I know you’re looking at the numbers. I know that a tiny subset of passionate, longtime users is no longer profitable for your company, so you’re kicking them to the curb. This is a deeply wrong, money-driven decision. Please reconsider.
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Please keep HTPC support!!!
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[Plex] it is widely used for piracy and copyright infringement
Huh? Speak for yourself. Since I started using Plex, I’ve started buying physical media again, to get the best of streaming & high quality movies & TV (very low compression & keeping DTS:HD audio tracks, for example).
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I respect that! Out of curiosity (and I apologize for now reading back this entire thread), what are the 2 or 3 things you are getting from an HTPC that you can’t get from a streaming device?
Absolutely, but this is how things work when you kill a feature or a product. There are threads with people who are strongly against the thing being killed, but not commensurate threads with the vast majority of people who a) don’t care or b) are happy for the focusing of resources on things they care about ore.
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Primarily… everything! Ok, not quite so, but I’ll start at the beginning…
I have a PS4 and initially used that for around a year, until I decided to try PMP via my laptop over HDMI, and learned the most valuable lesson in Plex… Direct Play. I mean, Direct Play EVERYTHING!
Then I go back to the PS4, and I find that in recent months, the UI has become worse and worse, and still very little support for Direct Play - EDIT: I am aware this is an issue with Sony and the PS in general.
My mum has the Roku, and it has little Direct Play support.
So I now have a 4th Gen Core i5 PC next to my TV, hooked up to my AV, with my big ass TV and my full on 7.1 - (which I might add, I have recently upgraded the Center Speaker) - You should come round and watch Alita - It sounds incredible!
With PMP and my £10 wireless Media Remote, I have it all. As Apple used to say… “It just works!”
But now I find that the only VAGUELY reasonable option for me is to spend another £250 or so to buy another device. The Nvidia Shield, and when I look around at users experience with it, it’s not great.
So I currently have an amazing setup (No 4K yet - but that’s another story)
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Nvidia shield seems like the best option if we want to stay with Plex. Direct play, 4K, HDR, etc… But then my IR Harmony won’t work, so I’ll need to upgrade to a Hub-based Harmony remote as well…
I’m a little surprised at this part (it was an interesting read overall). Roku direct-plays MPEG2, H264, H265, and H265 10-bit. It doesn’t direct-play VC-1. It also needs to transcode any audio that isn’t AAC or Dolby Digital/Plus, but unless your mum has a receiver that really needs Atmos or high-end audio, it’s unlikely she’d ever notice the transcode (which doesn’t need a lot of CPU on the server).
I do appreciate your frustration that the accidental message from Plex was essentially, “If you want what you have now, buy a $150 Shield for every place you already have a working HTPC”.
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And this is the point @Cafe_Diem - My mum is not the concern here. I am - with my 7.1 system that currently Direct Plays all audio codecs. I’m assuming you have heard the difference in quality between Direct Played DTS-HD, and having it transcoded? It’s night and day!
Indeed 
Thanks a lot for posting here! Much appreciated.
Now really, let’s ignore the whole HTPC/TV mode/etc. stuff for a bit and just think in terms of “we need a good desktop client”. I think that it’s not far fetched to ask for keyboard navigation (it’s good for both accessibility and power users) and graceful scaling of the UI based on display size/resolution. Frankly I think that would solve 90% of the needs of the HTPC users.
Second, is there any reason the new Plex desktop app looks like “just” an embedded Plex Web? I was surprised that it wasn’t a “proper” UNO UI.
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Well, you said your mum so I was thinking you were talking about her, not yourself. I understand what you were intending there now!
I understand about the audio. I use the Roku day-to-day (with ARC to the receiver), but switch to the Shield whenever we’re actually going to seriously watch a movie. Though honestly, the transcode is still pretty solid overall. Just not quite, you know, lossless.
I wish there was some weird hybrid of the Shield and Roku so you could get the Roku interface and remote control (which isn’t perfect but is far better than the Shield’s) with the Shield codec support and features.
