First of all, I just wanted to thank cayars (the OP) for posting that long, highly detailed, well-written post with thoughtful critiques. My only regret is not happening upon it sooner.
I also want to say, as someone who's been doing this for over 7 years now, things have changed a lot, and they'll continue to change. Back in the day, I knew every single user by name, and we were just working on a single app. Fast-forward all those years and we have dozens of employees, lots of products, gazillions of users, and it feels sometimes like it's hard to keep up :)
I would like to think that over the years, one things which hasn't changed is our values. We remain a media-loving tight-knit group of people who love what we do, and value and listen to our community. Yes, we can be secretive at times, but that's mostly because we enjoy surprising and delighting, and exceeding expectations. We are also very introspective, and we’re constantly re-evaluating, questioning, pondering, many times based on feedback in this very forum.
I'll take a stab at replying to the points raised in this thread, please forgive the ghetto quoting.
cayars: At a high level, why would anyone design a system that has to do all transcoding before starting any uploading
We totally agree there are some issues with Cloud Sync as designed today (pretty much layered on top of the existing Sync system). It works well for people syncing a reasonably small number of items to providers with reliable APIs (don't get me started). But the limitation you're mentioning does make it really frustrating for people trying to sync giant amounts of media. We're totally aware of it, have been discussing for a while, and we have plans for how to address it (along with some other major improvements to device Sync). Let me end with a question: why are trying to Cloud Sync massive amounts of media to the cloud? Do you have poor upstream bandwidth and stream outside the house? Do you want your media to live in the cloud? Help me understand.
cayars: When you watch something on a device the watch flag is never set on the server
We actually took pains to ensure that *would* work, but my understanding is that there are a few cases in which it doesn't. If you can provide more logs and details, we can have a look.
cayars: Filtering is "half" done. Right now it only support positive filtering and no negative filtering. This is crazy
We very deliberately chose to start with a simpler model (the underlying design is incredibly rich and flexible). We expected that content rating would work for the vast majority of people, and added the labels as a one-off mechanism to provide further flexibility. We also wanted to collect feedback on the system as a whole before providing a super complex interface to it. Again, what’s your specific use-case for negative tagging? Why doesn’t content rating work for you? [N.B. We are also going to be enhancing multi-select to make tagging/editing multiple items easier]
cayars: For example a person can only be a member of ONE home system. Why? Many people will/could use the feature of being part of multiple homes.
Again, we elected to start simple. Plex Home engendered days, weeks of passionate discussion, and we took pains to make sure what we first shipped didn’t suffer from feature creep. Multi-home (which was definitely discussed) is just not as simple as you might imagine it to be, and—believe it or not—it’s not a very common request. (Which is not to say we’re not discussing it still, but I just wanted you to be aware of how we got to where we are.)
cayars: For example on an xBox it’s tied to your live account
We completely agree about the uniform user-switching. Things are a bit painful on the XB1 at the moment in the case you describe.
cayars: When ever I add new users and add the shares from both servers, users get two different invites
Yeah, this is bogus and I’ve filed an internal issue for it. We took a _giant_ step forward with Plex Home, integrating all the sharing into the web app, and I hope you agree it’s a major improvement to be able to issue the share for multiple servers and with filtering with a few clicks. What you mention is a remaining rough edge :)
cayars: When xBox or Plex is doing any type of maintenance or having a problem or there is any type of internet issue this client is dead in the water
So I can’t speak for third party services, because there are time when we’re required to check for them before starting (we don’t make the rules). But we’ve taken steps over the years to improve behavior while offline, and will continue to do so. If there are specific cases besides XB Live being down which cause issues, we’d love to hear about them.
cayars: Plex needs to cache this information in an encrypted format on each server
Yes, we already do that :)
cayars: There should be more of a standard as to what clients are available with a plex-pass account vs those you can’t get with a plex-account
Yep, we totally agree, and are actively working on it. (You’ll notice baby steps like unifying all the Android apps into a single one.)
cayars: It’s fine to release plex-pass early previews but keep them labeled as such and not as a released client
The examples you mention (XB1, PS4) are Plex Pass previews. So maybe this is just a communication thing? We always strive to make it super clear on the blog that this is a preview release with limitations and requiring a Plex Pass.
cayars: We are all aware that Plex does not give out a development road map. This is sad because the real looser is Plex itself. The dev/design team does not get any feedback from the people using their systems in the real world
I disagree. Design by committee is not the answer. When we set out to design Plex Home, we read through all dozens of pages with people’s comments, and definitely took those into consideration. But the best products are not designed by a giant group of users, unless you’re looking to build the world’s largest swiss army knife.
cayars: Imagine if 10 to 20 (even 5 to 10) plex users were selected and signed NDAs, given a private forum and were able to participate with developers/designers
Yup, that’s what we do with Plex Ninjas, who are privy to new features and get to contribute ideas, test them out, and give feedback.
cayars: Same with the very long standing issue of plex security
It’s being worked on as we speak, but no, I can’t give specifics or a timeline.
cayars: There are many, many things that are lacking in server management
I note from your signature that you “Share with about 40+ people and normally a half dozen connections”. This places you in a pretty rare/unique category. But yes, I would expect over time for us to improve server management in general, and we’ve had discussions about it.
adamskoog: A software company not giving any kind of a road map or time frame for anything is kind of a cop out in my opinion
In that case, most companies are copping out :) We try to do (and I’m doing above) exactly what you say, letting the community know we’re aware of issues, they’re on our radar, or that they’ll be fixed in the future.
adamskoog: The way the main site reads it basically comes across to users that the Xbox apps (for example) are complete and you just need Plex pass to use them
Yeah, I agree that could be more clear.
