For all the griping and complaining we see here in the forums Plex did us pretty good for 2015.
We got several new clients, lots of new features and I don’t want the rest of this to be taken as a negative. These are NOT feature requests per say or they would be broken up and put in a different forum.
This is my generic “Wish List” for 2016 that would benefit all users. 
SYNCING:
Syncing still needs work. It’s pretty unreliable still after 1+ year being released. Many people abandoned it’s use. Besides syncing media we also need to be able to sync playlists. We need to be able to sync music artists and music albums.
HOME:
Works but is fundamentally flawed in concept compared to what users wanted. What many want is the ability to setup and maintain users on our own server. Users can log in directly without using plex.tv. A user of the server should be able to link their local account to a plex.tv account if they wish. Take a page from Emby as they handle this much better. No user should ever not be able to connect to the server because plex.tv isn’t working or can’t be contacted.
RESTRICTIONS:
An admin should be able to grant home privs to any user they deam fit. We need to be able to set priveliges for each user including “admin” rights. We need to be able to specify time of day usage limits (can use from 5pm to 9pm, limited to 3 hours per 24 hrs, etc). We need to be able to specify if a user can only have internal vs external access privileges. We need to be able to control if a user can direct stream or is capped at a certain bandwidth, we need to be able to control how many streams a user can have, etc.
FILTERING:
Filtering is “half” done. Right now it only support positive filtering and no negative filtering. This needs to get fixed ASAP and to me is a “lazy implementation” the way it currently works. This has personally bugged me since the day it was introduced.
SERVER MANAGEMENT:
Still lacking but due to a release glitch it looks like Plex is starting to work on this. Hopefully 2016 will be the year of management! I don’t want to go into great detail on this but we need MONITORING and CONTROL of users (some items covered above). We need to be able to look at past usage of the system as a whole and of particular users. We need need to be able to drill down into data. We need to be able to control the clients from the server and not the other way around.
GPU ENCODING:
Plex is behind the times in this category. Many other streaming software supports using different forms of GPU encoding. We need this yesterday. Granted it might not be available on all server platforms but release it for Windows and Linux since they are supported. Start working out the bugs and issues that will happen. For people on platforms not supported, they will at least have the option to port their systems to Windows or Linux if they need this functionality.
MEDIA OPTIMIZATION:
For a first release MO is pretty good. However, it needs a few changes to make it much more powerful. We need the ability to set the profile and the Constant Rate Quality used for the transcodes. If when we get GPU support it should use this too. Clients need to use this data better also. It’s 90% good but the missing 10% will keep people from using it as the quality is no better than real-time transcoding at present. So what’s the point?
CLIENT BUFFERING
For the love of God, please support proper video buffering on all clients that support this. We should be able to pause a video and have it continue to “download” while paused. This feature alone would help eliminate some of the “buffering” issues we see all the time in the forums. Users have been asking for this since at least 2012 (if not earlier).
ADAPTIVE BITSTREAMING:
Clients need adaptive streaming support. This can be done the proper way or at least start by having the clients automatically request different resolution/bitrates when the client has buffering issues or can easily keep the current buffer filled. This will greatly help with client setups.
TV (LIVE and DVR):
Long overdue in coming to Plex. While we have a few 3rd party options available to us these don’t work that well since they can’t integrate with Plex well enough. Plex could start with an external hardware device like the HDHomeRun Prime series (IPTV) which many of us have. This shouldn’t be that hard to do.
CORE LIBRARY:
Movies, Music, TV/Series, Live TV, Recorded TV, Books, Home Videos, Music Videos, Photos and Mixed Content along with Collections.
Movies, TV Series work well and Music is pretty good. We need the ability to have a seperate “Music Videos” library. At present it’s very hard to add “educational” or any type of “sports” libraries to Plex. You have to jump through hoops to get these types of libraries to work with Plex. We need much better handling of video types without meta-data. We need “collections” or “boxed sets” so we can organize our media better. Does anyone really want to scroll through 10+ Star Treks when you can have just one? How about one item for all your James Bond movies or Harry Potter movies. This would be especially helpful for series that aren’t alphabetical like “Indiana Jones”.
We still need the ability to allow a download of the item. Right now this is limited to the admin account only. We should be able to control/set which users have access to this. I’m tired of having to teach FTP skills to my family members so they can grab a couple of movies to take with them on vacation, bus or airplane trips (since SYNC is hit or miss) and not properly suppred for desktop/laptop environments.
