Starting to understand the Team's priorities

General Discussions
61

@MikeG6.5 said:

@KarlDag said:
Is that the #1 roundtable video played on these forums,or a private discussion that wasn’t recorded?

Cause a while back I looked at the roundtables and I felt that while some people are able to mention a few things, it was basically Plex talking about how great they felt the ShieldTV was, making sure their Dvr announcement would be well received and showing us they do have QA people.

It felt more like a PR move than a real discussion.

As far as I know this one was never recorded. Because @Elijah_Baley and I weren’t really that PC I would be surprised if it ever sees the light of day again. Here is the list I brought with me to discuss in April:

[ ] - Server side per user Bitrate limits, including transcoding limits.
[ ] - Viewing the user’s on deck for the OM feature to be used, if needed.
[ ] - Settings to adjust the OM feature for levels, speed, quality, etc.
[ ] - Rolling PlexPy or PlexWatch into the Web App.
[ ] - Collections groupings for movies.
[ ] - White List / Black List for filter across the whole of Plex, not just user permissions.
[ ] - Combined TV and Movie categories for one off’s.
[ ] - Tandem playback. For “family movie hour” when the family members are separated (useful for Servicemen serving overseas!)
[ ] - User notifications of new series, new episodes, new movies. scheduling the messages, once a day, week, month, etc.
[ ] - User Groups. (Family, friends, administrators, etc.)
[ ] - Permissions based on groups. Can set the permissions or even admin access to a group of accounts rather than one at a time.
MOST important point of all!
[ ] - More and better communications from the team.

(OM Feature is the Optimize Media feature we got about the first of the year or so. Probably one of the best features we’ve gotten in the last 18 months, IMO. But this still needs a bit of work, yet.)

The attendees to this were: (added some ??? to stop someone from spamming them, etc.)
Charles Angelis (Market for Plex)
Keith Sherry (developer)
jim48t@???.com (might be the Apple James?)
Elan Feingold (yep, we know this guy)
Josh M??? (another user?) (I think this is @Elijah_Baley)

@Elijah_Baley talked mostly about the Roku clients, as this is his heavy focus. He did contribute to the discussion on other points, though. And I’m afraid that I kind of monopolized the discussion when we started talking about my points. I’m not sure the Team knew what to think as I went bullet by bullet down the list… I could see there was a bit of confusion at times, as I built on these ideas.

As you can see, most of these points in some way relate to existing Feature Requests. (Except for the 2nd and third.) I personally didn’t use filtering much, but was building on @cayars comments in another thread, when @elan made some comments about it, naming me specifically in that thread. This suddenly turned me from “eh…” to that feature’s newest and staunchest champion… And I pointed this out to him during the Roundtable…

If they happen to choose me for a future round table, I intend to bring this list with me to ask WTF?! happened to this discussion, as well as a host of new bullets.

Agreed 100%. It would be a fantastic feature, but what I need to optimize is shows that I’ll have to upload, not stuff I stream for myself, so like you said I could really use an option to optimize the files for a user’s on deck, preferably the 2 next shows in case it doesn’t happen at realtime speed and the user binge watches.

Also, users have to ASK for the optimized file, otherwise Plex streams the file that requires transcoding. Unbelievable. That’s the first thing the stream brain should fix.

62

@Elijah_Baley said:

@KarlDag said:

@MikeG6.5 said:
To all: Do NOT misunderstand my ire and frustration with Plex. I personally LOVE the product. I feel it is the best choice anyone has for a client/server suite for streaming media, bar none. I also feel that Plex’s direction has taken a radical departure from the core users, just for the sake of marketing the brand.

I can get pretty darned vocal here. And angry. And it all comes from the route Plex is moving. Investors put a huge influx of funds into Plex Media Server and client apps development. That investment wouldn’t have come about if not for the features we asked for, that made Plex what it is now.

I honestly never expect @elan or any of the other developers or Team members to set foot in this thread. They might READ the discussion, but I seriously doubt any of them are willing to comment on anything said here. I think that’s because they are aware that there has been a lot of disillusionment of late, and their participation is likely to fan the flames higher.

In April, @Elijah_Baley and I had almost 2 hours talking with some members of the Plex Team. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere at least a couple of times. @Elijah_Baley and I were the FIRST Community Roundtable. I honestly thought that the Team was going to give me a Cease and Desist because of how vocal I had gotten prior to this roundtable. As I’ve said, I bounced things off of others on these boards before I went to that roundtable. I came prepared, with a list of things I wanted covered. Almost every one of the things on my list were Feature Requests that existed then, and how those requests could leverage each other to make the whole experience vastly better than it is now.

