Plex not considers episodes running

This is an unfortunate bug on Plex's side. It's actually existed for many years, and I'd reported it back then, though obviously it's never been fixed.

When Dispatch sends the command to Plex to play an item, it's actually a very simple command made through android's Intent system. When an app receives an intent, it's up to that app to handle it correctly.

Unfortunately, the bug is that when the Plex app receives this intent, occasionally it fails to start sending playback progress to the Plex server. There isn't anything I can do about it, since all Dispatch sends to Plex is the "play" command and the unique ID of the item that's meant to be played.

This actually happens with the default launcher on the nvidia shield, too. Like I said, the problem has been around for a few years.

I had been exploring an alternate solution. However, while it was promising at first, after a couple of weeks of working on it, I discovered that it triggered its own set of bugs within the Plex app, and was in the end less reliable than how things are working now.

The only solution would be for Dispatch to have its own video player so that it can play items and report playback progress to the plex server directly, similar to how infuse or kodi likely do it. It's something that's being heavily considered, though it would be a large undertaking on my part. In fact, it's more a question of when, not if, at this point.