We need “virtual Libraries”. We should be able to tag things and they automatically create a new Library based off our tags. This can be used for anything from “Animation” to “Recommended” to “Holiday” to “Harrison Ford” libs. We should be able to create a virtual library based on actor or director for example.
We need the ability to have nested libraries. So for example I could have Actors and then a set of libraries underneath for all the popular actors I setup and care about. We need to be able to create a “Seasonal” library and then underneath this have libraries for “Christmas”, “New Years”, “Holloween”, etc It’s little things like this that would add a whole new set of usability to Plex!!!
We need the long requested eBook library type as well as libs for Recorded TV (once added).
ALIAS:
We need the ability to assign an alias for both users and Devices. This would obviously enable us to identify both much easier.
GROUP USERS:
It would be great to be able to create user groups and assign users to these groups. We could then set sharing to a group and then simple assign a user to a group.
DLNA:
Still never updated after the HOME feature was added. DLNA gets turned off by default when activating the home feature. It STILL needs to get assigned to a built in “DLNA” user on the system so that the admin can set sharing permissions properly for it.
Plex needs to add DLNA push to DLNA receivers. This is a common way to make use of many additional devices without the need for a specific client on the device. Emby does this pretty well and it’s quite useful.
Take for example the WD Live boxes. These boxes can play just about anything but don’t have a native plex app on them (BTW, why not?). They make excellent play to devices for DLNA.
TRAILERS:
This needs some optimization and almost feels broken. The typical Plex server tends to show the same trailers over and over again. “New” trailers playing in theaters seem to show old movies no longer playing, etc.
LAYOUT:
Add 4:3 to 16:9 stretch option. This is basic stuff.
We need to be able to adjust the sync of audio to video.
Many of us prefer vertical scrolling over horizontal scrolling. It’s just much easy to use on things like websites and touch screen devices. Computers with mouse wheels work in vertical mode but not horizontal. The new layout common to all new clients uses a row of two which means it takes a lot more scrolling in horizontal mode than it would in vertical mode where there is 4 or more columns. It would be nice to at least have a choice of vertical vs horizontal scrolling in the different apps.
On the new UI there are sections for things such as new Movies. If you view this list, do something and come back it’s different than the first time you looked at it. Seems like Plex is taking a set number of entries from the last X time frame and randomly using these. While this gives some variaty it may not be optimal to the way some want to run their Plex servers. I for example would want it to show the X last released entries without randomizing it. So the first item on the list is the last item released. This should be a configuration setting ON THE SERVER not the CLIENT.
META-DATA:
Plex needs to get a handle on the meta-data agents currently being used as it’s a mess. Enough said. What would also be helpful is if plex could fully honor an NFO file it finds next to the media.
We need meta-data for TV SHOWS with a list of actors just like we do for movies.
MISC:
Many of the features of the server such as Media Optimization and Bif/Index file creation are very time consuming and can easily takes months to do if you ever lost your plex database and had to rescan/re-setup your server. Both of these items need to change a bit so that a re-scan can pick up this information. Like MO we should be able to choose to store the bif files alongside our media where it belongs instead of in the meta-directory. This would also allow the meta-directories to be much smaller and would allow more people to use smaller SSD drives to house the meta-directory.
MUSIC EQUALIZER:
Many other media players have a music equalizer built in. This would be nice to have as well.
We need to have Dynamic Range Compression
DISTRIBUTED SERVERS
With many of the newer features that have been added to Plex they are taking a toll on the CPU. SYNCing and Media Optimizations are prime examples. Some people try and work around this by splitting out the transcoding to “client” computers. Other try and run multiple server and split users between the servers. Problem is watch lists and meta data don’t flow between the servers. Others have asked for SYNCing between servers. Seems to me all of this could be avoided if we had:
TRUE RELATIONAL MULTI-USER DATABASE
Sqlite has served us well over the years but it’s time to grow up. We should be making the switch to a real multi-user relational database such as MySQL which should be available on every platform Plex runs on. This would enable us to have multiple servers all pointed to the same meta-data, the same libraries and most of all the same database. The DB could run on a stand-alone server or on one of the Plex servers. The great thing about this is would could then use industry standard practices of load balancing, database backups, etc. while being able to drop another machine online when needed to support our users and all their transcoding needs!
Carlo
OTHER:
I’ve said previously I think Plex needs to create a user consoluting group. Have them sign an NDA if needed but run new ideas past this group for feedback during design and get them to test things before it’s released as Plex-Pass. I know this is what the Ninjas are supposed to do but it appears it doesn’t work that well.
Carlo
PS Like this message if you agree.
