i do actually have a question about shuffle’s implementation.
I’ve long had a bee in my bonnet about shuffle on plex, something just doesn’t feel right about the way it’s implemented (out of 5000 episodes it played three consecutive episodes of a 6 episode standalone series back to back yesterday(!!)). I’ve seen numerous times members of the team mention the implementation but, well i still struggle to believe it’s working properly, and all it takes to prove it’s not is press shuffle. My flat mate is a statistician and he’s not sold on it at all.
Anyway, I did have one request that would probably massively improve it - because from what i can see it’s not doing this:
If you make up a playlist of 5000 episodes of 500 shows (with differing amounts of each show) it would appear that it still just treats every episode equal - so if say you have 500 episodes of 1 show there’s basically a 1 in 10 chance that you’ll get that show when you shuffle. This sort of destroys shuffle for me - i want it to have 1 in 500 chance of picking that show, and then pick an episode from those 500 episodes of that show. Just because i have more of something, doesn’t mean i want to watch it disproportionately more. I’ve a few shows which contain large amounts of episodes and if I press shuffle I can guarantee practically everytime that of say the first ten episodes, 7 will be from those 4 or 5 shows.
This is useless as a random system
Other times i’ll add say 12 episodes of a show i remembered liking into this 5000 episode mixup, and within 3 days plex will have tried to play it so many time i’ll regret ever remembering it. Shuffle seems to have a real hard on for recently added content.
As its stands, i have a playlist as mentioned above, and it just seems to play the same shows over and over again, to the point it’s making plex useless to me and actively pissing me off when using it. It’s an amazing system for amalgamating and displaying content but not one for discovery and curation of said content. Plex is severely lacking in that regard. I appreciate something like Pseudo TV Live has been said to be impossible with Plex’s technical structure and that’s understandable, but there definitely needs to be more in terms of curation. If shuffle worked better this would be a decent start - dashboard boxes suggesting a random comedy, thriller, horrors, miniseries or whatever would be another. Start watching basically anything and have Plex generates a 10 episode playlist based on genre for continuous playback for an evening. Technically simple, but huge in terms of UX.
The one benefit TV has over us cord cutters is being able to switch it on and flick through what’s on, mindlessly, and find something you’re happy watching. I think that’s the one place Plex is failing and maybe somewhere that there could be room for innovation like above. It does concern me, and i’ve seen others say similar things here and the plex forum that feature creep seems to be distracting away from progressing what would be percieved/expected to be a thorough core experience.
This frustration with playback versatility is what’s stopping me stumping up for a plex pass at the moment - i don’t actually have any real use for its paid features, i just feel like it’s only fair i pay something for something i use daily and needs money for further dev, but it just bugs me too much to pay up hoping something changes - especially when time is put into features i can’t really see the point of.
Love your product and the amazing work you guys put in, but please don’t forget what Plex was about in the first place 
