Ahoy Plexverse! We hope the season finds you well (hot and beachy in the northern hemisphere, cool and snow-shoey in the southern). Life here is good, we’ve been heads-down on fixing bugs and adding features, as always. The new UNO UI is coming to more platforms, we’re intensely focused on a giant metadata overhaul that we’re really excited about, we’ve added the ability to cast to SONOS devices and support for third-party Alexa-powered devices, and we’ve stomped some especially annoying server bugs: Live TV timeouts, several elusive crashes, some cases where we didn’t fall back from hardware to software transcoding, and some major improvements (orders of magnitude in fact) to partial scanning on some larger libraries, among others.
One thing we’ve been wanting to add for eons now is server notifications. Literally for so long that when we started talking about it, push notifications didn’t exist and we would have had to use pagers. Sadly there are very few titles which are pager-friendly and thankfully along came real push notifications.
“Can I ask you a question? Do you know if the hotel is pager-friendly?” The Hangover
We’ve been honing this feature for a while, and we’re finally launching it today! Super easy to get up and running—just flip the switch in your Media Server settings, and you’ll start getting notifications for new On Deck media and a few critical server maintenance events. Head over to your iOS or Android device and you can customize the notifications you’d like to receive to your heart’s content. Want to be notified any time your kid plays something? No problem! Want to know about all the movies your hipster cinephile sister adds to her server? Go for it. New media notifications work great for shared servers and users, too!
We’ve also added notifications around some key server maintenance tasks you can opt into, such as notifying you when your database is backed up, or for our security-minded server admins, new users accessing your server for the first time from a new device. Note: new content and server notifications are only sent for servers that have opted in.
For the automation fans out there, these new events will also trigger webhooks, so you can use them for all sorts of cool projects. Build something neat with webhooks? Let us know so we can feature it!
Push notifications are available now as a Plex Pass preview. Make sure your Plex Media Server is signed in with an active Plex Pass, grab the latest Media Server, ensure your iOS and Android apps are up to date, and get pushing! Find out more juicy details on our support site.