The truly sad thing is, I came away feeling we had done some good. 7 months later, and I realize that it was all smoke and mirrors. We drank the KoolAide and were happy to have done so, because we honestly thought someone had heard, and there was change in the wind. @elan and the Team listened to us, commented on some of what we had to say, but then NOTHNIG HAS HAPPENED SINCE on any of the features discussed with them!

I was personally told during that roundtable that 2016 would be a great year for Plex. They have less than 2 months to make it happen, I guess…

@don.alcombright I know I personally mentioned Collections as per the request with the great mockups. And @elan shared that something like this was also his vision. But he must be using a Time Machine to view it, as it’s not here yet… :frowning:
Is that the #1 roundtable video played on these forums,or a private discussion that wasn’t recorded?

Cause a while back I looked at the roundtables and I felt that while some people are able to mention a few things, it was basically Plex talking about how great they felt the ShieldTV was, making sure their Dvr announcement would be well received and showing us they do have QA people.

It felt more like a PR move than a real discussion.

I do not believe that it was recorded and since the promisees and projections that Plex made in that conference have mostly come to nothing I “think” that Plex is unlikely to make it public even if a recording exists.

Part of the reason for my ( and Mike’s I think) negativism toward Plex comes from a feeling that we were called into that conference primarily to shut us up, and it worked for a while as we waited for Plex to move in a positive direction in many of the things discussed.

Mike had a long detailed list of things to discuss and, to be honest, most of them were not things I had much interest in but they were things that I had seen numerous requests for and/or discussions of.

I had a shorter list primarily focused on two things:

  1. The EXTREMELY poor design of PMP and the fact that all the other players are dumbed down to be clones of PMP. There were some things that were hinted out and even promised but nothing has come of it.
  2. The poor communication between the Plex team and their users was the other thing on my list.

Plex explicitly promised better communication and there was some appearance of movement in that direction but that stopped and what has come out of Plex has mostly been meaningless drivel or lack of substance announcements. The poor communication skills of Plex has reall shown up in the handling of two projects.The “Shield” which has been much ballyhooed but has failed in that it cannot handle even moderately large libraries among other flaws without Plex even acknowledging that they have the flaws.

The other is the “Plex Cloud” which does not work but was announced globally in such a way so as to make it appear that a full launch was right around the corner. While I understand that “things happen” Plex has made no further general announcement and people are still thinking that the release is in a final beta stage.

Plex has NOT improved communication! In fact the pretty much have lied to their user base in a greater or lesser manner. Intentional misleading is just as much of a lie as an outright falsehood.

I like Plex (the software) a lot but Plex (the company) I like not so much. Plex is misleading their users and misrepresenting what their priorities are. I understand Plex wanting to be profitable but they do not have to lie to get there.

I have rethought my involvement in the upcoming bogus conference because I do not want to be mislead or lied to again so, should Plex have a moment of insanity and invite me, I will not accept the invite. My time is too valuable to allow Plex to waste it again.

Again, absolutely agree, and I do think that a lot of what was done a few months ago was simply try to shut us up. A new UI for PMP and clone platforms was promised months ago, before the summer I think. Considering PMP is still in beta (crazy considering the last time their still official desktop app was updated!) they could have included it out the builds as a work in progress /preview type of deal, and collected feedback at the same time.

63

@KarlDag said:

Agreed 100%. It would be a fantastic feature, but what I need to optimize is shows that I’ll have to upload, not stuff I stream for myself, so like you said I could really use an option to optimize the files for a user’s on deck, preferably the 2 next shows in case it doesn’t happen at realtime speed and the user binge watches.

Also, users have to ASK for the optimized file, otherwise Plex streams the file that requires transcoding. Unbelievable. That’s the first thing the stream brain should fix.

Think of it like this: You set up a user’s speed limits on the per user page. At the same time you tell the Web App to pre-OM the next episodes (based on if your friend binge watches, you can configure this number per user. Maybe 10 might be better for a given user. ) on that user’s On Deck. As they watch a show, the OM they just watched is removed (unless someone else is also at that point in a series with the same speed limit.) and the next is OM’d.

Since it’s tied to their speed limits, only the OM version made for them will be the ones they can stream, PERIOD. Not the full bitrate versions. Only the ones that have been premade to fit their restrictions.

