Apple Player Update Beta - Discussion

Plex Players Player Betas
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First it’s good to have some kind of communication on this.

Curious. Do users actually want this? Or is it an engineering want? That, I would understand.

Just… this doesn’t sound like a positive feature or aspiration for an end user. What benefit am I missing here?

I’ll probably submit some real bug reports later as I have - as to be expected - quite a few, and this is the point. But the player is… bad. The previous was better in literally every way.

Erm… YouTube? Aspiring to be as bad as Youtube is not good. One other, I suppose Amazon uses a chaotic custom player but that is also, bad. But it at least has a seek that is accurate, previews and follows system settings for subtitles. And X-Ray.

But also, don’t gaslight us: Deliver a great playback experience on tvOS - WWDC21 - Videos - Apple Developer

Quote: Apple, WWDC21
By adding relevant controls and options to the transport bar, we improved the discoverability of common playback tasks, such as turning on subtitles or changing audio language.

The transport bar controls are both universal in nature as well as can be application-specific.

And with new content tabs, users can now easily access supporting information – like Info or Chapters – making inline navigation accessible and discoverable.

The well documented, widely used… Display Content tabs?

IDK. It feels like what is happening with the new player UI on Apple TV will never match the vision of ‘the best possible playback experience’.

The best possible playback experience if you don’t remember the last playback experience?

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I don’t think so.

Users want a consistent playback experience across all apps in the same platform.

At least I do. I have 3 ATVs, the only platform I use. I really don’t care about how Plex looks and works on another streaming device.

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I only have one question, approximately when can I expect an updated ATV app that will play videos without stuttering? That is all I want. I don’t think that is a huge ask. The Plex Apple TV app has been broken for over two years. I don’t care about Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos or an updated UI. The current UI is very good which is why I would like to go back to using Plex instead of Infuse. I do appreciate all of the work everyone has done but I don’t think I’m in an island by myself when I express frustration about video playback on the Apple TV being unwatchable. I don’t understand why fixing the video playback isn’t the #1 priority. If someone can explain that I would appreciate it.

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Don’t hold your breath…they might fix the stuttering issues with the new “Plex Experience” app, but the UI will be way way worse as it stands right now.

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The Plex Preview Experience does just that. Playback is greatly improved. I don’t see any stuttering or lip sync issues with it. The UI on the other hand, I think you’re going to be disappointed in the direction of travel.

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How can anyone think the new player is better?, for example to fast forward you have to click twice, and to rewind same thing, also fast forward is 30 seconds and rewind is 10 seconds. The info screen screen is no where near as useful and everything takes more clicks to get to.

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If you want more ways to << >> use the timeline. (ATV must have Click and Swipe enabled)

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I’m fine with that, but I think we all need some clarification on what the topic of this thread is supposed to be now?

It was about fixing playback issues via a dev branch that’s no longer being worked, and parts of which have moved into the new “experience” beta – which people are now discussing.

So as long as we know what this thread is for now, and where to properly discuss this new “experience” app…

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Exactly, I have few things to report with no indication presently which Discussion to post :thinking:

@ChuckPa

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Ok, great stuff…

Anyone found a good way to Navigate from Library to Library.
Example: Movies Library, Looking at All Movies say your scrolling/ Browsing through this Library and your at movies starting with X. How do you navigate to another library without scrolling to the top again. Yes Backresults in Highlighting Libraries but Favourites will not appear unless at the top.

Double Back returns to Home, if you return to Movies same problem.

Another, how can you make a Library default to Browse

:grimacing:

@Craig_Holliday

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I’d imagine the proper place would be over in the Plex Experience Preview section of the forum. This post that people started replying to is really related to a beta update of the ATV player (that is no longer in progress).

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No one’s trying to gaslight anyone. We’re trying to be more transparent about what we’re doing, sharing what we can, but if that’s not appreciated we can definitely stop. :slight_smile:

So with that in mind, let’s talk about AVPlayerViewController a little bit.

That class has evolved a lot over the years and thankfully Apple has finally started adding some customization capabilities in their latest UI iterations, allowing custom metadata and controls. That’s all awesome, but it isn’t really a viable option for Plex because it continues to be a class that’s been designed specifically to work with AVPlayer, and nothing else.

We had to abandon AVPlayerViewController a long time ago when we first implemented MPV support, which is why the UI you see in the current public app is entirely custom. We also took that opportunity to refactor our playback stack to support seamlessly changing between different underlying players, which is why we could easily introduce the new experimental player for early testing.

Alongside these technical limitations, as mentioned in the other thread, we have a desire to offer users a consistent player UI across the entire Plex ecosystem. So, when work started on the new experience preview the decision to continue having a shared player UI that switched between different underlying player stacks was obvious, particularly since this app was built from the ground up to work cross-platform.

Now, I invite you to consider that what you’re seeing today is the first version of a work-in-progress player UI, that’s going through iterations and will continue to do so long after we release it publicly.

