Server Version#: 1.18.0.1944
Player Version#: current TVOS app as of 26/10/19
I find a terrible GUI problem when trying to use the TV app, but it’s such a biggie, I cannot help but think I must be missing something.
When in LiveTV/DVR and viewing the Guide, typically this might include hundreds of channels and since the HD ones are always way down the list (in UK FreeView anyway) one might have to scroll a long way down to see the channel you require. But then, you want to e.g. check a Scheduled recording which means selecting that tab at the top of the screen. How do you get to those tabs at the top?
As far as I have been able to work out, you have to scroll all the damn way up the Guide to the top as only then can you move the focus to those top tabs and select the one you want. After which you then want to check that same channel again in the Guide and have to scroll all the way down again. This is such a dumb way to force the user to navigate the interface that I must be wrong. Seems to me a press on the Menu button should simply take you to the top, but no, takes you out of the entire section. As I said, utterly dumb
When scrolled down to the bottom of an extremely long list, like the Guide/EPG, how is one then supposed to move the focus to the top tabs?
Similarly related, is once you’ve delved two weeks down into your scheduled recordings you (i) have to not only scroll up to now but also to the top of all previous recordings you’re still being shown. For me it’s three prior days of recordings. All three sections could really use some way to switch between them.
Yes, I had noticed the same basic problem elsewhere. Seems to me that the logical solution would be to use the Menu button. Once in a scrolling list, a single press of the Menu button should simply move the focus out of the list so other controls can be immediately accessed. I’m sure this is what other TV apps do.
Having been in the past a developer of GUI based systems, I know what it’s like to have to deal with these sort of situations, but to simply leave the user with no way out other than having to scroll a possibly HUGE list just to select another control is unacceptable and inexcusable.
It is endemic in modern software that the developers test their new fangly design with just a few items of data loaded and it all seems to work so they declare it finished, send it out into the big wide world and then totally ignore the (justified) complaints of users having to deal with an interface hopelessly inadequate at dealing with real-world quantities of data. Come-on Plex, this is a fundamentally dumb omission and surely would not take much to implement a solution with use of the Menu button.
The Guide also seems annoyingly slow, having to apparently rebuild every time you want to display it. I’ve never used any other EPG interface that isn’t basically instant. Is this a server speed issue? I am planning on replacing my PMS machine with something a lot more capable (i.e. faster) but will this speed up the Guide display.
I am more able to deal with these sort of things, but my other half is giving me a lot of grief over this as she’s used to a TV experience that ‘just works’. Everything always plays perfectly, anything set to record does record and the Guide is fast and accurate. Right now, Plex is NONE of these things and I’m getting it in the neck.
This is a known issue set to be fixed though I have no ETA to share. Similarly for guides with long channel listings.
I believe the fix will be that you use the “back” (menu) button, which will take you to the left nav / Live TV & DVR entry and clicking on that will take you back to the top of the screen.