This could be tied to groups of people, so all of the remote access for a said group are OM’d to the specs you defined for the group, as well as the speed limits set for the group. Every member of the group gets the same treatment, because the permissions are set on the group level, the user inherits the settings from the group. You and your wife want to admin the server, simple… Make her a member of the Admin group…

You may be able to go tweak an individual user for more or less restrictions. With the user level restrictions being the ruling factor. Set up a group, tweak the individuals.

Tie that in with PlexPy integrated and you get a full picture of what your users watch, when they watch it, and how they watch it, so you can determine the specs you need for the streaming limits and to set their OM’d versions in advance of what they might watch. Click on a user’s name and you can set speed limits and OM settings, view their watching history, access their On Deck, modify their permissions all from one app. (The PMS Web App!)

Totally dynamic, totally adjustable, and leverages some of the existing features into a much more powerful whole. Unfortunately this only works with TV Shows (or maybe collections, too?) But think of the capabilities if this were included…

Start by making their On Deck visible, then move on from there. Add in Watched History from PlexPy, (including the graphing aspects, IP logging, etc.) then add in groups and group permissions. Make these stats available to the USERS for themselves, when they log into the Web App (or even on clients, maybe.)

This takes 6 of those bullet points and ties them all together into a seamlessly integrated whole. but still maintains the ability to separate any of the individual aspects if needed. (I set a speed limit, but don’t want something OM’d. Or I OM, but don’t need it done on a group level, etc.)

The push back from the Team was (at that time) the admin account doesn’t have visibility of each individual user’s On Deck. That’s buried in the DB for each user. Ok, easy enough to fix, really… The Team has access to the DB, so they can make that part of the Web App access the user’s On Deck when you are viewing the specifics of the individual user. In other words, make the On Deck a reportable and viewable statistic. (If we can’t get PlexPy integrated, how about adding this to the API, so PlexPy can pick this up and display it there, at the very least.)

This is what I expected to see coming down the pipeline the past 7 months. Not what we’ve gotten, by any stretch of the imagination. In 7 months none of these features has made any traction. OM has the same (limited) functionality it had then. Streaming Brain or not, transcoding something when a version already exists that fits the requirements is stupid.

In short, just what has the Plex Team been doing this year? Definitely not making their product BETTER. They have been making it more visible, at the cost of the dissatisfaction of users that have been here for a while. Users that have taken the efforts to vote for features or make feature requests.

64

@MikeG6.5 said:

In short, just what has the Plex Team been doing this year? Definitely not making their product BETTER. They have been making it more visible, at the cost of the dissatisfaction of users that have been here for a while. Users that have taken the efforts to vote for features or make feature requests.

The Plex Team is out to make money. They realize if they push out a lot of new features all at once (but not finish them due to time), they will get more people to subscribe to Plex Pass.

I think they pushed out more than they can chew and are now paying the price for it by a lot of dissatisfied customers. New Plex Pass users are signing up thinking they are going to get a finished product only to find out it’s been in beta for half a year and no sign of an update.

The first thing the Plex Team NEEDS to do is to create a sticky post with their roadmap for the next 6-12 months. Soft dates of when they expect something to be completed. Dates can change and that is ok but I feel if the date is there, people will be more open to waiting for it to come out of beta.

Right now the Plex Team is robbing people of money and all they do is sit back and let the users create a thread exactly like this. This thread is already out of control and it should not even went past the first page. A Plex Team member should have chimed in and informed everyone what is going on.

It shocks me no one from Plex is even commenting on this.

65

@Joe4992 said:
…
It shocks me no one from Plex is even commenting on this.

I have a theory on that… FEAR. I am not sure exactly what they are afraid of but a lot of the behavior and lack of communication that we are seeing from Plex very much reeks of paranoia.

I am not at all sure what Plex could be afraid of as they are not threatened by any of the competition but it sure seems like they are fearful of something or someone.

Maybe they have simply become big enough that they are feeling the pressures of “Big Business” or maybe there is some in fighting that is peculating out into the larger world but whatever it is sure seems like fear has become pervasive in the behavior and communication of the company.

Maybe they need to see a corporate psychiatrist or at find the equivalent of a corporate wife or just a good corporate bartender.

“A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.” Joey Adams

66

@MikeG6.5 said:

@KarlDag said:

Agreed 100%. It would be a fantastic feature, but what I need to optimize is shows that I’ll have to upload, not stuff I stream for myself, so like you said I could really use an option to optimize the files for a user’s on deck, preferably the 2 next shows in case it doesn’t happen at realtime speed and the user binge watches.

