Apple Player Update Beta Testing - Archive

[Shaun_R]

Thanks @hsousa for the update.

Unfortunately, it’s clear that Plex is headed in the opposite direction from what its users want and have voiced loud and clear in this and other threads on these forums, over on Reddit, and elsewhere.

This in particular:

@hsousa

much closer to the video player in other modern Apple TV apps as well (moving away from the dated 2017ish design). It’s done both with the goal of having a consistent Plex playback experience across all platforms and also making it easier to access controls that were previously hidden and hard to access (we’re all used to the weird sliding panels in the current player, but for new users these were hard to find and difficult to use!)

The new player UI is here to stay and there are no plans to revert back to the old one.

You’re right, the Plex/Plex Beta/Plex Experimental Player Beta don’t use the newer tvOS 15+ AVPlayerViewController, and hence have a dated 2017-ish design. This isn’t great.

But it’s still better than the Experience Preview.

See, the thing is, the tvOS AVPlayerViewController — that’s the UI that Infuse, Netflix, TV+, and most other tvOS apps use) is the opposite of “hidden and hard to access controls”. It’s been designed by Apple to best utilise the capabilities of the Apple TV and tvOS platform. It supports things like Siri interactions (“turn on subtitles, rewind 10 seconds”, etc.). It supports interactions with the Remote widget/app built-in to iOS. It supports precise, intuitive, reliable scrubbing. It’s properly accessible. These are some of the reasons why people buy an Apple TV over other streaming boxes.

None of these things are true with the Plex Experience Preview on tvOS.

There is a reason why people loathe the YouTube player UI.

It’s because the YouTube app is a glorified webpage shoehorned into the tvOS platform, instead of a SwiftUI native app. It sucks.

You have shoehorned-in what feels like a glorified webpage, with no native OS niceties, in the view to make a UI that’s “consistent” across all platforms — whilst also sucking across all those platforms.

You want a consistent cross-platform experience.

Users want a consistent cross-app experience on their platform of choice.

As long as your direction is mis-aligned to user’s demands, you’ll have pushback.

I’m already using Infuse full-time. The app’s navigation isn’t as nice as the public/beta Plex tvOS apps is - I actually like Plex’s recommendations functionality - but the player actually works. It works reliably, first time, every time. It decodes every video and audio format I throw at it. It supports subtitles perfectly. It maintains perfect audio lip sync. It works nicely with Siri and the Apple TV remote and the iOS remote app. It just works!

That’s all we’re asking you to do. Use the same player that everyone else (except YouTube) uses. “KISS”.

It stuns me that Plex can’t seem to achieve something the much smaller Firecore team have been doing perfectly for years now.

I would be absolutely thrilled to have a Plex app which is the current tvOS navigation UI + the new AVPlayerViewController player UI.

I would be incredibly pleased with the Plex Experience navigation UI (with some improvements, especially around hover focus physics and general performance fixes) + the new AVPlayerViewController UI.

I’d settle for the Plex Experience navigation UI + the existing Experimental Player beta player UI.

But the Experience Preview player just ain’t it.

When Experience goes public, I’ll be moving my partner, parents, and grandparents over to Infuse and teaching them how to use that. At least they’re already familiar with the player UI - so it’ll just be the navigation to re-teach them.

I doubt I’ll be the only one doing this.