Will we change it to mimic Apple’s UI? Very unlikely. But, will we keep improving it so it’s intuitive to use and gradually feels more at home on an Apple TV device? Of course! A lot of us use Apple TV as their main Plex player (myself included), why would we not want our app to feel at home there?

And that’s why we’re taking the time to go through these threads, to gather feedback and understand how we can keep improving over time. We’ve talked with all sorts of users, some who love the new experience preview, some who simply don’t care about it as long as it works and others who really dislike it.

I’m not joking at all when I say that personally I much prefer the feedback I see here, even when we don’t agree on the direction. People who are already happy with a work-in-progress approach validate some of the decisions we’ve made, but rarely help us figure out the edge cases we might’ve missed.

I hope this helps clarify some of our decisions, alongside our commitment to continue improving as we iterate.

Thank you all, once again, for the feedback we’ve been receiving. Apple TV is one of the smallest platform user bases, but hell if it’s not the one where we see the most love for what we’re trying to do! :heart:

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Phenomenal message, thank you.

I get it. Just, please, really consider that you guys are standing next to Plex Trees, but most people are out in the Apple or Roku or Android Forests.

I can’t think of a single example, ever, of -

  • app rewrite
  • new codebase
  • unified UI across platforms

Where it was an immediate improvement and where it didn’t take years for the end-user experience to return to how it had been.

Even the biggest and best-funded guys get it wrong. The Facebook rewrite almost 15 years ago, the Twitter rewrite 10 years ago, the Snapchat rewrite in like 2017 was so bad, Skype (RIP). Vine might not be the best example because there was more going on. Sonos has obviously been mentioned. EverNote a couple years ago, LastPass too.

They all eventually publish “Hey our hubris got in front of us, and we didn’t understand how important the small features were to our users.” retrospectives.

Second-system syndrome has taken so many things from us!

I’m probably being grating, because I do hate change. Consider that I also really like Plex. And I’m sure Apple users are the most demanding (and entitled) about UI consistency.

My sincere sympathies.

I know you’re stuck between these incompatible things:

why can’t it Direct Play/Stream absolutely everything? I have all of these trash files that work (elsewhere)

while also hearing;

why doesn’t it work with all of these standard Apple features?

My complaint is at an even lower level.

In Apple TV (and Infuse, YouTube, Netflix, Prime, Paramount, and Discovery) when you tap/click, it brings up the OSD. When you swipe/scroll it scrubs. When you press menu/back it drops the OSD but keeps playing.

In the Plex Preview, when you tap/click it brings up the OSD … but you have to go UP to get to the scrubber. And when you tap menu/back it doesn’t drop the OSD, it stops playback entirely and returns to the browser.

These inconsistencies make me feel like a clumsy idiot.

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Thank you for that thoughtful reply :heart:

The back button stopping playback is particularly annoying to me. :laughing: :people_hugging:

I can confirm that improving the first item focused when bringing up the OSD and fixing the back button behaviour are items tracked internally and expected to get addressed.

I’ll have to confirm about improvements around scrubbing but I do know we have some improvements already planned around it.

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Thanks for the detail @hsousa, it is helpful to know some of the reasoning behind the changes.

I think we’re all kind stuck between a rock and a hard place here. For many the new Preview app has fixed a lot of the video playback issues, but it still feels very much in its infancy as far as UI and playback control.

With the announcement that the playback fixes won’t be back ported to the current UI, I’m worried that the Preview app will be rushed to release as soon as possible, and I’d highly recommend holding off until it is more mature before publishing it, or at least doing a playback control development focus test to get the new interface into a good place.

Just trying to close the controller overlay with the back button actually exists playback right now :slight_smile:

Thanks
D

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Completely agree. The current player mostly works. If that means the preview needs a while longer to get right… well, it needs a while longer to get right.

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I would argue the Apple TV user base is so small because majority of the ATV users are using Infuse when we need to use the ATV for Plex.

And also the user base is so small because the main Plex app has been horrendous for 5+ years regarding playback, stuttering etc that people like myself again will use Infuse, or seek an alternative.

So to be fair if the Plex user base is small on ATV, it’s because the app just hasn’t worked right for many, many many years and people moved on. NOT because the Apple TV doesn’t have a lot of Plex users!

You can’t retain a user base with a broken app :two_hearts:

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I’ll probably write a better reply later but you know what, I may still disagree on some points but it does sound like you care here. That goes a long way.

Thanks!

Speaking of the player - PS, pulling up a sidebar to change anything is always bad. It feels like Roku. If you can change subtitles without doing that, you should be able to change audio without that.

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This right here!!

I think you’re 100% right.

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This is a real positive for me IMHO, the ATV Preview has a simple exit from ATV app/back and return to addNew Additions to Libraries / just addedto be scanned and ready to watch. Yes this action was available via the Top Left Ellipsis in a Library previously but I must say the Preview method is far more intuitive. That`s a Positive :grin:

@BigWheel