Also, users have to ASK for the optimized file, otherwise Plex streams the file that requires transcoding. Unbelievable. That’s the first thing the stream brain should fix.

Think of it like this: You set up a user’s speed limits on the per user page. At the same time you tell the Web App to pre-OM the next episodes (based on if your friend binge watches, you can configure this number per user. Maybe 10 might be better for a given user. ) on that user’s On Deck. As they watch a show, the OM they just watched is removed (unless someone else is also at that point in a series with the same speed limit.) and the next is OM’d.

Since it’s tied to their speed limits, only the OM version made for them will be the ones they can stream, PERIOD. Not the full bitrate versions. Only the ones that have been premade to fit their restrictions.

This could be tied to groups of people, so all of the remote access for a said group are OM’d to the specs you defined for the group, as well as the speed limits set for the group. Every member of the group gets the same treatment, because the permissions are set on the group level, the user inherits the settings from the group. You and your wife want to admin the server, simple… Make her a member of the Admin group…

You may be able to go tweak an individual user for more or less restrictions. With the user level restrictions being the ruling factor. Set up a group, tweak the individuals.

Tie that in with PlexPy integrated and you get a full picture of what your users watch, when they watch it, and how they watch it, so you can determine the specs you need for the streaming limits and to set their OM’d versions in advance of what they might watch. Click on a user’s name and you can set speed limits and OM settings, view their watching history, access their On Deck, modify their permissions all from one app. (The PMS Web App!)

Totally dynamic, totally adjustable, and leverages some of the existing features into a much more powerful whole. Unfortunately this only works with TV Shows (or maybe collections, too?) But think of the capabilities if this were included…

Start by making their On Deck visible, then move on from there. Add in Watched History from PlexPy, (including the graphing aspects, IP logging, etc.) then add in groups and group permissions. Make these stats available to the USERS for themselves, when they log into the Web App (or even on clients, maybe.)

This takes 6 of those bullet points and ties them all together into a seamlessly integrated whole. but still maintains the ability to separate any of the individual aspects if needed. (I set a speed limit, but don’t want something OM’d. Or I OM, but don’t need it done on a group level, etc.)

The push back from the Team was (at that time) the admin account doesn’t have visibility of each individual user’s On Deck. That’s buried in the DB for each user. Ok, easy enough to fix, really… The Team has access to the DB, so they can make that part of the Web App access the user’s On Deck when you are viewing the specifics of the individual user. In other words, make the On Deck a reportable and viewable statistic. (If we can’t get PlexPy integrated, how about adding this to the API, so PlexPy can pick this up and display it there, at the very least.)

This is what I expected to see coming down the pipeline the past 7 months. Not what we’ve gotten, by any stretch of the imagination. In 7 months none of these features has made any traction. OM has the same (limited) functionality it had then. Streaming Brain or not, transcoding something when a version already exists that fits the requirements is stupid.

In short, just what has the Plex Team been doing this year? Definitely not making their product BETTER. They have been making it more visible, at the cost of the dissatisfaction of users that have been here for a while. Users that have taken the efforts to vote for features or make feature requests.

Just reminded me of PlexPy. They even hired the dev for **** sakes, how the hell is it possible that nothing similar has been included in the pms package yet?

Love what the product allows me to do, but SO FRUSTRATING to think of all the missed opportunities!

67

@Joe4992 said:

@MikeG6.5 said:

In short, just what has the Plex Team been doing this year? Definitely not making their product BETTER. They have been making it more visible, at the cost of the dissatisfaction of users that have been here for a while. Users that have taken the efforts to vote for features or make feature requests.

The Plex Team is out to make money. They realize if they push out a lot of new features all at once (but not finish them due to time), they will get more people to subscribe to Plex Pass.

I think they pushed out more than they can chew and are now paying the price for it by a lot of dissatisfied customers. New Plex Pass users are signing up thinking they are going to get a finished product only to find out it’s been in beta for half a year and no sign of an update.

The first thing the Plex Team NEEDS to do is to create a sticky post with their roadmap for the next 6-12 months. Soft dates of when they expect something to be completed. Dates can change and that is ok but I feel if the date is there, people will be more open to waiting for it to come out of beta.

Right now the Plex Team is robbing people of money and all they do is sit back and let the users create a thread exactly like this. This thread is already out of control and it should not even went past the first page. A Plex Team member should have chimed in and informed everyone what is going on.

** It shocks me no one from Plex is even commenting on this.**

Not me. They already lied to us in a bunch of threads, including the previously mentioned venting thread, so what do you expect them to come tell us here now?