MrMcLargeHuge: I agree with you 100% on having a bare-minimum set of features before a client can be released
So just to be clear, you’d rather wait a few months than be able to play with a preview release on a new platform? I’m fairly certain not everyone feels this way.
karbon82: It is discouraging to find that sharing works at an album level in Music but doesn’t work on an album level in Photos. Or to find that you can play a genre of music on the web app but can’t do so in Plex Home Theater
It’s frustrating to us also; achieving parity and stability and improved usability (especially first-run) is massively important to us.
karbon82: Perhaps too many platforms are being supported
To be clear, there is a massive amount of code reuse. Most of the XB1 app, the PS3/4 apps, and the smart TV apps, all share a common codebase. So yes, you might find an annoying bug on one platform, but it’s probably a lot better than you might think (and will continue to get better over time).
Elijah_Baley: The one thing they seem to be doing wrong is holding up development on some devices so the others can catch up
Not sure why you’d think that, but totally not true. People generally complain about the opposite (features being released for platforms A and B, but not C and D).
Plexhilarated: I have been around long enough that I have many old programs sitting on my shelves… some on 5-1/4” floppies.
Many became obsolete, but most became abandoned… I do not want Plex to become one of them.
Don’t worry, Plex never fit on a floppy disk and never will.
eckplex: We need core-features at 100% and feature parity across platforms
We hear you loud and clear (or is that loudly and clearly?)
vengeance goon: I would like to see some consistency in UI/UX design. I don’t believe the company has a UX designer, and that’s the core problem.
Et tu, Danny? We have about half a dozen people dedicated to UI and UX, and one of the tasks we’re undertaking is ensuring consistency across platforms. Part of growing up…
brainfrz: As far as i’m read up on that, most of [the $10m] will be invested in some sort “iTunes killing” functionality. Focussed on music aperrantly.
Definitely not true, but I think you’ll be impressed with how much better it works.
cayars: PS I totally agree on the user interface. It almost seems with each new client release they are trying something new/different to see if it works better and it’s fragmenting the interfaces as there is almost no “universal” interface anymore
While it’s true that we’ve experimented over time, I hope you’ll notice that the last handful of big-screen apps have looked almost identical. We’re refining idioms, always tweaking, but now converging.
jink0421: Audio track support isn’t much of a problem, but when you have a movie with a audio commentary you run into trouble
Totally agreed, and in the latest release of the media server, we’ve quietly started to collect stream titles during media analysis. This can help distinguish between those cases; and yes, clients will need to be updated.
AsphyxNYC: I do hope some of this new funding gets put towards hiring more Android Developers
We have equally large Android and iOS teams.
MikeG6.5: We really don’t have any way to see what’s going on with the server other than the “Now Playing” with no history of what, when, who, etc
Agreed; the sad thing is that we’ve been collecting that information in your server for ages now (c.f. PlexWatch and other third party solutions), we just haven’t exposed it via the management UI. But we will.
johndinsdale: Plex needs to achieve a parity in its clients as much as possible
YES, we completely agree. We’re working on it! Hard!
johndinsdale: However it seems as if the top Plex guys have disappeared into their ivory tower
No, not at all! Like I said at the start, definitely busier than I used to be, and I wish I spent more time in the forums, but it’s still the same people who have been here all along, and we are in no such tower, ivory or otherwise.
cayars: We are already seeing signs that Plex is starting to go after a different crowd then the “core” who “live” in these forums. We have new clients popping up on game consoles … We probably aren’t the customers these new devices are targeted at
This is unsubstantiated rubbish. Support for XB1 and PS* were top requests in our forums for years.
shanetd: And if someone outside of the Plex team is caught doing better work than they are (i’m looking at you ljunkie) they will just be brought onto the Plex team and forced to dumb down their skills
That’s just silly.
shanetd: I paid for a lifetime plexpass so there is nothing I can do now
I’d be happy to provide you with a refund.
ChuckL: IHow many months and letters “ AVOTON” has not been added to the 32 bit distribution image for Plex
It’s been added in the latest release. It’s hard for us sometimes to keep up with all the different NAS releases, but as soon as we noticed that, we added it, and I’m sorry it took so long for us to notice. This forum is large, there are many users and posts, and it’s easy to miss things.
