Imagine if you moved into a house that had a couple people living in it already. The movers have already taken the bulk of your stuff ahead and you arrive. You look around the brightly lit living room, which is already quite full of furniture, large wall art, and many potted plants. You don’t recognize any of it, though.
“Uh, where is my stuff at?” you ask your new roommates, eyeing an oxblood leather couch and a sculpture along one wall.
“Oh, well things were getting a bit cluttered up here. But don’t worry, it’s all here. You can get to it easily,” they said, and opened a door nearby. “Just go down these stairs.”
You walk down a rather dark staircase to the basement of the house, along with some storage and the water boiler you find all your things. It’s all in order and you can reach your video library on the bookshelf on one side, and your favorite reading chair and lamp are there and set up. A pleasant glow fills the comfy space.
“So, yeah, whenever you want to read or whatever you can just come down here,” one of your new housemates says from the top of the stairs.
“True, it was pretty easy to get here just by opening that door from the living room.” you note as you look at your knick-knacks arranged nicely on the end table.
“Feel free to bring your friends by and it’s nice having you here to share this house with us.” he says as he closes the door, leaving you down in the basement.
Would you feel like an equal roommate in this situation?
If they’ve got any sense it’ll be a series of crisis meetings. Ideal outcome: An admission that they simply got their priorities wrong and will learn from the experience, reinstatement of the old mobile app on the Apple AppStore/ Play store so discontented users can regain lost (core) functionality, whilst the currently inferior new experience release is developed until it’s in a fit state to be used by everybody.
That analogy doesn’t really fit. Because as soon as you open the app (walk through the front door of the house in your analogy) you are greeted with all of your things. However just like a real home they are now divided into designated areas. You have the Kitchen down the hallway (Plexamp for Music) you have your living room to your left (Movies & TV app) and you have your closet down the hall that stores all your family photos and memories (Plex photos app).
So just like a home Plex is designing designated areas. You don’t have a home theatre in your bathroom do you? You don’t cook dinner and have a stove in your bedroom right? You have designated areas for each of these use cases (unless you live in a tiny studio apartment).
Now while some of these “designated areas” are currently under construction (especially Plex photos) the idea and approach can be a positive one.
Can anyone actually name an “all in one” app that is better than a dedicated one? When I switched to Emby a while back CarPlay didn’t even work for music and you had to pay to even access the CarPlay feature.
Found a new problem while on the go.
It takes forever on a 10 Mbit mobile conncention until a small bandwidth video starts (about 1 Mbit video bandwidth). I guess it takes even longer for higher bandwidth videos.
At home this works much faster because of the thicker connection. The old app didn’t have any problems, it didn’t have to cache so much until the video starts.
I hope you understand what i mean, i attach 2 pictures from the dashboard: the first yellow mountain is the old app, it starts after about 1 second. the second mountain is the new app, it draws at much higher bandwidth and starts after about 5-10 seconds (both at home via wifi).
The blue mountain range is the new app via 10 Mbit mobile connection, the video starts reliably after the last mountain what means after nearly 2 minutes of buffering.
Please fix this, something has changed in the players caching and playback behavior.
Everything was monitored in direct play of course without transcoding and without relay.
Update:
I found a workaround.
Deactivate Settings/Video&Audio/“Direct Play” and leave “Direct Stream” activated.
I don’t know why it helps, seems to be another bug in the new app but the buffering problem is gone when every media is “converted” in Direct Stream Mode.
Works now but please fix the buffering issue in Direct Play mode.
I got hit by the new update and saying that I am bitterly disappointed would be a huge understatement. It’s painful enough that I expect to go through the rollback process.
Not that the old version was perfect but at least I could work around its problems. My normal usage was to pre-download a series that was suitable to listen to (with no video) while driving.
I had to turn mobile data off for the app because it constantly kept trying to switch back to a livestream version rather than the downloaded one. livestreaming over mobile/cell data was painfully unreliable for me and maybe 50% of the time the app would freeze or crash 1-2 seconds after starting a show. Mobile data off was no big deal and at least it would guarantee that it would play reliably and not require constant attention to fix the app hangs.
But the new app - won’t start up unless I turn cell data on. It’ll stay running if I turn cell data off again, but omg .. the download library UI is steaming pile of unusable garbage. It only seems to be able to sort by episode name or download date (essentially random order). Being able to browse by show/episode and have it be aware of previous/next episodes is gone.
It is absolutely unusable for me. I have to either revert and block updates, or switch away from plex entirely. I don’t much like my alternatives but the problems there seem to be way less severe than those in the new plex app.
If Plex could publish “Plex (Legacy)” to make the older versions available as a stopgap then that would at least buy some time. But something has to change.
My point of this was really about the Navigation Bar itself that bobinthewild is referring to. In the old app my individual personal libraries are there in the sidebar. They live right alongside the Plex Live TV and On Demand option. They are equal. What’s more, I can unpin the Plex libraries and move them to the extended “More” listings, removing them from the home screen, while still maintaining access if I should want it.
The new app did not follow this. If you wanted access to the Plex FAST content at all you had to have it front and center. If you didn’t want that that only option is to block the services entirely. Personal libraries are now in a “Libraries” tab. Are they easy to get to? Sure. But they are still second-class citizens compared to Plex’s own content in this manner. In the old app once you were in a library the bottom bar becomes dedicated to the contents of that library. If I’m in one of my TV show libraries the buttons Recommended, Collections, Categories – these will all be filled with my own server’s content. In the new app this bar is VIP space for access to Plex’s content and Discover. If you turn it off you can’t add an easy link to Collections or Playlists – just blank space
Plex has started to walk this back a bit with the addition of the new Libraries hub. That’s better, but it’s entirely a reactionary change. It clearly was not in their original design, and it’s still a substandard way to list libraries because the listings are scrolled through horizontally so the length of a library’s name impacts the usability of the hub. There’s no way to fix this that preserves the horizontal arrangement unless you want to start truncating library names or increase the hub size so it can have two-line labels on the entries.
I’m taking a peek at a different media player app that happens to include the ability to talk to my plex server. So far it seems like a viable option. It doesn’t seem to support user profiles but it is certainly less hassle than reverting to the old version of the app. I’m going to give it a try and see if I can live with that.
the new app is so broken , buffers all the time when it reconnects audio is lost , unable to add sub’s on the fly like you could on the old app, can’t advance tv shows have to wait to the end . unable to adjust play back quality due to new app buffering all the time. WTF did you do to it . I like the look it’s clean but add back or only release with all parts working .
The new user interface compromises one-handed functionality, making navigation significantly easier in the older app. Having to press at the top to switch between recommended and browse sections is inconvenient, especially on larger phones. In the previous version, everything was within easy reach. I have no intention of updating to the new UI, as 8.45 is all I will ever need from Plex.
The new mobile app shows all the users activity instead of just the user signed in, which when your trying to find what you were watching is time consuming. Also to many steps to get to resuming a show. You have to continually restart the app & find what you were already watching. The previous version was easier to use for continue watching a show. I would really like to revert to previous version, this one looks nice but it’s crap. It’s not just a matter of getting use to the new layout, it has to many bugs to be user friendly.
On Live TV, we can’t watch the channel live if another home user plays the same channel first; it forces the channel to play from the beginning. Previously, the old app would ask if it could be played live.
Same as pretty much everyone here, this update is awful. I don’t want to be forced into changes that break things and require massive changes. Sounds like I’m headed to Jellyfin
