First, this is NOT a -post. I’m genuinely interested if others share my experience.
Over the past 12 months or so, the Plex experience has gotten worse and worse for me. Is anyone else noticing a deterioration in the quality of the software or is it just me. If so, any ideas as to why? Here are a few of the things that drive me nuts:
My custom media posters continuously get removed.
Playback issues (stops, premature endings, server crashes).
Constant media refreshes. I keep seeing movies and shows that were added years ago show up in the “recently added” content.
LiveTV UI is sluggish and hard to use.
LiveTV recordings are unreliable.
These are a few of the items I’ve noticed…I’m not looking for solutions. Just wondering if others feel that the general quality of the Plex experience is not what it used to be.
I have to agree with @SE56. My Plex experience has been steadily improving over time, including recently. I use live TV pretty extensively and that has definitely improved for me.
I have not had your issues per se but I agree that Plex absolutely has gotten more unstable lately. I have a lot of my own issues that only crept up the last 6 months or so.
They have changed staff a bit lately. That must be it.
Also yes, the live TV experience is abysmal. At least on the Nvidia Shield.
Just out of curiosity, @pshanew where do you watch live TV? Which client?
My primary clients are Apple TV 4K and an Onn Android TV puck. I also use the DVR feature pretty extensively and have found it to be very adequate for my needs. That is, I set it to record series that I’d like to watch, they complete, and I watch them later. I know some folks have had issues with time-shifting (both live TV and live recordings), but that’s not my use case so I can’t weigh in on that.
As a bit of a counterpoint, I am one of those who has had timeshifting issues with various randomness of actions after trying to rewind or fast forward while playing back. I typically see this when watching a program that started recording some time earlier but has not finished. This has caused my to miss significant portions of football games at times. Very frustrating. I’ve not opened a ticket because it is not something that happens enough to really justify a lot of effort yet. I wouldn’t use it at all except my tv provider is not providing CBS, so I have to use Plex or HDHomeRun app to watch games only on CBS.
I think Plex has been going down for years already, lots of key functionality has either does not work properly, or does not work at all, or has been completely removed. Things like Downloads are a hit or miss, Camera Upload was removed, it is not possible to automatically download subtitles anymore, playback on Apple TV (a VERY popular device) is horrible and out of sync most of the time, the migration to the new Agents was horrible (but it is getting better, except Posters), the leaking of PRIVATE data via emails to “friends” was opt-out instead of opt-in, and many other problems I am forgetting right now. And on top of that they fired employees, so the team is now smaller. But in the other hand, we can see more transparency in the past couple of months, so not everything is negative.
P.S., This is not a hate post, I am truly a Plex fan and I am thankful for the uncountable hours of fun I’ve gotten, I am just frustrated and disappointed.
-post. I’m genuinely interested if others share my experience.