Watchlist - Allow user to directly play local video

The new Watchlist feature is nice, but not very useful to some of us since you have to select a source. If the movie is on my server, if I go through the watchlist, I have to:

  1. Select the item
  2. Wait for all of the locations to load
  3. Select my server
  4. Then click play

That’s 3 steps more than any other service.

If a video is a local file, we should be able to click on it, and it plays as usual.

So… just to make sure I understand this correctly.
When hovering over the source of a local / shared library (#3) you want to immediately play the video (or at least have an option to get some kind of play button overlay – kind of like you have the option to click on the play button when you hover over a poster in your library?

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So… just to make sure I understand this correctly.
When hovering over the source of a local / shared library (#3) you want to immediately play the video (or at least have an option to get some kind of play button overlay – kind of like you have the option to click on the play button when you hover over a poster in your library?

Close. When I’m looking at my Watchlist, clicking an items should play like it does in my library. I don’t really think there is much value in telling me where a video is on a streaming service if I have it locally.

Edit: Just to clarify. I don’t think the behavior of the watchlist should be different than a playlist or collection. Even slightly different adds user friction which kind discourages its use, in my opinion.

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There could be still a desire to stream the video from someplace else.
For instance:

  • the own server has only limited bandwidth
  • the own copy of the video is not available in a high quality
  • the own copy would require transcoding with the currently used client type, which the server is ill-equipped to perform

There could be still a desire to stream the video from someplace else.
For instance:
the own server has only limited bandwidth
the own copy of the video is not available in a high quality
the own copy would require transcoding with the currently used client type, which the server is ill-equipped to perform

@OttoKerner Sure. I’m not trying to imply that there aren’t other use cases, but the primary use case is still going to be playing local media. As of now:

  • There isn’t a way to go directly to your local version
  • If the video isn’t available elsewhere, you still have to manually select the local version
  • Sometimes the option for the local version doesn’t even load because it loads with all of the other options, but not before them.

I don’t know what kind of analytics you have on this feature, so I’m not trying to come off critical, but I do think a user needs a way to directly access their content, even if it is the first option in a context menu or a long press on their TV.

100% agree! Make a second button right of “play trailer.” Have the first button say “play or play local” and the second button be “play trailer.” Keep everything else the same. Keep the streaming options available for those that want but I’d like to add videos to the watchlist to easy reference later. I know I could make a playlist but the watchlist is so prominent in the app.

This just won’t work. And there is no “local” anyway. Next to streaming options the movie could be present in one or many libraries on one or many plex servers as would be indicated by the corresponding icons.

Click on that button brings you to the library’s item view, where you can choose e.g. version, subtitle, language and so on first or hit play.

What may be possible is long pressing the respective plex server icon and allo direct play from there.

Even if we could play straight from the discovery page, it still creates a situation in Plex where a single show or movie will have two discovery pages, one when accessing it through wishlist and one when accessing it through normal libraries on the server.

My view is that if discovery is disabled and only one server exists, then going in to a show should skip the watchlist preplay page and go straight to the local server’s preplay page. Only if discovery is turned on or if the user has more than one location or libraries where the content can be found, then use the watchlist preplay screen

I agree something is needed here.

I setup the watch-list on my android client.
I added shows i am watching to the list.
Then i went to the watch-list and my local server and others were shown when i selected one of the shows on the watch-list.
The problem was when i select my local server to play the TV Show Episode i had to click , click, click … just to play the show that was next.
When that show was done i had to do this all over again to watch the next show.

Now on my home page i have continue watching. Why would i ever use the watch-list if it is not even close to the continue watching list.

Maybe we could solve this by letting use add shows to the continue watching list before i start watching them.

I consider a watchlist/queue an essential tool for media consumption. Playlists and Collections are both great, but neither is optimal as a watchlist. So I appreciated very much when Plex not only added Watchlist, but also used it to bring library and streaming sources together. However, the current implementation is quite punishing to use with library content, as other folks here have aptly described. It really discourages use of Watchlist by “library-first” households - particularly for TV shows.

Maybe Watchlist just needs to be able to function independent of Discover. Is there any reason it couldn’t?

I agree with what the OP mentioned, but my situation is slightly different in that I don’t use any streaming services, so everything I watch is ‘local’ to me, i.e. on my NAS, but as the OP said, it takes several clicks to start watching a film/show, even if there is only a single location (my NAS) of the film/series (having disabled streaming services in the Discover section).

99% of the time, I just use the Home screen and the ‘Continue Watching’ section as it’s mainly TV series, whereas watching films is sort of random. I only use the Watchlist if I want to binge watch a collection of films over a few nights.