My 2 cents on Plex's current state

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My 2 cents….

I’ve debated long whether to post this. Plex in itself and as an idea is a great app. I’m sure there are many devoted developers and workers that I do not want to lump into one bad post. Unfortunately the current direction and lack of communication and quality control is slowly going to destroy Plex.

First: Plex has gone from a great idea with passionate developers to seemingly a great idea with passionate investors….

Currently it feels like the owners/investors now just want to grab as much subscription money as they can from the broadest group of users until the next big thing comes along and they can abandon it, cash in hand. Every other month it seems we get a big announcement about some other feature/side path/whatever is new; something to entice a few more subscribers. In the end though it feels like a group of people worked on an idea, it reached a sellable point, so it got marketed, cash grabbed, and then they move 90% of the people to the next idea. Leaving that 10% just so they can honestly say the feature is still in development and will be expanded. Nothing every feels like it has a polished finish or sometimes even much of an active development after that initial release.

Second: Lack of communication…

I get that announcing deadlines, hard line development path, etc is a bad idea in this type of work. Things constantly change, take longer to complete, etc. But that should not yield an almost non-presence of feedback and communication. I feel like the administration is more worried about discussing things with their investors and making commitments to profits then to discussing anything with the people who use their products. There are still major issues with several of the various Plex products, some with vague promises they would be addressed and others almost seemingly ignored outright (see more below). At some point when you have paying or paid customers you need to have some feedback and communication to their concerns and ideas. Give us a quarterly update, list out the current priorities, ADDRESS long standing issues and what is being done about them, or if not being done, WHY. No deadlines needed, just some basic information, direction and feedback that people are actively listening and working on specific items. You would be surprised how far a little communication and information can go so feedback and support remains constructive.

Finally: Apps and programs that no longer or never have done what they should.

Some examples:

Plex Home Theater vs. Plex Media Player: Plex Home Theater & Server (for being centralized) is what drew me to Plex over previous Media Center Apps. Plex Home Theater could be skinned so my media room had this awesome (changeable) interface that just felt professional. There were options for scrolling (rotating carousel, side to side, etc), 3D elements, shadow effects, crisp media art backgrounds, themes etc.

I completely understand the devs desire to rewrite from scratch a new Media Player. But while it functionally does many of the same things (and hopefully smoother on the back end for development). Its GUI looks something akin to a 1990’s Windows 3.1 screen. A few words on the side, a couple drop downs and a ton of boring rectangular tiles spaced equally on the screen. Oh yay! When it first was released it seemed very premature, and was quickly pointed out that it was a BETA player (even though PHT was 100% abandoned while PMP was still a BETA “flagship” player). People were promised that first the core functions needed to be tested and completely debugged and then things GUI related would be addressed, maybe the option for 3rd party skins again, etc. None of which has happened in over 2 years now. There has been one GUI update and it seemed mostly to contain nothing of what people asked for and 100% of what some developers said we SHOULD like and want. Just give it time they said…. Or a third party app managed to do what most people wanted so people were told if you want that kind of GUI interface install yet another program and back door into Plex… I personally came to Plex (and paid for a lifetime subscription) because it was a very nice single app solution, I don’t want to install, integrate and manage another app. I want PMP to become what it was supposed to be and Plex Home Theater was. A polished flagship HOME THEATER SOLUTION that looked professional on a large media room setup. Not just another “app”.

Plex for Android: Well it’s a mobile app, for one of the largest mobile platforms, that at its core cannot reliably do some of the absolute basic functions of a mobile app…… 1) determine whether its online or offline, and 2) gasp sync items to your mobile device for offline use…. We recently received a new GUI (like it, hate it, that’s not the point) that seemingly no one asked for in this case (unlike PMP). All people have asked for, FOR YEARS, is that it reliably sync stuff so we could take our media with us. PRIORITIES, look it up if need be, but reskinning a product that can’t due its basic functions is not good product development. As I write this, currently it has been almost a week with a broken sync that for a large number of people Plex claims they are out of space when they have GB’s of free space. We got an update recently, yet nothing to resolve the issue…. Even if that is fixed, Sync is still far from reliable… maybe your playlist is too long (although I have 35 item playlists that still won’t sync properly), or something gets corrupted… so you get to uninstall, clear caches, reinstall, resync, etc. It gets old after doing this several times for a supposedly working “mobile” app.

Again, I write this because I genuinely believe Plex is a great idea and it fits my needs well. But years of failed promises, problems with core programming and non-existent feedback begins to build up frustration.

I do however want to thank all the developers and workers that strive to make a great piece of software who unfortunately probably have no control over development paths or are restricted from providing decent feedback.

If you managed to make it to the end of my long winded 2 cents, thank you.

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To be blunt, Plex simply doesn’t respect their customers. They introduced their abomination of a UI on PMP, and then insisted on also breaking the Android app without even beta testing, despite many posters advising how atrocious the new UI is.

The staff then advises rolling back is not even an option, despite the “update” clearly being enough of a disaster to warrant immediate termination of employment for the idiots who think this is acceptable.

Figure it out before you don’t have any customers to listen to, devs.

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+1 for everything . I’ve already been searching for alternatives. I’ve used this program for a couple years now and it somehow feels LESS functional than 2 years ago.

The biggest problem (to me at least) is that the hardware end is based on mobile apps and web connectivity instead of embeded tech so changes are outside of my control. They break things and there’s no wait to roll back or even stay put. Even if you put in the time and money and got everything the way you like it (like the way I did with a freenas setup and boxee boxes prior) it’s inherently unstable because you can come home from work one day, sit down, turn on the TV, and the s**t is broken because they “updated” it.

There is absolutely ZERO regard for customer service.

I would not mind this in the slightest if this was a free product. If this was some kind of free, open source thing or something, I wouldn’t ■■■■■ for a moment. FreeNAS gives me a lot of grief and I’ve never complained about that, but they have never charged me anything. Once you charge money, you better act like a company.

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I mostly agree with much of what is said in this thread but I have to say I am no longer of the belief that Plex is evil or that they are the uncaring bastards that many make them out to be.

The fact is that while I disagree with their UI choices in many cases that is simply that. a disagreement.

Another fact is that every player I use works nearly perfectly and just has a few minor irritants none of which makes it hard to use my players to play my rather large media collection.

Every part of Plex that I use works very well for me.

I still think that many moves Plex makes is, at best, inexplicable but I also think that those moves are made with the good of the whole Plex ecosystem in mind and that the problems we see here are representative of a tiny percentage of the Plex users world wide.

I have been harsh toward Plex in the past and will continue to be so in the future as I see problems that I think need addressing. However recent events in my life has caused me to really think through development and support models for large systems and from that reflection I decided that Plex is not doing such a bad job.

Oh, by the way, I hereby apologize to any Plex people I have offended in the past but I am a repeat offender so I probably will offend again.

Again my Plex system is about as close to perfect as I could hope and everything is very stable for me.

BTW: To be fair I need to say that I don’t share with anybody or use remote access at all. Nor do I use the DVR functionality (no local TV signal) or most of the “advanced” features that seem to give others so much trouble.

My Plex use is very simple and that tells me that, for me, the basic core of Plex is just fine and stable.

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Is your PMS even logged into plex.tv? or just local “anonymous” access?

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Yep, it is logged in to Plex TV but it is setup where I can easily and quickly switch to local only if needed when I loose my internet as I often do. (Rural ISP) But I will say that most of the time when my internet goes down I do not have to do anything and my Plex just keeps happily chugging along.

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As a contrast (and similar to Elijah) my experience with Plex is pretty good. I have a large collection, it works well, and even Android Sync has been solid and reliable since v7 of the client was released. I had some odd meta-data matching issues, but figured them out, but in generally everything functions as it should. So much so that, having got a refund on my Lifetime pass 2-3 months ago due to the sync unreliability, I actually re-purchased it last week.

Given that the vast majority of Plex functionality is free, and how well it works, it amazes me how much people complain. That said, I don’t use the DVR functionality, multiple libraries, or share my plex with anyone else so I’m probably a pretty vanilla user.

I also find that Plex is pretty communicative despite the vitriol aimed at it and the general activity levels on the forum. I’ve had Plex employees/developers directly answer most of my questions, and have had useful and sensible discussions in which the CEO has got involved. So the general claims that Plex is evil, doesn’t listen to or help its users, and doesn’t care about product quality, seem pretty unfounded to me.

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Erm, sorry to burst your bubble, but it is free. Unless you use Sync or hardware transcoding - neither of which is mandatory - you don’t have to pay a cent. So unless you have a specific problem with the paid functionality specifically, you really have no grounds for complaining.

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There are a LOT of features that require payment.
You can’t add home users.
You can’t use lyricfind or plex mix.
You can’t use hardware acceleration on a NAS.
You can’t offline sync.

I’m sure there are others.
Simple fact is, if I bought it for any of those features and something doesn’t work properly then I’m a paid user. There’s an obligation to make it work properly once you charge a fee for the product. I expected a certain level of performance from the product (at least the level of performance that I had when I paid for it) and that hasn’t been maintained.
Nothing I have done has caused the product to break. I didn’t get new hardware, I didn’t change my operations systems, I didn’t cease payment. If you can’t simply keep things static enough for the course of my payment schedule to prevent the product from breaking then you’ve failed to honor a contract.

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