: is the fabled “whole home audio” for Plexamp still on the radar?

Yes.

2 Likes
56

Question:

Many issues posted in this plex forums have never been taken into account by the devs (for example many issues with the plex app for consoles) is there a reason ?

Answer:
That’s a honest and valid issue, one that we’ve struggled with for some time. There’s a lot that gets posted in these Forums, not including what we find ourselves or through company-wide testing. Add all of that together and you have, at times, immense amounts of messages and feedback that has to be parsed through. How much of it is individual user scenarios that we can never replicate? How much of it is due to technical set-ups that number in the thousands of possible combinations? How much of it is related issues that we have to then put together to review? To adjust, test, then release? How long would it take for a user to provide all of the information and logs we need to investigate?

I’ll be clear - that list of questions is not an excuse, but it is context for the process as it currently stands. While I do not have the immediate, we’re-implementing-ASAP solution to this problem today, I can offer a commitment. One where I plan to continue working with others, many who you see in the Forums daily, on improving communication with the community, because there is definitely room for improvement.

3 Likes
57

Question:

Is there an update coming where when I share a music playlist with a friend that the playlist is visible to them and not just all the songs in the playlist are shared?

Answer:
We reviewed this question and the first thing I would like to suggest here is to see if you have shared the library with the other user. Next, it does appear that sharing of a playlist does work, but it isn’t appearing as one might expect once the action occurs. The playlist will appear under the Media source, not as a standalone Playlist in that area. There is no work ongoign around this at this moment - but we do have future projects planned around Collections and Playlists and we probably won’t do much work in this area until then. I will also note that the Media source is not currently supported in the new experience apps at this time.

58

Question:

Sometimes when a server update is available (I have WD MYCLOUD), the link downloads the last version instead of the new version. I don’t know where to report this on the forum or elsewhere?

Answer:
Yes! Please let us know in the forums!

Additionally, we are aware that many of these NAS server versions are lagging behind. This is an area that we have an effort underway to document and improve. For many of these it isn’t nearly as simple as dropping a new file of a new server version somewhere and it magically appearing in the app store or downloads area. Many of these specific stores have processes for approving releases (which is great, but it does add time and complexity into the release process). Our goal with this effort is to better streamline this process as much as we can and keep as many stores as close to our current release versions as possible.

1 Like
59

Question:

Not too long ago there was mention of Plex expanding media to include ebooks/audiobooks. I think this would elevate Plex’s offering to brand new audiences. Personally, I’d like to see podcasts make a come back as well. Is there any update timelines for new media for Plex?

Answer:
Unfortunately no, there are no updates on these question right now.

60

Question:

Will there be support articles that put some flesh to the request-by-request type of documentation which needs you to have experience in this field already?

Answer:
While we aren’t working on a specific support article that addresses the scenario in this post, what I will say is that we are at the very start of this new path. With the release of the PMS API and the setup of the Dev Community area of the forums we want to keep growing and providing more information in this area. I would suggest that you keep an eye out for more information here (we will be doing things, I just don’t have any specifics to share right now) and feel free to ask questions like this in that area so that we can help steer in the right direction and support people like yourself that want to learn and build amazing things.