Always the same users complaining about the same stuff and nothing gets done. And you know what? I’m not even interested in any answer they might have to give right now, I just want to see results.

I want an improved OM feature. I want a working Nvidia Shieldtv server (would be more powerful than my old Mac min I think) and/or working plex cloud (would fix my issues with upload speed). I want per user bandwidth limits. I want collections.

I’m stuck between “thank God I paid for lifetime and don’t need to pay more for those bad decisions” and “it sucks I already have lifetime because I can’t send my message through finances”…

68

@KarlDag said:

I want an improved OM feature. I want a working Nvidia Shieldtv server (would be more powerful than my old Mac min I think) and/or working plex cloud (would fix my issues with upload speed). I want per user bandwidth limits. I want collections.

I just want the DVR beta to be out of beta. Or at least up to date with all the additions the other clients have. This is NOT asking for a lot here. Last update was Sept 30th. Not sure why this client has not seen any traction.

I also want to see GPU transcoding. Would make a LOT of people happy since they won’t have to get top of the line CPU’s anymore. I can then install my video card back into my server. Right now it’s just taking up electricity so I pulled it.

69

@KarlDag said:

I’m stuck between “thank God I paid for lifetime and don’t need to pay more for those bad decisions” and “it sucks I already have lifetime because I can’t send my message through finances”…

Every day, when I log into Plex I think the same damned thing.

@Joe4992 said:
I just want the DVR beta to be out of beta. Or at least up to date with all the additions the other clients have. This is NOT asking for a lot here. Last update was Sept 30th. Not sure why this client has not seen any traction.

DVR can so easily be done with other methods, that it’s a wonder this was even in Beta to begin with. DVR has absolutely nothing to do with the top 10 request of Live TV streaming. It’s a recorded stream…

I also want to see GPU transcoding. Would make a LOT of people happy since they won’t have to get top of the line CPU’s anymore. I can then install my video card back into my server. Right now it’s just taking up electricity so I pulled it.

There are a few threads around that show you that GPU transcoding isn’t the saving grace everyone seems to think it is. @cayars had one a while back where he showed a pretty low time decrease with transcodes, and on some codecs it actually increased the time spent transcoding, if I remember correctly.

And hate to say it, but I run a damned healthy system on a CPU with just over 5K passmarks. You don’t NEED a race horse in the box to make it seem fast. You just need to take the time to set up your media correctly. I can do 5 Direct Play streams with this CPU and use less than 20% of the system’s resources for all 5 streams. That’s on a i3-4330 chip, which certainly isn’t the latest nor greatest CPU out there.

In fact, @cayars CPU the last I heard was one with about the same specs as mine, and he’s running a lot more users at a time than I have had. And very little on his system is transcoded on demand, either. Hell, he wrote the scripts I stole to work on my NAS to convert media to MP4, H264 with AAC stereo audio for the first track. Check it out from the link in my signature…

70

@MikeG6.5 said:

@KarlDag said:

I’m stuck between “thank God I paid for lifetime and don’t need to pay more for those bad decisions” and “it sucks I already have lifetime because I can’t send my message through finances”…

Every day, when I log into Plex I think the same damned thing.

@Joe4992 said:
I just want the DVR beta to be out of beta. Or at least up to date with all the additions the other clients have. This is NOT asking for a lot here. Last update was Sept 30th. Not sure why this client has not seen any traction.

DVR can so easily be done with other methods, that it’s a wonder this was even in Beta to begin with. DVR has absolutely nothing to do with the top 10 request of Live TV streaming. It’s a recorded stream…

I also want to see GPU transcoding. Would make a LOT of people happy since they won’t have to get top of the line CPU’s anymore. I can then install my video card back into my server. Right now it’s just taking up electricity so I pulled it.

There are a few threads around that show you that GPU transcoding isn’t the saving grace everyone seems to think it is. @cayars had one a while back where he showed a pretty low time decrease with transcodes, and on some codecs it actually increased the time spent transcoding, if I remember correctly.

And hate to say it, but I run a damned healthy system on a CPU with just over 5K passmarks. You don’t NEED a race horse in the box to make it seem fast. You just need to take the time to set up your media correctly. I can do 5 Direct Play streams with this CPU and use less than 20% of the system’s resources for all 5 streams. That’s on a i3-4330 chip, which certainly isn’t the latest nor greatest CPU out there.

