Updated info can be found in a new announcement here Update on the new Roku App
Plex Community,
We recently released a new version of our Plex channel for Roku, which has brought that platform’s user interface into alignment with other existing platforms, such as Plex Media Player, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and several smart TVs. This interface design is one that we’ve been working and iterating on since the preview version of the current Plex Media Player app was released to users. As with any big change in the interface and navigation experience in an app, a natural period of adjustment is expected, as users learn how the changes work and, in the case of this release, begin to familiarize themselves with all the customization features we’ve added.
However, it’s clear from the feedback left by our community that many users have struggled with the updated channel beyond a regular adjustment period. This was compounded by the fact that many users on old, low-memory Roku models (such as the Roku 2 XS, among others) experienced significant performance issues, as well as cases where the Roku itself could reboot when attempting playback.
We want everyone in our community to know we’ve actively been reviewing all the feedback you’ve shared and that we’re absolutely not ignoring it. We’ve always valued feedback from our community, and though it’s difficult to hear that users have struggled with a new update, the feedback is valuable and we take it to heart.
The majority of feedback about the Roku channel release has fallen into three main areas (of course, we’re also internally tracking a full list of reported issues and feedback):
Navigation: For some users, the new navigation is frustrating and complicated, particularly when when switching between multiple libraries of the same media type on a single server. Others lament navigation choices such as filters or sorting not being maintained when returning to browse a library.
Our support, design, and engineering teams are actively collecting information (and will continue to do so) and evaluating the feedback and we will follow up as soon as we can. Addressing user interface and experience concerns can take time, since a change for one person’s benefit can cause strife for someone else. We do hear the concerns here, though.
Readability and accessibility: The new, lighter visual style is harder to read for some users. Contrast sometimes isn’t high enough for users with certain visual impairments.
We agree that there are definite improvements we can make in this area to improve the accessibility for users. We’re looking at both short- and long-term options.
Performance and stability: Roku is transitioning the core framework used to build channels to a new API (and the old one will soon be deprecated). Transitions like this are intensive and very time-consuming, requiring the channel to be re-written almost entirely in many cases. The primary reason you haven’t seen substantial updates to our Roku channel lately is that we’ve been focused on creating a new channel, using the new Roku framework. In the future, all Roku channel updates will have to use this framework and there will inevitably be bumps along the way. Both Plex and Roku are tuning performance, and it’s expected to only get better from here.
For users on underpowered Roku devices, the new channel can feel slower and less responsive. This is particularly true for those running on old models (many of which were released as far back as 2011) such as Roku 2 XS. Many of those same users on old Roku models are also experiencing device reboots in many cases, making it difficult or effectively impossible to use the new channel to watch media.
On several of these old, low-memory models, Roku has temporarily reverted them from using the new channel. We’re continuing to work with Roku to determine the most appropriate path forward for those models. (The specific models [and numbers] affected are: Roku LT [2400, 2450], Roku HD [2500], Roku 2 HD [3000], Roku 2 XD [3050], Roku 2 XS [3100], Roku Streaming Stick [3400, 3420])
Roku is also currently rolling out a new firmware update (version 9.0) for the majority of their devices. By the time you read this, your device has likely either already updated to the new firmware or it’s available for you if you check for system updates. This new firmware addresses many of the performance issues around startup for older devices using the new API, and improves the startup speed and performance on newer devices. We’ll also continue identifying areas in our own channel where we can improve performance overall.
While the recent feedback has been about the updated Roku channel, much of it is also applicable to our other apps that share the same navigation and interface approach. We do hear you and are constantly working to improve our applications based on constructive feedback from our community.
We also want to address the other elephant in the room: “plugins”. While we previously communicated in our blog and in our forums that we’ll be slowly phasing out our general support for plugins, we obviously didn’t communicate that as clearly as we hoped. Support for plugins was never intended to be included in our updated Roku channel, and we want to clearly state so that there’s no misunderstanding that we will not be adding plugin support back to the Roku channel. We will continue to phase out plugins in Plex as we move forward, which will include other Plex apps in the future, as they receive updates. As also mentioned in other communications, we continue to explore ways for users to extend Plex, but we don’t have any more information to share in this area currently.
Once again, we want to reiterate that we do truly value feedback from our community and we’ll be working to address many of the issues that users have brought forward.
Thanks so much for using Plex!
