Plex is set to end support for podcasts on Friday, the company behind the media management platform has announced.
Web Shows on the Plex media server will also close this week, the company said in a post on the Plex forum, although most of the content the section hosted will still be available to users elsewhere on the platform.
As part of our ongoing effort to make sure we're spending our time and energy in ways that best serve our awesome user community, we've made the decision to end support for Podcasts and Web Shows within Plex. We recognize this decision will impact several of you greatly, and we apologize for the inconvenience it will cause. You can continue to access these features within Plex until Friday, April 15th, 2022, at which point they will no longer be available.
Plex didn't say exactly why it had decided to end support for podcasts and close the Web Shows portal of its media management offering, but the wording suggests that neither section was being used enough to make them worth the time and money spent maintaining them.
For those who want to export their podcast subscription list in OPML format for use in other players, the Plex forum post provides instructions on how to go about it before support closes.
As noted by XDA Developers, Plex podcast support has largely stood still since it was introduced in 2018, and there are several complaints from users in the Plex forums about buggy performance and other issues going all the way back to its inception.
Top Rated Comments
It does create a tension between different kinds of users (or current and potential future users?).
Unless I'm very much mistaken, the neither the player nor server apps use Electron.
I think it's a bit harsh to call it 'garbage'. For me it's somewhere between 'fine' and 'meh' - yeah, it's not very Mac-like (what is these days), but it's reasonably fast, easy to navigate, and doesn't hog loads of system resources. I like Infuse too.
I mean, it's essentially a product that consists of both a "server" and a "client" piece. The "Plex Media Server" runs on a machine configured for it and lets you store a collection of video and audio content that it indexes/catalogs and can then stream optimally to a Plex "client" -- which can be software running on a Windows PC, a Mac, an iPad/iPhone, Android device, or built into various smart TVs on the market or set-top boxes like Apple TV.
It works on your local network or can stream over the Internet, supporting "user accounts" you create on the server so specific people you know can be granted access to parts of, or to your complete library of content.
As time went on, the Plex authors kept bolting on new features, so it went from focusing on your own personal video, music or photo collections to supporting all these Internet-based streaming options and even broadcast TV if you have the right TV tuner board installed in a Plex server. Podcast support is another one of those things they added to fill out the offerings a Plex client gave people....