In fact, @cayars CPU the last I heard was one with about the same specs as mine, and he’s running a lot more users at a time than I have had. And very little on his system is transcoded on demand, either. Hell, he wrote the scripts I stole to work on my NAS to convert media to MP4, H264 with AAC stereo audio for the first track. Check it out from the link in my signature…

You’ve mentioned your setup and the number of users you serve before, same for Carlo… How much upload speed do you have to do that? With my 20Mbps I wouldn’t try to serve more than 4 upload streams at once…

71

@MikeG6.5 said:
In fact, @cayars CPU the last I heard was one with about the same specs as mine, and he’s running a lot more users at a time than I have had. And very little on his system is transcoded on demand, either. Hell, he wrote the scripts I stole to work on my NAS to convert media to MP4, H264 with AAC stereo audio for the first track. Check it out from the link in my signature…

Still running the same old server which is i7 930 @2.80GHz with 8 GB Memory running Windows Server 2016. Does the job just fine since I pre transcode everything before adding to my libraries.

I’m running on Verizon FIOS with 300 both ways but typically get closer to 350.

If your server doesn’t have to do a lot of transcoding then you don’t need a lot of CPU. If a user of mine can’t take a full stream then I just don’t share with them.

72

@KarlDag said:
You’ve mentioned your setup and the number of users you serve before, same for Carlo… How much upload speed do you have to do that? With my 20Mbps I wouldn’t try to serve more than 4 upload streams at once…

At the time I had 5 Direct Play I was in Alaska and they were all local streams. Since the NAS was Link Aggregated, it had a 2Gb pipeline…

It still does to my local network, but my upload isn’t nearly what I had there, either.

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@MikeG6.5 said:

There are a few threads around that show you that GPU transcoding isn’t the saving grace everyone seems to think it is. @cayars had one a while back where he showed a pretty low time decrease with transcodes, and on some codecs it actually increased the time spent transcoding, if I remember correctly.

And hate to say it, but I run a damned healthy system on a CPU with just over 5K passmarks. You don’t NEED a race horse in the box to make it seem fast. You just need to take the time to set up your media correctly. I can do 5 Direct Play streams with this CPU and use less than 20% of the system’s resources for all 5 streams. That’s on a i3-4330 chip, which certainly isn’t the latest nor greatest CPU out there.

In fact, @cayars CPU the last I heard was one with about the same specs as mine, and he’s running a lot more users at a time than I have had. And very little on his system is transcoded on demand, either. Hell, he wrote the scripts I stole to work on my NAS to convert media to MP4, H264 with AAC stereo audio for the first track. Check it out from the link in my signature…

Direct streaming should take almost no CPU power. It just takes the video and passes it through your server onward to the client. I’ve had 2 directs going at once and saw my CPU idle at 2-4%.

I have a i7-4770 box I use now for Plex. Can do 5-6 transcodes at once easily. If there was GPU transcoding I could go back down to my i3-3220 again and use that since it uses less electricity and it’s a smaller footprint in my basement. I could then convert the i7 into a gaming box and upgrading my current gaming box that has a AMD 955 Phenom x4 in it that’s like 7 years old.

74

I also think if this thread was on the public forum (non plex pass forums) then there might be a little more activity from the Plex team. If you hurt their “potential” income, they will jump. Everyone here already has a plex pass with a lot of us being lifetime members so they are not too worried with people here seeing it. But if this was on a forum where everyone can see it, where people who are thinking of paying the money can see it… I bet they would jump a little higher in responding.

75

I don’t think it matters one bit where it is. The Team is going to ignore it because it’s not toeing the party line. I have been a HUGE critic about Plex’s marketing and production paths in the past, and I honestly think a lot of the Team (including some ninjas) have me blacklisted. (See, Plex Team? HERE’S a perfect example of how a Blacklist would work! It’s too bad that we didn’t have something like this for filtering or sharing exclusions, too, huh?)

And, as this entire thread is about Feature Requests, which the F2U can’t have input to, it’s not appropriate to put this in the General Forums. They have no input to the Requests. Pass members do. So commenting or linking to that forum is a waste of time in the General F2U forums, as they can’t see the posts.

In any case, I expect if I were to post in those forums I would definitely be getting a Cease and Desist, if not an outright ban from posting.

76

Just catching up on this thread, figured I’d give my two cents on a few things:

A new UI for PMP and clone platforms was promised months ago, before the summer I think

Yep, we realize we’re insanely late on this, and we’re not happy about it. There are a few reasons, but the most important is that the move to React, while fairly easy on the desktop, has proven to be a lot harder across all the platforms the big-screen UI is on (PS3/PS4/XB1/smart TVs) besides PMP. We’re making good progress, and we’ve hired more people for that team to speed things up.

