Last night I tried the new version, and went in with an open mind after the long break between updates and seeing all of the fixes listed in the changelog.
- home page navigation seems a little faster (still nowhere near as fast as the current app) but mainly while moving horizontally in the same row. Switching “down” to another row presents a visible delay.
- the popover Library menu is an improvement in usability, but I still don’t like the placement and the removal of the sidebar.
These are the only positive thing I can say at the moment, because I then immediately went to try the player, the only REAL thing that affects our viewing experience. I didn’t last long.
THE PLAYER IS ABYSMAL, and you’re going to kill your userbase with this
- seek previews are still absent
- seeking instantly jumps the playback without waiting for user confirmation
- moving the cursor between UI buttons is unintuitive and inconsistent. Sometimes you press pause (or the touchpad button) and the focus is on the seek bar, sometimes on the play/pause element, one time it was on the subtitles button. I’ll tell you right now, it should always be on the seek bar
- while seeking, if you are near an INTRO and move over a “skip intro” section, the cursor gets automatically moved to the SKIP button, rendering the seeking operation frustrating
- subtitle styling is still broken, see: Subtitles styling is broken when changing OS subtitles style
- pressing the “back” button while the UI is visible stops playback instead of hiding the UI itself. There is no way to manually hide the UI other than waiting for it to fade away
- “display mode” being hidden under 3 or 4 submenus and 7-10 remote clicks (!!!) is infuriating. With the current app, which uses the native ATV player, you just double tap the touchpad on the remote to switch between “native/letterbox” and “zoom to fill”, fast and seamless
- we no longer have the movie/episode description, audio delay option and more, because the native ATV player was apparently too good for them, and instead of having both a "swipe down” gesture and a “swipe up” or “tap” gesture, we only get this poor excuse of a custom player, seemingly being coded by someone that never used an Apple TV in their life and never tests their own code before shipping a preview version
- I HATE THIS PLAYER WITH THE PASSION OF A THOUSAND SUNS
The app also crashed a couple times while playing a file or moving through the menus. And I didn’t really use it that long. Never happened with previous versions.
I use Plex on my Apple TV every single day and I would throw my remote at the screen if I was forced to use the new app. This player should never see the light of day.
