I have been using Plex for a month or so now and have a Premium subscription. Initially I though that Plex would be the solution to all of my video streaming problems but, in reality, it made my experience even worse! Today I cancelled my subscription and wont be using Plex anymore.
Plex is an undeveloped and unstable platform that rarely works properly. Streaming success is spasmodic at best and library setup and maintenance is fickle and unreliable. I have had much, much more success using Apple TV without all the configuration and tweaking that goes into Plex. The concept of support only being offered through the forums is flawed too but I suppose a Plex support department, unless staffed by thousands, would be forever swamped given the state of the Plex platform.
Plex is essentially an excellent idea but is far from being fit for purpose. I may revisit in a few years time when a debugged and stable platform is available but for now it’s back to my Apple TV.
Your experience is vastly different than mine or most Plex users. Except for live sports I use Plex to watch TV almost exclusively. I have a library of thousands of movies and tens of thousands of TV episodes and the library setup and maintenance was about as easy as anything I use for any task of similar size.
I have problems with many of Plex’s decisions and many of the ways I feel they have wasted resources on what I believe is worthless features but the one thing that is true for me is “Plex just works.” It is the most reliable of the systems I have dealt with that even approach the same level of complexity.
Also in the forums generally if you ask for help and include logs and details about what your setup is and what is happening you will get good help pretty quickly.
If you want something that will do what Plex does on as many different hardware and software systems as Plex does and requires no real user effort to get going then you are going to wait a LONG time.
There are currently two major contenders for managing and playing local media collections of any size, Plex and Emby. For me, right now, Plex is the best of these by a very small margin.
If you are truly leaving due to issues with Plex then I bid you a fond adieu and hope you find your own Nirvana elsewhere.
I’m sad you feel this way – in particular after it apparently worked great for you before (based on your previous posts). If you have a change of mind, feel free to post your specific issues. Maybe there’s a way we can help.
Devil’s advocate: Take a look at the top posts in the forum recently. Your experience is not the defacto standard. Lots of users having issues recently who have been running Plex for years without issues.
My general stability of Plex (running in Docker) has devolved in the past six months, with no end in sight. Fourm help has been sparse at best in my experience. I get what he’s saying, though I’m not yet ready to leave Plex, as there is no equal (emby is good, but just not quite as slick as Plex at this point).
My advice is you should save your previous install files. I’ve rolled back before, due to stability. Now I just refuse to update unless there is a real need.
I haven’t given up with Plex, not quite sure if I picked the right product for what I wanted. But two major issues that I have ran into is one, I have a Madison and Milwaukee tuners, but only one EPG using Plex’s Gracenotes. The 2nd issue is only my account can record TV shows using the DVR, and not my family accounts, which is a pain for me because well, I have to setup each show each person wants to record - and sometimes they want to record stuff that comes on when I am not home.
Other than that, would be nice to have other users other than “home” users be able to access my tuners - logic is that each friend account is an individual account and anyone in my home group can see each other login (and log into them) as long as they don’t have a PIN associated with them.