The poor communication between the Plex team and their users

You’ve still got a co-founder (me) in the forums, chatting directly with you. I can’t name many companies where that’s the case. And we’re scheduling a new set of community roundtables.

projects.The “Shield” which has been much ballyhooed but has failed in that it cannot handle even moderately large libraries

I’m not exactly sure what a “moderately large library” is, but yeah, it’s an ARM-powered box, not for everyone. For people with reasonably-sized libraries, it’s a great one-stop solution.

I have rethought my involvement in the upcoming bogus conference because I do not want to be mislead or lied to

That wasn’t the intent, so I’m sorry you feel that way, and you definitely weren’t lied to. There’s likely nothing I can say which would change your mind, so I won’t bother.

I have a theory on that… FEAR.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s not fear. I just got pointed to this thread about 20 minutes ago.

I just want the DVR beta to be out of beta. Or at least up to date with all the additions the other clients have. This is NOT asking for a lot here. Last update was Sept 30th. Not sure why this client has not seen any traction.

I can explain this ~ during the DVR work, the server was “forked” (branched on git, if you want to be specific) to allow rapid progress to be made. We’re in the process of merging stuff back into the mainline, but it’s been going slower than expected, which is why there hasn’t been a unified release with the DVR feature included. We have a beta 4 ready, but we decided to re-sync it against upstream (to get the new photo tagging feature, bug-fixes, etc.) This work was completed over the holiday weekend and now it’s in testing.

I also want to see GPU transcoding.

Our work on this is progressing, it’s important to us too.

I bet they would jump a little higher in responding.

Again, I’m sorry we can’t be on top of every thread. We have a ton of forum users, and sometimes posts fall between the cracks. Feel free to PM me personally if you think this is happening and I’ll have a look myself or pass it along.

I honestly think a lot of the Team (including some ninjas) have me blacklisted

Nope :slight_smile:

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Well, let me say first off, @elan, thanks for stopping by. I really didn’t expect ANY of the Team to drop in for a comment. The fact that it’s you, well…

But your reply hasn’t addressed the main issue this thread was started over. Where is the updates to Server Side Per User Limits? Collections? Blacklists? and the list goes on…

Broken features are just that, broken features. When the functionality isn’t there, it’s not a working feature, and needs to be fixed. DVR is one of these, as is the Amazon Plex Cloud. (Neither of which I’m likely to use, but, let’s be fair… They need fixing…) And when they are features that haven’t specifically been asked for, it leaves a lot of us asking the question “WTF is going on?”

For a moderately sized library, that’s what I would say mine is. 2200+ movies, and a new high of 3600+ TV episodes, (down from my 21K or more at one time.) and 3500 or so music tracks. This is actually not even a drop in the bucket compared to some of the really LARGE libraries I’ve seen people talking about. (Look at @cayars for a truly “large” library. And his isn’t the largest by far.) @Elijah_Baley makes mine look downright small as well, but he would consider it a “moderately” sized library, I would expect…

You and I had a rather lengthy face-to-face about the ideas I suggested earlier in this thread. And I thought we both saw pretty closely in how that functionality could all be used. Seven months and as far as we, the users can see, it’s no closer to a reality than it was when you and I talked about it.

In short, where are the features your Plex Pass users have been asking for? Why has porting PMS to a ROUTER of all things taken higher priority than making User Limits a reality?

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Thanks for the feedback @elan, I appreciate it, but as @MikeG6.5 said, those are snippets of a much larger thread about a much broader issue.

I understand that the team, or the team’s direction (you) might have different priorities, but how do you justify implementing stuff like photo tagging (which doesn’t even do face recognition, the most important form of tagging IMO, and which competitors like Google Photos have done for a while) when you have outstanding feature requests with hundreds and thousands of users demanding basic stuff dating years back? You don’t even have an official (non-plexpass) and updated desktop client right now!

I’m sure you understand the bigger picture of our whining here. Why are stuff like ShieldTV released half baked and then not improved for months? You get people’s hopes up and then disappoint… wouldn’t it be more productive to fix the stuff that’s broken before investing time and money on other stuff?

“I’m not exactly sure what a “moderately large library” is, but yeah, it’s an ARM-powered box, not for everyone. For people with reasonably-sized libraries, it’s a great one-stop solution.” It’s not even about the power of the box! It’s about files not being scanned and/or not showing up, it’s about somehow library folders being limited to a certain number of files for them to be scanned, it’s about external storage not being available for metadata, it’s about the plugin folder STILL not being available…

PS While I’m on it, why not just make plugins like Trakt available on the official list of plugins? People could just install them like the official plugins.

