A few months ago, while testing Plex Preview for iOS via TestFlight, I was also able to install the app on macOS.
Later, when the Plex Preview version included tvOS, I was no longer able to update the app on macOS. During the time I used it, it was really fast, attractive, and functional, much more so than the WebApp via Safari.
Are there any plans to release Plex on the macOS App Store with the same interface as tvOS?
if you want the tvOS interface on your Mac, that would be the PlexHTPC app. It will eventually get updated to the New Experience interface, like the other “10-foot" interface (TV/streaming device) Plex apps.
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?
Love Plex btw, have bought lifetime subscription just after using it for about 2 months. The only thing I hate about it is the 30s forward xD
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?
I’m back a year later with my 2024 punchlist because communications have ceased on those issues along with some new ones:
Hi Elan - Any plans to nuke music from Plex Media Server and rewrite so that we can finally have more than one artist per track. I would pay for another plex pass / bounty for this option. Plexamp is great, but majority of my music is wrong so I stopped using PMS for music. [10 year old request]
ETA on Nvidia Shield TV extras working on a per season level. Every other lesser device is supported. [September 2021]
ETA on Global Lock for poster option and just be done with it, forever. Movie posters are changing randomly to Gracenote’s unbelievably poor posters at random times. Plex employees can’t find the bug, so just give us the lock. [February 2024]
ETA on Disable Logos globally option- they look cheap. Just give us the option like we have been begging for. I don’t look forward to logos when the new UI is forced onto the shield. [November 2024]
ETA on Backdrops wrong aspect ratio fix? Why can’t we have a 16:9 option? 4:3 is offensively wrong and I don’t believe any exec at plex dogfooded backdrops. @nolankotulan gave Plex,Inc $50,000 in free consulting services to solve this issue [November 2024]
ETA on my ticket to remove the “add to watchlist” advertisement (popup on the shield) when I play a local trailer, using media on my server that I personally ripped. Plex employees refuse to get me a ticket number and are combative in the thread. I’m not the class of plex user who will ever use a watchlist or discover and this advertisement is offensive. [December 2024]
ETA on answering emails from NVIDIA on audio dropouts and sync issues with seamless branching on 4K TrueHD/Atmos can be fixed on the shield. It’s been a few years. Plex employees have refused to update us paying users since June 2024. [February 2022]
ETA to remove “browse libraries” from the homescreen of the new UI. There is no way this is on purpose, because libraries is less than one inch below. [June 2025]
Edit: let’s use Jeopardy rules to see if we get some responses.
Can we please have nested collections with movies? I would love to separate my Godzilla collection for example, into the era’s instead of having 6 collections for this.
Fireside Awesome Question! Note - this is either a dupe or very similar to the question posed here. Hopefully that answer covers what is being asked here, if not, feel free to ask another question!
I was an early adopter and have had Plex installed since it was in beta. I like the concept but there have been things done to it throughout the years that have made it unusable in certain situations. Other features have been remove and the interface has become more convoluted. It would be nice if Plex could examine what it has become and see if it can go back to including what I would consider original “core functionality”.
The ability to use Plex without an internet connection while on the same local network as the server has become a jump-through-hoops-and-pray process. The original Plex server allowed you to play your own media on your own network anytime you wanted without hassle. I understand that the https security with the certificates is likely the cause for this, but is there not a way to add a on/off toggle option in the settings that will automatically enable the proper settings needed to be able to watch locally without an internet connection? UPnP exists for routers, you have control over Plex settings, firewall exclusions can be set, why can this not all be rolled into a toggle for ease of use, especially for those less savvy with technology that may have issues setting up their firewall or port forwarding.
The download feature was an amazing inclusion when it was released. When the feature first came out it worked great. I could choose a season of a show to download so I had plenty to watch on trips. Then as things started to progress, the download feature became more an more buggy, failing randomly on a download just to complete it successfully the next but then fail on another. It got to the point I stopped using the feature all together, which is disappointing because it was a very useful feature when it worked.
