Pro Week ‘25: Fireside in the Forum Question Submissions

General Discussions
103

Long time plex fan and advocate. Questions:

  • When developing something as substantial as the New Experience, how do you define ship criteria? Do you have performance comparison criteria (ie, startup time, home screen refresh, library display, playback startup time, etc) metrics that you use internally to compare to the existing experience on popular devices (Roku, Nvidia Shield, LG TV, etc?). Are there user experiences metrics (ie, number of remote button clicks to access library, playlist, etc)? If so, would you consider publishing them? The “responsiveness” and usability of the new apps seems like a significant step backwards vs the legacy apps and I’m curious if that was known and considered acceptable, or something that wasn’t tested/compared?

  • It seems like PlexAmp has a very different approach to design, development and customer feedback than Plex video app development does. Would you agree with this? If so, why is that?

5 Likes
104

Is there any updates on implementing the display of time when the movie finishes at the end of the scrub bar for NVIDIA Shield players (not the duration to the end of the movie, but the actual clock time of finishing the movie)? My Mac OS HTPC player had always been great to use this feature. I just wished my NVIDIA Shield Plex had the same functionality please.

Thank you for your Fireside question! I am not aware of any work currenly ongoing in this area. If you would like to request this please feel free to add this item in the Feature Suggestions forum area.

2 Likes
105

I have over 1,000 .mp3 tracks in my “Music” folder. There are a few that show the correct album artwork, and the rest show nothing. All have embedded artwork that displays on various other music players. Examining the information in detail with Picard shows that both png and jpeg files are displayed correctly and ignored. Can anybody look at the attached info and tell me how to get all the artwork to be displayed?

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Fireside Note: Thank you for the question! The reply that @DaveBinM provided is a really good one here, please check out the comments in this thread for more information

1 Like
106

I do remember seeing this get released. And what has stopped me from using it s the Plex Account requirement. A link should give access regardless of having an account. And the link can be set to expire, or revoked at any time.

1 Like
107

Using Plexamp is a real pleasure. Sonic analysis makes it possible to create playlists with exactly the music you feel like listening to at any given moment. Brilliant.

The biggest drawback is the handling of metadata. In particular, the fact that an album in Plex can only have one artist is a major disadvantage: Hundreds of albums with “Various Artists” in the library make everything very confusing and really impractical. This behavior has been described and documented for years (!), including possible solutions to fix this problem—so I won’t bother listing them again.

My question: Is there any hope that Plex will ever support multiple artists per album?

Fireside Awesome Question! Answer Post

Is there any hope that Plex will ever support multiple artists per album?

8 Likes
108

My question is about audio playlists.

1.) Will we ever get the ability to sort songs in an audio playlist? It helps if you want to add a song but check if it’s already in the playlist. Currently the sort is whatever order you added songs.

2.) Is there some way to make playlists resilient to media storage being unavailable? For example occasionally my NAS becomes unavailable. If that happens during the nightly tasks all the playlists think the songs are gone and they are removed during task trash emptying. I’ve turned off automatic trash emptying, but it seems to be a workaround. Is there any way to have the playlists keep the songs but just mark them as unavailable if this happens?

Thanks for all the work you’ve put into Plex.

109

This is not the case for playlists. We should be able to sort our playlists alphabetically or other by Aritist, Album, Song, Date Added, Song Length, and I’m sure there are other columns that would be nice to have.

Plex Needs Sorting Tools.PNG
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2 Likes
110

Was nervous to ask this, since a lot of questions like this are in feature requests getting hammered all the time, and those questions are getting flagged as basically “we might answer, we might not”. Hoping this one in particular gets addressed with a solution, or something very inspired.

2 Likes
111

A playlist by definition is the tracks that compose it and the order in which they are sequenced. The desire to sort a playlist by any track attribute is redundant because it’s part of the music library browse experience, which is also how you make playlists.

You make playlists by filtering and sorting a tracklist then creating a playlist from that view. If you want to have those same songs be in some other order, you filter and sort the tracklist and make a new playlist to match that order. You can also just skip the playlist part and filter and sort your tracks as you like then press Play.

If this seems onerous to you, I would love to hear more about your use-case. Are you saying you have a completely ad hoc collection of tracks that must be in a playlist and that you need to play those tracks in several different sequences specifically ordered by track attributes?

112

Hi. Can you please try and fix Plex on Nvidia Shield Pro? I often watch tv episodes and leave them to autoplay the next episode one after the other when one episode finishes. But very often when the next episode autoplays it is often just black screen with sound only. I then need to go out of the episode and back in to play the episode properly so I get video and sound. It’s not good. Does not happen on my Fire Cube. Thank you.

Fireside Note: We would be happy to provide support here but will not address this item as part of the Fireside AMA. Suggested forum area for assistance: Streaming Devices

2 Likes
113

Ah, fair enough! A slightly different use case then.

114

Since replies on the answers post are disabled, I would like to address Plex’s answer here.

@McWanke Just a quick intro to Zidoo and other similar playback devices (DuneHD), their appeal is their dedicated hardware playback chipset/engine. They are capable of playing back media files with the highest fidelity. All known formats of Dolby Vision? Yup! Full support for lossless surround sound codecs (ie. TrueHD Dolby Atmos / DTS:X)? You got it!
These devices run circles around the Nvidia Shield and HTPS’s for local media playback.
Think Kaleidescape playback quality for your local media files.

Yes, you can side load the Plex android app, or install it through the Google Play Store, however doing so does not allow us to play back media using the Zidoo native player. It just plays back using plex’s internal player (which does not work well on these devices)

The current workaround has been to use a modified version of Plex4Kodi that utilizes the Zidoo player.

So the question could pivot to: Can plex open up options on the client app to play media using external players so that we can utilize dedicated hardware players like Zidoo and Dune HD?

Fireside Awesome Question! Answer Post

Can plex open up options on the client app to play media using external players so that we can utilize dedicated hardware players like Zidoo and Dune HD?

1 Like
115

Is there any plan to improve the metadata management ?

I find it to be really weak, in particular filters. For instance, I can add multiple tags to videos. But I can only search by a single tag, apparently. I cannot search for a video that has a combination of 2 tags.

An example of how to do this metadata filtering properly can be found in the Lightroom Classic metadata filter. You can add multiple filters and do combination of OR or AND operators. With a large collection of personal content, I really need this capability.

Lightroom Classic does the cataloging properly for both photos and videos, but unfortunately offers no facility for remote viewing or filtering.

Ideally, I would like to be able to edit the tags in LRc, and filter/view the photo and video content in Plex.

I believe for photo content, the tags are standard metadata, which can be written back by LRc into photo files themselves. For video metadata, unfortunately, it has to be stored in sidecar XMP files, and it is not well standardized, so this is more difficult. But the reality is that I mostly use Plex to view video content, either from DVR, or from my personal video collection. In the later case, it is just too difficult to find the content.

Fireside Awesome Question! Answer: coming soon!

Is there any plan to improve the metadata management ?

116

Came to provide a crowd ROAR for this. I can’t figure out why anything else gets accomplished before this. At least making the label system - that already exists - work for whole collections so that labeled collections could be added to smart collections.

1 Like
117

Hi Jason,

I’m loving the AMAs! Thank you for helping with these! There are many reasons I’d like to have sorting within playlists. Filtering and sorting my entire collection for a desired set of songs will not get exactly what I want. And I don’t want to do that every time I need a certain type of music. My playlists are large. They are created so that I can hit shuffle and hear one genre for hours at a time. Creating these playlists is not just done in one sitting. It takes LONG periods of time to curate the “perfect’“ playlist. I need to be able to see what I have in my playlist quickly and easily to determine what I’ve missed, if I have doubles (think album vs greatest hits), items that are in there in error or accident, etc. I have an 80s playlist with over 900 songs. It’s almost impossible at this point to remember what is in there and what is not. Also the random-ish order in which I have added them means nothing to me really. I don’t think the order of the songs is of much value to any playlist, especially large playliststs like I’m talking about. I always use shuffle when I play them. Spotify lets you sort your playlists by Title, Artist, Album, and Recently Added. It’s extremely useful. And I’m creating many of these playlists as time allows. 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, Country, Hip Hop, Yacht Rock, etc… Each of these playlists can easily go over 1000 songs. I know I’m missing some big hits in each one because it’s so difficult to search them after they begin to get over a hundred songs. I can use Tautulli export a playlist and create a spreadsheet and sort that way, but that is cumbersome and frustrating. I LOVE my Plex and Plexamp, but this feature is sorely needed. I see others asking for it, too.

1 Like
118

Quick question about the downloads to mobile devices, they only play the singular episode rather than continue onto what you have downloaded next, this used to be a feature until you guys update the interface to what it is today, will you guys be bringing this back to downloaded media on devices?

Fireside Note: We answered a question about what is next up for downloads here. Please feel free to check it out - but also know that that isn’t a finish line for downloads, there will be more coming around this feature!

1 Like
119

Saying that new download features are coming soon is not really an answer. A massive change was made in April 2025 around download, and we are still not at the same level of user experience than before. So, when could we have a downloaded season shown as one and not a list of all episodes in the download section? When could we download all seasons from a specific serie in one go? The level of communication around this feature on Android and iOS is suboptimal to be honest.

4 Likes
120

Just to be sure:

  1. Do you know Plex Home and managed users? Doesn’t this is what you seek?

https://support.plex.tv/articles/203948776-managed-users/

  1. Did you name your editions correctly?

https://support.plex.tv/articles/multiple-editions/

1 Like
121

I can’t seem to find a stable ‘just works’ remote control for use with my Mac Mini based HTPC. I have tried the app based offerings but with no consistent success. I have bought two different Rii style mini keyboards but they are flaky as hell. Any advice??

Fireside Note: Thanks for the question - we aren’t going to talk about specific hardware here in this AMA, but please feel free to consider posting this question in an appropriate forum section in Plex Players where some of the community could possibly help out on this one!

122

I saw your Plex API article and I really want to start using it.

I am into 3rd party agent additions and with the new API, I need a guid-through. Will there be sample code that walks us through or around the common hurdles of HOW TO add metadata to new (just added) or existing library (ie. scan for metadata) items?

How to do the JWC thing exactly?

Where and how to bind a piece of code to your agent or to certain events?

How to fall back to what your agent provides and how to rule out that additions or replacements get overwritten by your agent?

I know that there are classic 3rd party agents/scanners using Python out there. But I don’t have the slightest idea on how to best-practice-add/replace metadata in a slim way.

I have plans to manage smart playlists and smart collections to give users the ability to use filters that your UI does not offer.

A quick example would be: give me all movies in a library that have a critics rating of at least 70% that are at least XYZ years old and put a “best classic movies” label to it (which is used in a smart collection). If the item does not meet the conditions, check and possibly remove the label.

The same with awards and other things… I want to program an agent that gives all these possiblities to users, but I need the general best practice procedure for you newly documented API with up to date bindings into a PMS.

I have done agents/scanners in Python, but since you possibly want to remove support for python, I need a good sample in order to be able to help.

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?

Fireside Awesome Question! Answer Post

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?