Hi Plex ninjas, hey Plex for Android developer team,
v6.4.2 brought the “Android TV” user interface to the Amazon Fire TV.
So please excuse if I compare “old” and “new” UI, I don’t try to over-excercise that. And I will try to tell you why I am calling it a “glitch”.
First impressions:
- During Playback: In the old Player, the controls were not covering most of the screen (remember, playback is contiuing while the controls are visible)
- During Playback: Until recently, it was possible on the FireTV to move the progress bar (using the remote control of the Fire TV) to move back or forward a few minutes with a single click. This is no longer possible and I had to click 150 times to fast-forward through a movie… this is wasting time and energy.
- On the movie or episode content screen, a larger “unwatched” badge was visible next to the title. This is gone now. The red triangle in the upper right corner is okay, but not that “visible” (depending on the background of the poster).
- On the same screen: The buttons to browse to the previous and next episode are at opposite ends of the upper menu. While this looks good, usability is limited in situations where you want to browse forth and back… These buttons really should be next to each other.
- On the same screen: Below the title of the episode or movie, you can see the chosen tracks… For example, in my current episode, I can see “TON Deutsch (AC3 Stereo)” (Audio: German) and “UNTERTITEL Keine” (Subtitle None). The color and the shading of both is the same… no indication, if additional audio or subtitle tracks are available (in this example, there is an English audio track available and there is no subtitle track available at all. I have to go up to the setting menu, then choose the sub menus “choose audio track” or “choose subtitle track” only to find out that I cannot choose and subtitle and how many audio tracks are available. In Plex web (and the Android app), different colors are available in on the movie or episode content screen to let the user know without clicking though a couple of menus with a remote control. Probably easy to fix.
- During playback of a TV series episode: When the controls are visible, in the on screen menu where you can also re-order the list of episodes, there is a menu when you click on the “three dots” right to each TV episode. There the wrong texts “Go to album” (action: go to series xy), “go to artist” (action: goes to series overview page) visible.
- On the Movie or TV episode content screen: when you click the button “continue reading” to expand to the full content description, you are normally using the up and down buttons on the Fire TV remote control to read through the content. When scrolling back to the upper parts of the text, I would have expected that continuing to click up would automatically crunch down the content, but it just stops scrolling and you have to press the “return”/“back” button on the remote control to gain back full control on your movie screen. It would be nice to have both.
- Main screen: clicking on the User button does nothing other than lighting up the button for a short time. I can see that I am logged in…
- Main screen: I have to scroll down through all the items of the main screen (Mediathek), “Continue Play”, “Actual”, “Actual Playlist”, “Recently added episodes” to change my server (I have one server for TV shows, one for Movies). This is not nice and was more accessible with the old U.
- Main screen: On one of my PMS, I have ten diffrent libraries. I need to scroll them from left to right with big ugly icons. If I had them accessible in two or three rows of (smaller) icons (remember, no poster is shown for libraries), I would have less screen scrolling and less clicks on my remote to get to the ninth library and back to the first.
- When I enter a library on the screen where I can see all my library items (movies, for example) and navigate by “First letter”… I get there with the “cursor” on the left hand side, but the “letter navigation column” on the right hand side. It takes at least four clicks (or seven when you first go down to the first poster) to get there. This letter column definitely needs to go to the left side of the posters - or horizontally directly below the upper menu (above the posters) .
- On the same screen: When navigating through the posters (go down for a while), it takes ages to go back all the way up to reach the upper menu… clicking left when you are on the left poster in a row does nothing. It should auto-scroll up to the top, for example. When you click the “ok” button on the FireTV remote control while you are “left” of the left poster of any row, it opens the top left menu drop-down-menu without scrolling up. Clicking right then does not bring you to the next drop down menu. This is irritating.
That’s it for now… I need to get used to it, but I think I brought up a couple of points that can be done better. I use it daily and my wife also does not like the clicking orgy. She is happy for the moment having theme music back, but I know here well… 
Thank you for listening and I hope I was clear about my actions and findings…