The Plugins feature was removed, which was extremely disappointing as there were many fan-made plugins out there that added a lot of extended functionality to Plex. I am not sure if this was for legal reasons but it would seem that Plex could not be held legally liable for an app made by a 3rd party developer the same way YouTube is not liable for the content its creators post. The functionality lost by the removal of Plugins alone set Plex back a good distance in my opinion. It should have been used, if nothing else, to see what features Plex can/should be incorporating into the base program.
Why is it that everyone seems to feel the need to hide main features under layers of menus and options. I have 3 different Plex servers I run from different locations. How am I supposed to see which of the 3 “TV Shows” libraries is which? All the new interface displays is “TV Shows goosar19”, “TV Shows goosar19”, “TV Shows goosar19”. The same goes for “Movies” or any of the other library types I have multiple of. The new user interface is a step backwards in my opinion. It used to display all of the information I needed in a neat column on the left that could be collapsed into an even smaller column if you chose to do so. So what was the problem with having things so easily accessible on the left hand side of the screen, where you now have to hide them under a menu at the top of the screen that leaves out critical information? In addition, I was able to hide “Live TV” “On Demand” and “Discover”, features that I do not use and do not want cluttering my home screen. I had them turned off for a reason and now they are shoved in my face at the top of the screen.
When will Plex go back to being concerned about how I am able to watch MY media from MY devices. If I wanted to watch free ad-supported content, there are many sites out there that already do that. I purchased Plex because I wanted to watch MY media on MY terms, not have to deal with someone else’s choices. Plex started out that way. I know Jellyfin exists, and sadly at this time they have remained more Plex-like than Plex, but the fact of the matter is I do like what Plex was, and do enjoy some of the features that have been added, but I am not sure how much longer I will be able to continue with Plex if they continue to deviate from their original vision and cave in to forcing their users into ad-supported content, AFTER they have already given you a significant sum of money for a Plex Pass, in my case, the Lifetime flavor.
Fireside Note: Thank you for this post. Many of these items have been addressed in different Answers. Please check out:
Hi Jason! I don’t use Spotify either, but I looked to see if they have playlist sorting. I perfer Plexamp! I think we may be on different wave lengths. I don’t think a playlist is simply the specific order of a group of songs. It’s just a group of songs. Playlists are the heart of my use case. If you are saying Plex CAN do what I’m asking, maybe you can show me? I add songs one at a time, that’s the only way I know to get what I want in my playlist. I don’t want genres or artists or albums, etc, I want very specific songs. I find the song in my library, I click the ellipsis, Add to, specific playlist. So now I have a playlist with 900 songs and I want to add more. But I end up adding songs that are already in the playlist because it’s near impossible to scroll through 900 songs to see if it’s alread there or not. Hope this makes sense. Thanks!
Regarding the ‘Watch Together’ feature: Are there any plans to restore this functionality in the new experience app or provide an alternative with the same capabilities? This feature was a key reason I purchased a lifetime Plex Pass.
Regarding feature parity: 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?
Fireside Note: See the Watch Together response here.
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?
Few gripes/feature ideas I have which I always wanted to know answer to from the horses mouth.
Is there development being done on the Plex Dash app? It feels dated and could use some UI enhancements.
Will Plex Photos ever be as good as Immich? Immich is amazing but installing it with Docker Mumbo jumbo is not for everyone. Would be nice to have it be as powerful.
Is it possible to have my tv show and movie library content be turned into a Program guide. Kind of like Plex Live but my own content where I can create channels based on genre, themes etc and use Plex knowledge about the most paused or iconic points in those who’s and start episodes from that point on. There are some plugins that keep the media running and drives engaged, I don’t want that. I want the media to be “pulled” to that video and seek to that point as if it was live and spin my disk only then. Some buffer to lag is fine
Allow notifications to be sent to friends I have shared my server with when new things are added.