EDIT And on the topic of the UI, which, thanks for answering me specifically… If it were me, after working on PMP for the time you spent on it and with the terrible reception the UI got… Why aren’t you releasing screenshots of mockups and see if people like it? Why don’t you consult some users and get their feedback? Why don’t you bake it into PMP as a beta of sorts and see if people like it? What if this thing comes out after a year on all platforms (consoles, smartTVs, etc) and people don’t like more than they liked (hated) the current UI? Again, your call obviously, but I just don’t understand.

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Where is the updates to Server Side Per User Limits? Collections? Blacklists? and the list goes on

If by “per-user limits” you’re talking about streaming brain, then definitely something we’re considering for the future; right now the team is working on something streaming brain related which we think is much higher priority.

Collections, as I discussed with you personally (IIRC), is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but it just hasn’t bubbled up on the priority list (and we don’t get a large number of requests for it). Same for blacklists (if you’re referring to parental controls).

Broken features are just that, broken features. When the functionality isn’t there, it’s not a working feature, and needs to be fixed.

I think your definition of “broken” is different from mine, and therein might lay some of the misunderstanding we’ve had. I wouldn’t consider a feature to be broken if it was missing something which a small fraction of users need or want for the feature to be useful.

DVR is one of these

How is DVR broken? We’ve gotten plenty of great feedback on it, including just from a day or two ago “I continue to be impressed by @plex DVR. https://www.plex.tv/features/dvr/ It just works. #TV”. Would we love to support Live TV and more tuners? Absolutely. But it’s kind of silly to call it “broken”, unless I’m missing why you’re including it in that category.

And I thought we both saw pretty closely in how that functionality could all be used. Seven months and as far as we, the users can see, it’s no closer to a reality than it was when you and I talked about it.

You can’t see it, but the Streaming Brain work continues; just because we haven’t implemented the per-user knobs yet (it’s been out for less than two months!) doesn’t mean we won’t. One of the things we discussed is about how much harder some of these things are than you might realize, because of the complexities of our large eco-system.

where are the features your Plex Pass users have been asking for? Why has porting PMS to a ROUTER of all things taken higher priority than making User Limits a reality?

This is what’s called a false dichotomy. It’s not like there are contending resources which are taken off those features and put towards the port. At this point, adding platforms is not rocket science, and mostly involves enabling the build with new parameters, and spinning up QA resources to validate it.

how do you justify implementing stuff like photo tagging (which doesn’t even do face recognition, the most important form of tagging IMO, and which competitors like Google Photos have done for a while)

We’re not competing with Google Photos; our users tend to have large collections of photos they want to keep inside the home, and the various cloud solutions don’t work for them. For these people, offering auto-tagging is a super cool feature they would be hard–pressed to find elsewhere, and it definitely provides value without face recognition, making things easier to find, and more fun to explore. So yeah, if you’re simply comparing with Google Photos, you’re sort of missing the point of our thrust there.

You don’t even have an official (non-plexpass) and updated desktop client right now

We’re working on that, and you’ll see an announcement around this very shortly. We continue to grow the resources associated with that effort.

I’m sure you understand the bigger picture of our whining here. Why are stuff like ShieldTV released half baked and then not improved for months?

I would resist calling the Shield release “half-baked”, it’s working well for a number of people. We’ve had a similar complexity around the Shield release as with the DVR, where parallel streams of work are being merged into the mainline code to make updates faster. (AFAIK, some issues on the Shield are related to firmware/Android limitations, and we’re working with Nvidia wherever possible.)

wouldn’t it be more productive to fix the stuff that’s broken before investing time and money on other stuff

Again, it’s not an either/or sort of a thing. We have engineers working on both things at the same time. But as I mentioned earlier in this post, your definition of “broken” might vary from ours.

Why aren’t you releasing screenshots of mockups and see if people like it? Why don’t you consult some users and get their feedback? Why don’t you bake it into PMP as a beta of sorts and see if people like it?

I totally understand that question. We spent a lot of time extracting the key problems with the initial UI, and combined that with future-facing needs. And we have shared parts of it with our group of ninjas for feedback. And quite honestly, we hoped to get it into your hands months ago…

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@elan said:
Collections, as I discussed with you personally (IIRC), is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but it just hasn’t bubbled up on the priority list (and we don’t get a large number of requests for it).

I can’t believe I just read that last sentence :open_mouth: