Mmm… that sounds like an assumption;-)
Much like the free market doesn’t create equity or sustainability,
user forums don’t guarantee good product decisions.
This is about time and effort.
When I first discovered Plex a squillion years ago it was just so amazing:-)
I invested a lot of time and effort in getting video and music files named correctly and organised in the right folders etc. and this effort was repaid tenfold. Not only that, but the product was free!
When the opportunity of a lifetime Plexpass came around it was a total no-brainer, I jumped on it.
At first I was happy reading forums and tweaking my server and client configs, rolling back when the odd duff release happened, because Plex was a fantastic experience and provided incredible value.
I know it’s just opensource encoding libraries like ffmpeg etc. but I still think its magic that I could play Rocky Horror Picture Show on the large screen smart tv in the office Halloween party 500 miles away from my home without a hiccup. I imagine the little Mac Mini waking up, the clunky 12T drive spinning up, and the server spitting out exactly the right data so that the receiving TV could create a very convincing illusion of a high-resolution output.
Then, at some point, reading the forum and tweaking settings stopped working on my Apple TV. This must have been three or four years ago now, but since then I tried everything to the point where it no longer made sense for me to invest the time in the forums.
During the same time period, Plex leadership decided that they had to monetise, not least if they were commited to maintaining a million clients to the same high level of quality. Engineering costs money and “one guy and his dog” doesn’t scale.
So more and more ads crept into the experience, things got progressively slower, and the experience became more complex.
Eventually, I gave up watching Plex on my AppleTV. I use Plex everyday to power Plexamp on my Android phone and clients run hapily on all sort of machines I use.
I installed Emby on the same Apple TV and straight out of the box everything worked fine.
All the same hardware, the same network, the same movies, the same hard drive, the same everything. Emby app and Plex app side by side on the same AppleTV. On my phone, my macbook and the iMac I watch on Plex, on the AppleTV I use Emby. It’s a pain in the ass and Emby doesn’t look as nice as Plex but it works, and Plex does not.
I agree it’s theorically possible that there may be some hidden config lurking somewhere in PMS or Plex AppleTV client that would fix this, but I’ve run out of time. I simply can’t afford to invest the time and energy to fix it.
I would happily pay market rate for someone to fix this, but in our hybrid open-source/surveillance capitalism world their simply isn’t anybody you can call. “Post a bug report to the forum” just isn’t helpful anymore.
