can we fork out the ‘this-should-be-done-already’ stuff from this thread? It’s been a super high signal-to-noise ratio thread about player issues. We’re at significant risk of losing that.
What defrag steps are you referring to?
Would you like to take your last two posts, plus this post, to a new thread where I will explain and show about the DB optimation you can do ?
Regarding the ‘noise’ in this thread, Yes it should be cleaned but I’m not on the player development team.
I will get one of them to come in and guide / tell me what to do if that’s what you mean
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Certainly can, on the db opts.
And yeah, the goal here was to debug/test out various configurations for the player. getting into the conversation of “why isn’t it done yet” is, while legitimate, distracting to the overall original goal.
I’d like to see y’all host a proper fireside q&a on it, frankly – lets get to an understanding – but in the mean time, lets keep this focused on how we can help testing/validation.
as a sidenote, however:
I did want to check back in to verify if this new player we’ve been testing has any particular bearing on the new ui? Because if not, i’m concerned it’s not super valuable overall?
Hey y’all,
First, of course, I’m sorry for my lack of communication. I appreciate everyone’s discussion and resolution of issues, especially Chuck, for hopping in.
As many of you have speculated, just about every team member at Plex and I have been focusing on the new update. That doesn’t mean any of the issues in this thread have been forgotten. The new update has many performance improvements, specifically for playback, that we could not do in the current app. We’re also benefiting from the amount of work all teams are contributing.
That said, we cannot publish more updates like I have done. These updates have been outside the regular beta track, and now I cannot deploy changes quickly without affecting other team members’ work.
The solution to this issue is to bring as many of you as I can to the preview beta so you can test our more frequent builds until we start the beta on the regular track again.
There are limited spots, so I have reached out to some of you specifically. If I have not reached out to you and you want to be added to the preview, DM me so I can fit you in.
Everyone will still be in the betas in the future, but it is not my place to share any timelines. So, we can use the preview beta in the meantime.
We’re not closing this thread as it is still valuable, and I am still tracking some bugs. To manage responses more efficiently, I may reach out to some of you through DMs for specific issues.
Also, dklein has put together this helpful post that tracks some of the issues and features we have already discussed here.
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Thanks Craig,
To confirm, does this mean that there will not be any player fixes ported to the current UI version of the app? Only the new “Preview” version with the new UI will have any playback improvements moving forward?
Does that also mean that Apple TV HD devices will officially have supported dropped as the new Preview version is not currently usable on those devices?
Thanks
D
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Please.
It’s faster, actually is dismissible, fits in with the OS, is less cluttered. There’s no ‘ah but you wouldn’t get this feature’ factor here. From the user perspective that tradeoff is worth it, surely.
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Hi Craig, thanks for the update on the situation.
I can only imagine the developmental headache that is having three Beta tracks
(Plex Beta, Plex Experimental Player Beta, and Plex Experience Preview) all at once!
Thus, I’m not surprised that your efforts going forward are focused on Plex Experience Preview.
Like others in here, and as @Matthew_Rumley notes in this thread, and in the megathread of Experience issues, though - we all really, truly would like to see Plex Experience use the Apple-native AVPlayerViewController UI (linked against the tvOS 15+ SDK to take advantage of the numerous improvements made since tvOS 15), in preference to the custom UI as seen in the 5 builds of Plex Experience Preview for tvOS thus far.
Whilst the existing MPVKit + older AVPlayerViewController UI (linked against the tvOS 14 SDK) which Plex/Plex Beta/Plex Experimental Player Beta currently use and which suffers from stuttering/dropped frames/audio synchronisation issues/etc. still provides a better user experience in a better user interface, than what Experience Preview provides.
Craig, I (we?) hope that you can influence the direction the team take - and use this influence to push for a better overall UX!
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Called it.
Would just like to chuck in a quick shout out to @Craig_Holliday here. You and this thread have been handling this issue extremely well and have been as communicative as I’m sure you can be. We appreciate you sharing with us as much as you can and taking the time to try and fix this issue while juggling expectations internally and from the forum community.
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I highly doubt the player UI is a decision to do with Craig.
From some of the wording of this preview it seems as though the end goal is that all apps are the same.
I would say this is for making life easier for the developers but also I’d say they want to have people be able to switch between different Opetering Systems and not notice any difference.
I do like the both the new and old Apple UI, probably more than new player UI (which I also do like btw). But I just can’t see plex going down the route of changing it away from their custom UI now.
Posted this in the plex experience beta thread but thought would also update here (note that this is in the latest new app not the beta using the current app):
i think that my lip sync issue has finally been mostly fixed in this latest update (tried a couple of items and it mostly seems fine i think). Anyone else having issues of HDR looking overly bright / washed out when compared to infuse?
Hi folks!
I wanted to clarify a few things related to the experimental player that will hopefully help keep the conversation here on the right path.
Playback Stack
The new Experience Preview app only includes the experimental player (and AVPlayer for certain fallback scenarios). It does not include MPV, and there are no plans to do so. This player stack is the future of Plex playback on Apple platforms.