I was going to come in here and reiterate my feedback from last year – that Plex’s internal metadata is not merely bad, it is terrible, perhaps the worst product level metadata offering I’ve ever interacted with, and this is an entirely self-inflicted wound because just not doing metadata and deferring to external sources would be exponentially better – but nothing has changed in the last year and nothing is going to change. And in fact in the last year Plex has taken on more metadata burden by expanding the reach of the social media functions (which so far have not gone well) as well as shoehorning logo images into the new clients (which users literally can’t even override because you guys keep shipping MVPs and then not iterating on them). So, question withdrawn, or it would have been had @mightydh not already quoted me in support of the question.
This year I’d like to raise a new issue. Every so often someone makes a thread complaining about irrelevant, repetitive, obnoxious, offensive, or abusive ads, and every single time, the response is “Deal with it, we can’t control who shows ads on our content”. That goes beyond being bad or annoying as a product and gets into the territory of “I don’t understand how you can sleep at night”. If your salary is being paid in part or in whole by revenues earned from advertising, you have a moral obligation to the people subjected to the ads to do right by them. Shrugging off responsibility because you rely on a third party ad provider is simply W R O N G. So I guess I don’t have a question after all.
I know I’ve asked this a few times over the years at this point, but Plexamp is by far my most dominant use-case for my server sooooo I’ll ask anyway: is the fabled “whole home audio” for Plexamp still on the radar?
I don’t think this was asked already, but, as with previous years, there are a ton of responses here and it’s hard to double-check that with all of them (though I’ve seen other comments with my other questions, e.g. non OpenAI solutions for smart playlists, etc. and would love answers to those as well).
Fireside Awesome Question! We have collected the Plexamp questions together and addressed them in a single post here
Addendum: I appreciate that this was technically answered (“Yes.” is technically an answer, and I appreciate that you at least gave that).
It’s kind of unhelpful though. A single word reply to a question about a feature promised years ago when you gave detailed answers to other newer questions is… not great. Thanks anyway
My Question is pretty much the same as last year: What is the state of the supposed alternative for 3rd party Metadata Agents?
Last year, it was stated that you wanted to “double down” on the Server side and with the removal of 3rd party agents on the Shield, that there will be an alternative to the python-based metadata agents.
What is the state or progression on that? Will there be a grace period of some time to give developers the ability to bridge the two systems so that we are not caught off-guard because there was no announcement of the final removal on other server platforms as well?
Another thing is the new API, last year it was stated that metadata agents should use the “same API spec” as the official Plex agents. My question here would be how you imagined this to look like? I mean, from the API, it looks like those 3rd party metadata agents are now separate programs instead of part of Plex which wouldn’t really make them “first-class citizens in PMS and server owners” as it was stated last year, especially if you need the “old” token or the new JWT for it to access Plex.
So the question still is: What is the future of 3rd party agents? Is the goal to let developers create their own applications that need to run separately from Plex or is the Plan to have them in some way integrated in the Plex infrastructure, like they were before? I can’t really imagine that a user would be happy with having to run X separate apps next to Plex just to have different sources for metadata.
Last year, it was stated that you wanted to “double down” on the Server side and with the removal of 3rd party agents on the Shield, that there will be an alternative to the python-based metadata agents.
What is the state or progression on that? Will there be a grace period of some time to give developers the ability to bridge the two systems so that we are not caught off-guard because there was no announcement of the final removal on other server platforms as well?
I primarily use Plex to watch anime where your average episode is about 22 minutes. I’ll usually watch 2-3 episodes when I get home from work before going to bed.
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.
Binge watching is something every streaming service offers and is kinda boring in my opinion. Being able to watch a few episodes from a few different shows like I’m turning on the TV from the pre-streaming era would be neat.
I guess you could kind of do this by dumping a bunch of files into a folder and watching everything in the folder, but there’s gotta be a less messy way of doing this.
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.
That’s right, I’ve also used the PlexHTPC app, but it’s nothing like the browsing experience I had with Plex Preview. For macOS, it should be very easy to publish the same app as on iPadOS/tvOS.
Rather than simply listing the year of release, could Plex support displaying the full release dates in the web/mobile apps and players? I’m thinking specifically when in movie pages and actor filmographies.
I might be wrong here, but it seems simple enough to implement? Would be a nice little QOL improvement at least.
