Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pathartl 1542 days ago
I get that most people use streaming services these days, but I don't think I've used one in over a year and rely solely on local media. I understand _why_ Plex adds these features, but I'd much rather see them put time into the core product.

I don't need their movies and TV catalog forced upon me. I have no interest in Tidal integration or searching streaming services.

Once Jellyfin gets intro skipping I think I'll be switching.

2 comments

> Once Jellyfin gets intro skipping I think I'll be switching.

I like that feature a lot, but the big one I'm waiting for is Quick Connect on the Roku app so I don't need to choose between highly secure passwords and the ability to get logged into a device in a reasonable timeframe

Also keeping an eye on Dim. It's nice to see new projects popping up in this space.

> I'd much rather see them put time into the core product.

....what's wrong with the core product? I've used it since at least 2013, and the core product has been flawless.

Just some features I'd love to have:

- LDAP integration

- SSO

- Customizable icons per library

- Remote agent transcoding (i.e. install an agent on multiple machines on the network, give them the direct play stream to transcode instead of relying on the server to do it.)

- Dolby Vision support (current state of things is terrible)

- Apps for Android and iOS don't work well with large libraries

- No DVD/Blu-ray support. Not expecting full menus, but even a best guess at finding the main title would be sufficient.

- Automatic collection creation by path

I'm with you on this, what features is Plex missing that other services have? Intro skipping was the big one that comes to mind and Plex was a bit behind the competition (if streaming services can be called that) but they also had to do it from a "zero knowledge" position (using ML to guess where the intro was, which was genius IMHO) verses being able to just hardcoded it per-episode.
Why would they need to use ML to find intros? Most implementations I have heard of just analyze the sound at the beginning of episodes and mark out the "theme song" that recurs.
Hmmm, well it might be that my memory is faulty and/or I read someone else's comment somewhere when the feature first launched that said it was using ML. But you are correct, both the initial blog [0] and the support article [1] makes no mention of ML, only audio fingerprinting. My mistake.

[0] https://www.plex.tv/blog/go-ahead-and-skip-that-intro/

[1] https://support.plex.tv/articles/skip-content/

One major issue for me is that you cannot have movies and TV shows in the same folder on hard drive, you need to split them to separate folders, if you want correct metadata discovery.

I use one folder for everything with Infuse (iOS/macOS/tvOS only), and it works great, so it doesn't seem to be an unsolvable feature.