While we managed to include the experimental player in the current app, it was retrofitted into a old and bloated playback stack that’s been there since 2014 and has gone through many iterations. This is the reason why, for example, there’s stuttering in the current app that we can’t reproduce on the Experience Preview app. The only reason why we did this was because we wanted to have a build available for you as early as possible, much earlier than we could have any of the new experience ones available. Your testing and feedback is invaluable.
So, let me be clear in saying this: the current Apple TV app will not be getting the experimental player in any public release.
Player UI
The player UI in the Experience Preview app is different than what we had before on the tvOS app, yes. But it’s much closer to what we’ve been doing in all our other TV apps over the years, and 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. But the new UI is also not finished and final yet, and as we continue to build out the new experience we are iterating over the design and improving things, we know it’s not perfect yet, so keep you’re eyes out for more improvements.
We also understand there are some core Personal Media features missing from the Experience Preview app and playback experience that haven’t been added yet. For the vast majority, these are on our roadmap and will make their way back there soon. For example, we’re actively working on implementing file info/details, multiple version support and playback settings from the details screen.
Our Vision
We believe both the new experimental player stack and the player UI to be the best possible playback experience for our core users (which includes us!), but also understand that it can be sometimes frustrating to deal with big changes like these that you have little control over.
We’ve been working on being more transparent, and plan on continuing that effort. We want to share more of our roadmap over time, be involved with the community and yes, definitely expect more fireside chats as the ones we’ve done before.
Finally, I want to show my deep appreciation for all the hard work folks have been putting into testing edge cases and constantly provide great feedback. We couldn’t have gotten where we are without you, and while there’s still a lot of work ahead of us, we sincerely hope you’ll come to love the new UI as we iterate and improve things.
Next Steps
So, where does this leave this tread? Personally, I’d like to keep it open so we can continue gathering feedback and fix issues in the new player.
If you have feedback about the Experience Preview app please post it in that thread, and if you have thoughts you want to share about Plex’s direction feel free to open a new thread in our forums for discussion.
If you have any other thoughts about anything I just wrote, shoot me a DM.
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Thanks for the update. Out of all that, the “working on being more transparent” is probably the most welcome. Plex for too long thought it was great with the mantra that “we don’t discuss planned features or roadmap”, but it wasn’t really clever, just frustrating!
Cheers!
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Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Like I said, we value this kind of constructive feedback, even if/when we don’t align on the outcome. 
I’m sorry you don’t like the new player UI, but to be clear we have nothing against 3rd party player apps like Infuse so if you prefer their experience on the Apple TV, go for it!
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Thank you for a detail update, this was my understanding from snip bits I had read from the Experimental Beta Player discussion. To me it makes sense and do understand the situation, this is NOTchange for the sake of Change. I believe over next few months, most will see the fruits for this challenging exercise.
So for me full steam ahead and looking forward to a new killer app to entertain my Family and Friends
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Thanks @hsousa for the update.
I appreciate the dev team being more communicative and open with the testing group and the public as a whole. I really do.
I’ve been a daily Plex user since the OSXBMC days and a Plex Pass user since 2011. I have been through numerous redesigns and changes over the years across pretty much all the client major client types (Android, Amazon, Roku, Smart TV, and AppleTV/iOS). I was even programing various DLNA profiles for devices back in the day.
I have also consistently supported and defended the Dev team here in this specific forum, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, I have to agree with @Shaun_R.
Since the public Preview release of the app there has been near universal feedback from the user community here in Plex’s forums, Reddit, and blogs asking Plex to reconsider the new playback UI in favor of the native AVPlayerViewController UI.
I understand the desire to make a uniform player UI across all your platforms, but that also means you are limiting yourself to the “lowest common denominator”. Apple devices are “premium” devices. They are not $30 Amazon Fire Sticks. They typically cost 2-3x that of other clients and users expect a consist experience between their apps. As Shaun noted, a majority of apps on the platform use the AVPlayerViewController and Apple users understand how it works. People specifically purchase Apple devices to take advantage of their UI and the “premium experience”.
Is there a technical limitation for why the AVPlayerViewController UI isn’t being considered? ie Is there a codec support limitation caused by the playback controller? If there was, maybe users would be more understanding.
A lot of the changes in the Preview app are a positive (nice to see support for all types of Local TV Extras!) and a lot of the changes will take time for users to learn and adapt to (verticle/horizontal navigation). But please, please, please take to heart the feedback from the community on the actual player interface.
Please don’t go the way of Sonos and damage the app experience just to implement change for change’s sake. It’s been almost a year since their management team decided to push out their re-design, breaking a majority of functionality, and they still have not recovered both in a technical capacity or in their reputation.
Thank you,
D
EDIT: Corrected Spotify to Sonos 
Long day folks.
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Would it be possible to port over the HEVC transcode logic for Apple TV HD devices from the Current UI to the Preview AI app that forces H264 transcodes for those older devices and to force the usage of the AVPlayer on those devices? With the recent Preview App optimizations, menus and navigations now work on those devices, but playback does not as those older units require the “Old Player”/AVPlayer.
Thanks
D
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That is correct as Hugo mentioned after you asked this.
Apple TV HD will not have support dropped. I’m trying to get the new player to work more reliably but per your suggestions we may fallback to AVPlayer since that is working better with this device.
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Thanks for confirming Craig!
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