Server Version#:
Player Version#:
The sidebar recently vanished on my in-laws TV, replaced by a slow and laggy top menu that’s not nearly as usable. It also crashed three times today. I am going to get endless requests to fix this and make it like it was, but I can’t find any options to revert. Help!
The subtitles also aren’t playing automatically, even though it’s set to always. They are seniors and they don’t watch anything without subtitles.
I feel for you. Lots of us do. Unfortunately for so many of us in this exact situation, it’s a feature and not a bug (the new ui). Plex rolled out the trash “new experience” last year that focuses almost entirely on their VOD offerings. They are also attempting the impossible task of unifying their code base across all devices, this means they have built their own player and no longer use native device players.
All we can do is complain and sideload the old apps. You can find the old apk out there and side load it. I have some Apple TVs and disabled app updates to keep the old version, also froze my server to keep it from getting ruined.
Sadly this is the a feature, not a bug. This is what they’ve forced on all of us, plenty of people have been complaining about it on Roku for months but are being totally ignored.
Those who got to beta test it gave bad feedback and informed them it was rubbish but were also ignored.
I saw yesterday that Plex confirmed it could take 4-6 weeks for the new experience to roll out to all of the fire TVs. I cannot help but wonder if that is intentional in order to slow down the wave of angry complaints that they know they are going to get. And yes, for anyone who’s going to call me out, that is a “conspiracy theory” 
It got rolled out to their TV a couple days ago, so it’s new. I tried it for 2 days while they are on vacation and it’s pretty horrible. I know they are going to struggle with it.
There was massive backlash when it released on Roku and Plex decided the correct course of action was to ignore negative feedback and double down on their horrible decisions (sunk cost fallacy). Today they hardly respond to anything about the new experience unless it’s an actual “bug” to them. Slow UI? Ignore. Harder to use for anyone? Ignore. I’m just waiting for a competitor to mature a bit more and then I’ll jump ship. It’s a shame though, been on Plex since the beginning, somewhere around 2010.
I got it today. It is simply 10 steps backwards in navigation.
The UI was what brought a lot of people to their app, so it’s really weird to take all the things that were great and just scrap them.
They have said that their “younger” users now prefer on demand streaming and no longer want to run self hosted servers so they are favoring their vod offerings. So, from what we can tell they are building the app and interface to mimic big players like Netflix. Which is hilarious considering how long this is taking and Netflix just redesigned their app again 
That doesn’t make sense. If people prefer netflix, they will go to netflix, if people prefer plex… let’s make it look like netflix!
Why not just let people make custom skins, then if people want plex to look like netflix they can choose that, but the rest of us who want plex to look like plex will stay too.
Interesting, I keep seeing all these trending YouTube videos by tech bloggers about how they replaced their streaming services with a self-hosted media server 
Yeah I’m not sure where they are getting this data from but I call BS. I still say this whole mess is due to some investors.
