Plex Blog

September 17, 2024

Plex Pro Week ‘24: TLDR; Back to the Fireside

Hello again to all of you amazing and wonderful Plexy people!

What an incredible and totally nerdy week we have here at Plex. This is one of our favorite times of the year. The pros are out and we were thrilled to get back in and have a chat with a lot of them in our second annual Fireside in the Forums event.

First off, were you even aware that we have a pretty cool forum for discussions and support? I don’t call it pretty cool just because it sounds good—it is jam-packed with pros of all types with amazing Plex setups and with users, admins, and support staff that are ready to jump in and share their knowledge and expertise with anyone. It truly is a one-of-a-kind place!

This year exceeded our expectations with more great questions, discussions, and interactions than we had a year ago. The fire was burning merrily along and we all enjoyed a quality chat.

So, after filling our mugs with something warm and yummy, we raise them and salute our passionate community who joined us at the Fireside this year and helped to make it the best week yet!

Let’s take a look back at some of the best of the Fireside in the Forum chats!

In honor of Pro Week, we will start with a request for some Nerd Stats! One of the first questions we received was whether we could enable these stats for users with Android TV devices. We were so impressed with the question and discussion that someone jumped in and got it working and we were able to get those Nerd Settings enabled for these users!

Next up was an inquiry into a topic that has been a thorn in our side: Downloads. This has been an area that we have been continually working to improve for a long time. It was great to be able to share not only some current work here, but also some plans for how this will be improved in the future! Not only that, but since the Fireside chat ended, we have now released additional downloads improvements for Apple iOS devices!

We talked about some potential features like custom Live TV channels, preplay logo support, and getting Plexamp up and running on TVs.

There was also some attention paid to subtitles with a request to adjust the subtitle offset with a few more options. While this kicked off some good discussion, we were also able to come back after the fireside and complete the launch of one of our newest Plex Pass features, Auto-Sync Subtitles! Hopefully this helps keep all of those subtitles in line.

We confirmed again that we have plenty of work left to do for Plex Media Server and local media while engaging on some other fun topics like favorite streaming players and what we can do to enhance the overall server manager experience. There is some exciting stuff planned around this topic!

Speaking of Plex Media Server, offline authentication came up, and we also chatted about improving the DVR recording experience.

One topic that garnered a lot of attention this year was around whether we mark titles as watched or unwatched. There were quite a few posts like this post or this one that show that there is more discussion to be had here. We hear you!

Just like last year, Plexamp and music were a hot topic of conversation. During the weeklong chat, the news broke that the TIDAL integration is going away. This kicked off a few comments (here and here) around this topic. But other music soon filled the air with questions around seasonal music being discussed, current database incompatibilities preventing some feature adds like multiple artists per track, and some good discourse on discovering music together. Oh, and it got really exciting to hear confirmation that multi-room synced playback is coming soon!

We also talked about what’s next up for us and how we move forward. This includes listening to ideas about how to improve and how we work with more stuff in the backlog than we have time to quickly address. And in the end, we wrapped it up with a pretty big message around some of the areas that we will be targeting over the next year. There is still space to jump in here as a follow-up, non-timed thread was initiated here and we would still love to get your feedback.

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When it was all said and done and the roaring fire was reduced to a few glowing embers, we wrapped up another Fireside chat. The week was an amazing one, made so by all of you, the ones who not only joined us around the fire, but who join us every day, enjoying all of the media and entertainment that we love. Thank you so much for all of the chats, conversation, and questions. We look forward to seeing you again next year at the Fireside!

About Kevin

A Plexian for two years and counting, Kevin Wanke works with the engineering teams working on Personal Media and Discover features. Even before joining Plex, Kevin has been an avid user and part of the community for over 12+ years. He’s grown his server solutions from a modest Xbox with XBMC to the point of being the de facto IT go-to for many friends and family. Before joining Plex, Kevin led engineering teams in various industries including product development in the cash management and physical security space as well as a large courtroom recording equipment and software provider.

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