I’m glad I found this thread as I’m in a similar boat. I too use Plex for my local media, though I do use the DVR. What has me looking into alternatives is that Plex no longer does a good job with the basics. For example, I wanted to play all of our Christmas music, so I created a Collection. Unfortunately, when I attempt to play it on my Apple TV, it doesn’t work at all. I guess I could have tried to create a Playlist, but I didn’t, though my video playlist doesn’t repeat.
Yesterday I installed Emby and was able to get it up and running really fast. It’s very straightforward and seems to do a much better job of the basics than Plex. The home screen has “My Media” and nice big icons for Music and TV Shows - the 2 categories I created, as well as Collections with my Christmas playlist.
Finding this in Plex is much less intuitive, as the entire screen is taken with “Recently Added”. There is no list of my stuff. For that I have to go and select a library, etc. Doing this in the mobile and Apple TV apps is very tricky and not obvious. I wrestle with it every time.
To be honest, my collection did not play back in Emby. On Apple TV, nothing happened and in the web player, I got an error message. However, I went on to their forum and got 2 replies from a staff member “System Architect” who told me that it should be fixed in the next server update. I’ve never gotten that type of timely response in the Plex Forums. In fact, when my Collection didn’t play back I found an existing thread: Collections not working for Music Albums from almost a month earlier with not a single response. I chimed in but haven’t heard anything back.
It’s great that Elan is responding to this thread, but it would be better if the “Chief Product Officer” paid attention as there seems to be a disconnect with the product focus of Plex and a perception of caring about the customer, not technological direction.
