I tend to agree with this. I am no fanboy… I’ve had none stop issues with liveTV and ended switch to emby just to sort that. Outside of weird occasional bugs, plex as a media player has been rock solid for me.
I do think better QA is needed as most problems I’ve had with the client or server lately outside of LiveTV seem like little things proper QA testing should pick up.
In saying that, I do lurk the forums abit and agree fixing existing issues should take precedence over “new features” unless said improvements resolves other issues.
But people tend to forget that plex covers a very large ecosystem now and fixing one mans problem, can possibly cause another grief. Hardware transcoding is a good example of this.
I do wish plex was more transparent though, I does seem more like a fund raising exercise lately to try and push many features ASAP to raise capital without fixing some long time issues.
Plex needs to respect that the paying customer purchases there product expecting it to work as advertised, however; people also need to respect that this is a business and attract more plex pass purchases is a major business choice decision, which likely drives the most of there dev-time.
I just hoped support/bug fixing would have a bigger slice of the pie in the future.
Blockquote I do think better QA is needed as most problems I’ve had with the client or server lately outside of LiveTV seem like little things proper QA testing should pick up.
This, this, this, a million times over.
Just look at all the bugs introduced to the firestick platform, over, and over and over again. 4K video was broken, audio sync was broken, hardware transcoding is STILL broken, live video is a mess, AAC HE was broken for about 18 months before it was fixed.
I am not expecting them to do deep testing on every single variant of hardware out there, but time and time again new, show stopping bugs pop up on one of the most popular streaming devices out there tells us they clearly don’t test things well enough.
^^^ this is the only feature that I bought plex for, along with its FreeNAS/FreeBSD support, to scoop photos automatically off our family devices and keep them safe.
It’s been broken since ~ june 2020 but used to work flawlessly. I’ll even offer pcap traces to a plex dev if they can’t replicate it locally.
The other feature I’d like to see is an honest public bug tracker. Its’ standard in free open source projects these days, and here we are with a paid product and the only place we can log issues is to bleat and whine on a public forum?
As I’ve said elsewhere, this is costing Plex trust with existing users, reputation and actual referrals for new users.
I wish they would do a Long-term support (LTS) stable release. I would happily have no new features for the next few years; just critical bug fixes. Would even be open to paying for a second Plex pass to get it.
Exactly, think of all the development time gone into building gaming and and providing Plex online content, that could of gone into fixing basic features of the core product that have been broken for months and in some cases years.
Audio is broken on Plex TV so i am playing audio from my phone while watching the video on my TV on mute. Sometimes the subtitle breaks so i just print out the subtitles in PDF format and read it while watching the TV. Most of the time, the next episode on TV shows wouldn’t start automatically so i usually solve the issue by fiddling with the TV remote and replace with new batteries (costs only $120 per month to buy new batteries everyday - what a bargain!). Good times.
I’m in substantial agreement with the OP and many of the posts in this thread. If Plex’s continued indifference to fixing well-documented bugs becomes unacceptable to you then by all means cancel your Plex Pass and go use something else that works better.
But just like that Ex who can’t seem to stop visiting your Facebook page month after month only to mention how they’ve moved on…
If a Plex player was broadly “unusable” I’d think that would be apparent on the forums. Perhaps if you posted something specific in Streaming Devices tagged with “Apple-TV”?
I don’t use Apple TV players myself (and mute that tag in the forum accordingly) so I won’t be any practical value to you on that.
And as someone who owns a Apple TV, Shield, Roku and Smart TV app the ATV (4K) is the only one that has worked completely flawlessly for the last 3 years. It’s that exact reason it became my go to device.
So as mentioned by others just saying it’s unusable is hardly gonna help.
I cannot advise anyone buying the plex pass, its not like you actually get any support or bug fixes.
What you will get are half baked ideas and features that do not last or are so far removed from what Plex is good at to be a curiosity at best. The feature that convinced me to part with cash was the photo upload, that has now been broken for a year, without any feedback from the dev’s showing it is even being looked at. This is fine for open source software as that is the nature of the beast, but we are paying customers who have been ignored for far too long and who receive a level of support that is non-existent.
When a ‘premium’ feature is broken for a year, it shows how little care there is for existing customers.