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Part of UNO is making the interface the same on all platforms, across as many screens as possible, so we’re on our way to that 
This is very valid… Rather than develop another app that looks and feels almost exactly like the localhost web app or Plex.tv web app, if anything, why not remove the “Desktop” element of PMP and leave the TV Mode in place, or UNO as it is now?
We already have localhost:32400 and Plex.tv for management, we just need a good player.
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But you’re not Dave! The new Windows / Mac app is not UNO. It’s the web app.
If this was a true statement, you would remove the Desktop element of PMP and leave UNO behind.
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I would like to comment on the current situation of the PMP deprecation.
I, as well, am very very upset about this change. I have talked my entire family and extended family into setting up Plex and running their own HTPCs. I built a form of embedded Plex long before embedded Plex existed.
The ability to have a machine 100% decicated to the usage of Plex and nothing else is invaluable and cannot be achieved by a Nvidia Shield or similar device. My grandmother, and other tech illiterate just cannot navigate the shield OS to find Plex. The constant UI changes have been hard enough for them.
The other benefit is I do not want to be buying device after device to support higher and higher quality video. I’ve had to upgrade from a Chromecast, to Chromecast v2, to a shield on my one TV that does use these type of devices. I hate it. My desktop HTPC has worked WONDERFUL for the entire time without upgrades.
Please, please, please do not deprecate the Plex embedded software. I don’t care if you stop adding new features to it, just please keep it working. I love Plex and I want to stay with it. The day that Plex embedded stops is the day I have to move to a new platform.
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Meanwhile Apple announces iPad OS alongside Watch OS, iOS and macOS after realising that one UI for all devices doesn’t make sense. Same with Microsoft forcing a tablet UX onto desktops with Windows 8.
Would having a smartwatch interface on a TV make sense? No. So why is an identical UI with no 10 feet scaling the next logical jump?
Please understand I’m passionate about Plex, love it. I want to continue to see it do well, but introducing this when there is greater feature parity with what is available already would have made far more sense than a seeming regression on all fronts from media support, playback and UX. Perhaps a road map of what this allows would be a positive announcement?
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Please keep your Windows apps coming through the Windows Store. To be forced to update an app when I go to use it is the bane of my life, it’s like being forced to download a 60GB patch when wanting to play a few minutes of a game like Rainbow 6. Wasted time that I don’t need nor want in my media playing experience. Everything should update in the background or when I update the OS.
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190 dollar shield
And so I have now just installed the new Plex for Windows app, and…
It’s Plex Desktop! I know the blog said it would be, but it really is!
@elan and @DaveBinM - I’m genuinely confused by this! This seems to me to be a product that was never needed. I only need to go to http://127.0.0.1:32400/web/index.html or https://app.plex.tv/desktop and I have the very same thing.
And it is in complete contradiction to UNO - the same on all platforms.
Surely the best route would have actually been as I mentioned above… Simply remove the Desktop element of PMP and improve the Playing and control abilities of the TV Player.
You have made a product that you are going to have to maintain, but is actually not a product that anyone needs, which from what you have said, is what you are trying to avoid.
Anyways… It’s nearly 2am here, and the emotions have certainly calmed a little, but I’m sure there will be more discussion tomorrow.
Until tomorrow then 
Andy.
I’m not sure what you’re on about … plex web is using Uno.
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@axemanuk666 @HammyHavoc UNO is a design paradigm (you can read more about it here: https://www.plex.tv/blog/uno-everywhere/), which we’re bringing across TV, mobile, and web platforms. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to look the exact same on every device (the TV style wouldn’t work very well on a mobile device, for example), but the same customisation and philosophy is the same across different platforms.
The new Plex macOS & Windows app uses mpv as the playback engine, allowing far more direct play capabilities, plus features such as tone mapping for HDR content on SDR screens, and supports downloading content to the device, which the web apps (either local on your server, or at https://app.plex.tv/desktop) do not do.
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