I’m not sure where to post this, so I’ll post it here. I’ve read countless other posts about things being pretty broken since the “new experience” rolled out. I don’t see any other option to get support, so I’m posting my issues here and hoping to get some sort of attention to them.
I’ve been a PlexPass lifetime subscriber for almost 13 years. I initially set my Plex server up to let me download my TV shows and movies to my mobile devices since I travel quite a bit for my job. Before the “experience” update, I had over 700+ episodes of TV shows synced to my iPad, and about 60 movies. These were neatly organized by Show → Season → Episodes. After the update, these were flattened out to over 760+ individual things.
I have found that Plex on my iPad and my Pixel Tablet are pretty much useless now. This is not an exaggeration. My primary use of Plex on a mobile device is to sync/download content from my server to watch it offline. Often I’ll pull a whole season of a show so I can watch it on longer flights, or when I have nothing to do in the hotel after my work day. The fact this is no longer treated like the old way of collections of Shows to Seasons, but just individual items, is an awful UX decision.
So things I’ve found that are broken so far, and I’ve seen no resolution yet:
- Downloaded TV series have zero sorting for Seasons to Episodes anymore. They’re flat and are horribly disorganized.
- Trying to delete downloaded episodes requires deleting each one individually, instead of the old way of “delete season” or “delete show.” This is AWFUL. In order to fix the 760+ flattened library I had on my iPad, I had to delete the app from my iPad to kill the data. I wasn’t going to sit and select/delete each one individually.
- I’ve found some HEVC 10-bit x265 movies and shows play fine when downloaded, and others using the SAME ENCODING settings do not. They infinitely hang in the player. It feels like a transcoding issue from the server, but I’ve literally never had this issue in the past, with these exact movies. i.e. I have a movie (Avengers: End Game) that plays fine when downloaded pre and post update. I have another movie (Avengers: Infinity War) that played fine pre update, but does not post-update. These movies I encoded myself with Handbrake, and have the exact same encoding settings. They are also both downloaded as Original with no transcoding.
These above issues, especially the TV shows Season/Episode sorting, are very disappointing. These don’t feel like a bug from going to the new experience, rather, these feel like conscious decisions from the development team to completely break the very clean UX from before.
I don’t expect much from this, but know that someone who has loved Plex for over 13 years, and has advocated to numerous friends and colleagues to buy their own PlexPass lifetime subscription, is really disappointed in the product now. So much that I’ve strongly considered alternatives, which I’d really like to avoid. Please fix these issues.
