One of Plex’s most annoying quirks is its two-hour autoplay timer. If you don’t interact with Plex for two hours, it won’t load another episode of whatever show you’re watching. This nonsense finally comes to an end in the latest Plex update—you can now adjust or disable the autoplay timer! Plus, Plex is rolling out new settings for intro skipping, credit skipping, and “up-next” behavior.
By default, Plex’s autoplay timer is still set to two hours. To adjust or disable the timer, go into the Plex settings on your playback device, navigate to “Player Experience,” and find the “Passout Protection” setting. If you want to disable it, set it to “Never Prompt.” Unfortunately, this setting requires a Plex Pass subscription.
This update also includes several playback improvements for Plex Pass members. A new Rewind on Resume setting forces media to rewind by up to 30 seconds when unpaused. You can now tell Plex to automatically skip intros, credits, or advertisements (ad-skipping only works in DVR content), and credit sequences can now be kept at full screen when autoplay is enabled (rather than shrinking to a miniplayer at the corner of your screen). All of these settings are available from your playback device, though they aren’t available on iOS or Apple TV just yet.
Additionally, Plex is building on some of the streaming quality improvements it introduced in August 2023. The idea is pretty simple—Plex will automatically ask to increase or decrease streaming quality based on network bandwidth. This mainly affects remote streaming. If a severe drop in bandwidth is detected during a remote stream (or the video player buffers three times), a prompt to reduce streaming quality will appear onscreen. Users will also be asked to increase streaming quality when possible. Additional information is available on Plex’s support page. (As always, you should tell friends and family to stream at maximum quality when possible. Reduced playback quality requires transcoding, which is very resource-intensive and can slow your server.)
It’s great to see so many playback improvements from Plex. Old quirks like the two-hour autoplay timer and the credit sequence miniplayer regularly appeared in complaints on the r/Plex subreddit and Plex forum. Please note that these improvements require the latest Plex app update. Some changes are not available on iOS or Apple TV at this time.
