So now with the release of the Preview for the Roku app alongside the android mobile app there is going to be a problem with how background images will be handled. If you choose a 16:9 ratio image the android app will crop and look incorrect while the roku will look great.
The server will have another option to use/upload square backgrounds that are used on phones. I don’t have an ETA when that will be available. Being able to upload logos will likely happen about the same time.
What a terrible idea. So we’re going to have to find (good luck with that!), or create, even more assets, now with an unconventional aspect ratio (which isn’t supported on any major database), only for Plex because they decided to reinvent the wheel alone on their own for absolutely no good reason, whether practical, ergonomic or aesthetic. All this so that on mobile the content is pushed way too low and makes us scroll unnecessarily, again. Wondering how they could complicate things even more unnecessarily. Everything they shouldn’t do, they do. I give up. I’m fed up trying to remind these people of good practices and instil an ounce of common sense in them. Everything I wrote since the PEP release last year, every mock-up I made, it was all for nothing. They have no clue and don’t know what they’re doing anymore. They totally lost it.
I’ve been rethinking this and @nolankotulan is right. 100%.
My reply was rushed in the heat of the moment.
I have 1200+ movies and 180+ TV shows where I have carefully edited the posters and the backgrounds. For the backgrounds, sometimes flipping the canvas horizontally so the motif is right-aligned, sometimes cropping to the right and extending the canvas to the left for the same reason. All with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
This works great in the Apple TV app, where the focus is on the right of the background and gradually fades to the left.
I don’t know what is used to style the backgrounds in the mobile apps but if it is CSS, a simple value of cover orcontain (depending) on the background-size would probably do the trick.
I simply can not go on the hunt again for all my backgrounds and I don’t think Plex would automatically find suitable backgrounds in a square (or almost square) format.
I don’t remember how backgrounds were handled in the now legacy apps. Probably in a more elegant way as I can’t recall me having any issues with it.
@nolankotulan, I have seen your posts with the mock-ups which were really pedagogical and I hope they don’t fall on deaf ears.
I’ve written something myself a couple of times regarding this issue
I may be wrong but I see this adjustment as a minor assignment for a developer.
@BigWheel, any chance Plex can reconsider this decision? For Plex provided content I don’t think it will be that easy to find square-ish backgrounds
Honestly, when I seen the comment on square background a few days ago I could not believe what I was reading. Its like, we are giving you the option to have square background on mobile because our app is so bad it won’t render the traditional background correctly in the first place!
Just bonkers but will wait to see when its officially announced …
One could argue that some other platforms / apps also use (almost) square backgrounds on mobile. That indeed does exist. The mobile Apple TV app for example even uses vertical ones for most of its hosted content.
But there are some huge differences here:
The mobile Apple TV app, in fact, does NOT require the use of those almost square / vertical backgrounds. It’s just that it is the preferred and most used aspect ratio for the mobile app but it is absolutely NOT mandatory. When no suitable content exists or has been provided, it falls back to the good old common 16:9 aspect ratio that remains CONTAINED / NOT CROPPED! Their UI is, in fact, pretty well thought and flexible!
Apple TV (the app, not the device) is a VOD and streaming service and its content is provided as is only for you to watch it. It is NOT a user hosted content oriented platform like Plex is (was?) supposed to be. It is NOT a library for your own content and you don’t have to deal with any data or asset management, in any form, so there is no hassle, they can do whatever they want. You, as a user, only use it to click, play and enjoy (or not, because), period.
So the assets on Apple TV, just like on any other streaming platform, are either managed by the platform staff or by the content providers themselves. And these people have access to official, native, layered material. Or press kits. We don’t. Rarely. Same goes for the logos by the way.
Apple’s UI/UX designers are better than those from Plex. Even though their content is also pushed low on the screen, they do it in a way better, denser, cleaner and structured way. It just works.
As another example, Infuse also does use square backgrounds. I mean by that that they also do crop the 16:9 aspect ratio content to display it in a square (sigh)…
But Infuse UI/UX is precisely NOT an example to follow and never has been. While it looks simple, clean and slick at the first sight, it is in fact an inconsistent unergonomic mess that even manages to become more so as the so called major updates come out, offering now totally different layout (non-)options depending of the device (without even considering the phones here) for no reason.
The only Infuse screen that does really look great (in my not so humble opinion anymore) is the good old Details View in the Modern style option on the Apple TV (yep, that precise one that is still the default non-option on macOS but that isn’t available on the iPad version anymore, because reasons, because they decided to replace it by the New style non-option that displays the details over the left side of the background in a totally unstructured, almost random manner). And do you know why it does look good? Because for this screen precisely, and as many other ATV apps do, they followed very closely the Apple guidelines and that renders it almost native, which is great because you know what?
It just works.
Anyway, if anything, it’s for me now hard to not see all this as just another symptom of Plex losing sight of its original purpose and what built its user base and community.
It would make more sense to just use a normal 16:9 background and put the clear logo over that, maybe offset so it’s only partially overlapping on the bottom. Really the amount of used screen space just for the header on mobile due to the square background seems excessive to begin with.
I rarely use the mobile app for video so I don’t see myself caring much. I’m happy with the mobile background being separate primarily so I don’t have auto-picked backgrounds I see on the TV apps being the square format compositions.
I do agree with the others in this thread, that it is unfortunate that with the new redesign on the mobile app that if users have picked their posters/background to match. They will need to either ignore the fact that 16/9 ratio images don’t look right in the mobile apps or spend more countless hours trying to find/acquire 1/1 ratio images (which are not common) to add to their movie options to keep the theme/design they are wanting to go with.
I am not sure where these 1/1 images that are showing up in plex are generated from and whether plex is just creating these from the selected background that you have already chosen. Would be nice to know how these are being created.
It is terrifying (yet not surprising) that anyone internally would think this is the solution to an issue you’ve created with awful new app. 16:9 images are standard and the solution is to adjust the UI in the mobile app to accommodate that instead of terrible cropping of carefully curated 16:9 background images. It is so patently obvious and common sense that it beggars belief that the Plex team is incapable of seeing this.
@DaveBinM Possibly. I had not personally heard of that request before but I’ll bring it up.
As far as square backgrounds if is possible we may do something like the profile images where you can have a 16:9 image but move it around to get the best part of it or use the top/bottom part of a poster. I’m told this can be done with detection to pick the best art but I don’t know what end solution would be. We get them from Gracenote currently for our streaming stuff but PMS does not itself have the ability to ingest them
Thanks @tom80H I had heard of theme music for collection before. My brain was on backgrounds and I thought they meant more visual change possibilities.
I’ve been manually uploading themes for collections via the API for a long time now, but there had been talk of being able to do it via the UI on Plex web, so I was hoping that change could happen alongside these changes.
