I have been using Plex for quite sometime now and I am absolutely loving it. One feature in particular I have grown to enjoy is the pre-roll functionality. I have my own local pre-roll videos stored on my server along with my content and one thing that tends to break the, “movie theater experience”, is when the Plex app transitions from the pre-roll video to the movie. This is not necessarily a buffering issue as the files play fine. The main issue is that the title/details information pop-ups on screen indicating the file being loaded that comes up between each file. If there was a way to have the UI completely hidden during playback, even if the server is buffering/loading the next video, I feel that would fix the issue. I think it would be a great option to have and help to complete the movie theater like experience. For player details, this is experienced while using Plex web, the LG TV app, among other devices. Hoping maybe there is an option for this down the road possibly?
I would love to see this feature implemented as well. For many remote users a movie can take up to 20 seconds to start. Seems like not only can the transition be made better but the movie could start it’s buffering while the pre-roll is playing.
I want to see this happen. It would be best if the movie began buffering ASAP while the preroll plays. A simple black screen between the preroll and the movie would be the most seamless.
A super cool but more advanced improvement would be if client devices cached the preroll and then while the preroll plays the full bandwidth can be used to buffer the movie.
I would love this to work for every next up video. I use the news feature a LOT. It still buffers between each news story just like switching between pre-rolls/trailers and movies. This could also work between switching episodes of TV for the play next feature.
Out of any “Feature Suggestions” I think this is the most important. It will be what gives the official feeling of the theater experience! I’m still fairly new to all this, but has there been any update as to whether this is even being considered? If there is a way I can help quicken the process I am all ears. It’s that important to me.
I am making playlists with “coming attractions” and “feature presentation” videos along with trailers and such, and seeing the Plex UI show up during every video transition while watching through Chromecast is completely detrimental to the experience. I really wish there was a way to disable the UI from showing up like this.
There already is a post about this from max 2 days back, I suggest upping that one again as it had more votes and I believe more response in general, that way it isn’t just 2 loose pages with just a few votes!
Other than that, I’d really love this kind of feature. In terms of development it shouldn’t even be hard, you already know what to play. You just change the order of it. I’m not sure why any one would add trailers knowing it currently just acts as yet another 10 seconds of waiting and buffering… And frankly, my pre-rolls get cut off at the first few seconds and it looks like a goddamn mess either way.
Please please make this a thing. I’ve gone to great lengths to make my home theater experience special, and seeing the loading overlay is the only thing that makes the viewing feel a bit amateur. Even if its just an extended black screen, I don’t want to see anything between preroll videos and the actual movie. thank you!
Would love to see this added. Then at a later time, it would be great to be able to select an image to display instead of the black screen for added customization
This item was merged with a separate suggestion about simply “hiding” the buffer wheel and %. This is a separate item from hiding the title. I don’t see a title at all when the buffering wheel is up. I just see it say 13%, 33%, 87%, 99%, with a spinning circle.
For my purposes, I have a halloween projector with video files on the Plex server. The little buffering wheel takes away from the experience. It’d be ok if there was a pause or blank screen, but instead I get orange wheel.
keeping the last frame (or just a blank/black screen) instead of displaying the buffering including art work would defnitily help the theatre experience
the other option would be to do some sort of pre-buffering like this feature request. Both feature requests have somewhat of the same goal, mainly beeing a more fluent movie watching experience.
tho i think, that the “mask buffering between preroll and movie” feature would be more easily implemented.
I actually agree… while this feature suggestion is older and has a notable amount of votes (almost 50 votes), the suggestion you’ve linked has a gained much wider support (almost 300 votes).
Very tempted to close this one (freeing up the collected votes) and ask everybody to “move” their vote to the similar suggestion instead (merging threads gets a little ugly if you’re dealing with 2 longer-running / active threads)
Dont know how much of a difference it would make. I, for my part, voted on both requests. Additionally, I dont know how many voters on this request still keep tabs and would see the merge.
Seamless transition could be accomplished by forcing a transcode and concatenating the pre-roll + the movie on the fly. Plex could do this, with a bunch of caveats - it would change the video duration, break the seek/scroll bar, and would require extra magic for video preview thumbnails and subtitles.
The other one, buffering the main title during the pre-roll, would require client device support, so it’s less likely to happen, I think.
extra magic being muxing two streams with different resolution,colorspace,audio-format etc.
muxing pre-roll and mainfile is not the way to go, even if you would transcode the preroll to match most aspects.
you cant transcode/upmix to dolby atmos enabled streams and transcoding/upscaling to 4k/hdr/hdr10/hdr10+/DV is not something plex has done before, which then would need to be implemented from the ground up. even if you just use static metadata in a variable metadata stream it will not look the way it should. if you’ve ever seen post HDRing on certain SmartTVs which have (((((specialized)))))) hardware and proprietary software to make it somewhat watchable, you know this isn’t the way to go if you have a large variety of plex-setups.
hence pre-buffer ( == dual-stream/PiP emulation) or mask. which leads me to believe that IF this feature gets implemented, it will be the mask option.
