I’m all for updates, I even agree that parts of the UI/UX needed work, but cmon guys. Updates can’t be 1 step forward and 2 steps back. You can’t just remove useful features and call it progress. I’m on beta trains on so many softwares and like to contribute, but this thing should not have passed alpha/nightly QA testing. I have used it for less than 1 hour and it’s so bad I have to opt out of beta.
Subtitle settings within player - it’s a must have feature to change subtitle color, position and size on demand while playing back. These are very content dependent settings and burying them to app wide global setting is crazy.
App UI customization - certain users like “Big” UI and are fine with only 1 row of 5 content posters visible, others want practicality. Add responsive option to change content poster size with possibility of seeing at least 2 rows of content on home screen.
App feels laggy as hell, in older app it helped to reduce animations - no option on this app. There is also constant visible loading of content while opening content pages or even switching between episodes it takes 1-2s. I have Nvidia Shield Pro and good connection. I cant even imagine what low end smart TV users feel.
Option to see content ratings while browsing under the logo just how it is when opening content page.
EAC3 5.1 forces transcode on Nvidia Shield Pro
New left menu is buggy - can’t navigate out of if with back button - back button closes app - when reopening the app the menu is still open but then “right navigation” button does not close the menu but navigates in content. meaning you have to spam left nav multiple times and then right nav multiple times just to close the menu.
No “Previous” and “Next” button on player - if that was an actual decision someone made not a bug then you need to seriously check what your UX analysis team does for their salary.
OK, who at Plex thinks this is April 1st and is pulling some sort of “April Fools” prank.
Enough with this joke, give us back the Plex Interface we all paid you for.
This “New and Improved” is neither. Most of us lived through the old TiVo days when they tried to make their great system better and completely trashed their customer base and never recovered.
Is Plex now trying to repeat history and see how fast they can become irrelevant too?
I think it’s time for everyone on Plex to take a serious look at Jellyfin.
Already setting up Jellyfin because of this incompetence. Whoever created this “new experience” should be ashamed tbh - it’s made Plex un-usable for me. Lifetime Plex user of >10 years.
came here to post this. I’m on Onn Pro 2 with 3GB of RAM and 90% of users will be on a less powerful Android TV device. This app is so slow it’s intolerable. This feels like I’m using a PWA, I suspect they will not fix this ever, it will never feel as snappy as a native app.
The UI layout itself would be fine I think if it weren’t so buggy. I expect those to be sorted and the lag will be improved like Emby did with their universal app, but nothing compares to the native apps.
This one has gotten me several times this morning. From the main hub you cannot just hit play on the remote on a movie like you could previously. You now have to hit enter to bring the movie up and then hit play.
Summary:
The new app may be slightly prettier but as far as functionality goes it’s a dumpster fire.
Pros:
slightly prettier (which adds nothing to functionality)
Cons:
omg, there are so many.
All media playback settings should be readily accessible at any time.
Sometimes when skipping or rewinding a movie it goes from ‘letterbox’ (full frame) to zoom or stretch. The only way to get normal is exit and restart the video.
Watching back-to-back episodes the “suggested” video is the default instead of the next in the series when you just hit enter during the countdown.
Slower responsiveness when trying to find something
Libraries are harder to access. Once in them you cannot change the browse mode without going to the top and selecting again.
OTA Live TV switching channels and viewing the guide is kludgy and slow. (not that it was great before, but it’s worse now)
I got fed up a bit and installed the Plezy client for plex that everyone is recommending. It supports both plex and jellyfin servers so you don’t have to change anything server side
It’s pretty much a single developer open source project and omg what a difference. Pretty much all my issues with plex native app are solved, has customizability, can boost center channel on downmixing, dolby vision profile conversion on the fly, volume normalization etc etc everyhing is smooth and fast.
It has all the improvements over the old plex app UI wise and has all the functionality and extra over the new plex app. Crazy.
Also opening the menu and backing out of it with the back button closes Plex. Should close the menu and go back home.
Many places, like in menu or library when I’m too fast (because the app is sloooowww) I navigate to another button. Then the UI is done loading and focusses back on the default button. This happens in more places then just the menus.
I don’t mind the redesign but it is glitchy and slow AF.
The left menu is a much appreciated feature return for me.
That being said, there’s still work to do in my opinion. TV Shows in particular should be reworked. It’s ridiculous that ALL seasons of a long running show are in a single row. I have to press the right arrow 10 times to get to season 10. Skipping to the end doesn’t help if the show has over 20 seasons. The row should wrap around like it used to. That way I can move down an entire row and navigate in half the clicks.
The same is true for the episodes within a season. The first tile should be the first episode, not a play all tile. The episodes should wrap as well. There’s absolutely no good reason to have this layout on a TV with a remote control.
Additionally, the top half of the Home Screen doesn’t need to be an image and text. That can be scaled down so we can see more of the row beneath the current row instead of making the Home Screen seem like it only has one row.
Better yet, give us the option to remove the text and image from the top of the screen so we can just see what we have on deck, as well as any new media without a distraction. It does absolutely nothing to enhance my experience. It only makes it more frustrating to use.
Yeah, I know it definitely confused me. I legitimately thought it was a glitch for a while until I realized its “purpose”. It’s really unnecessary and confusing. Hopefully as they move forward they’ll actually focus on usability instead of whatever it is they think they’ve been doing.
Favorites/media item menu syncing across devices should be optional. The ability to have different setups is an extremely useful feature. Different devices/places used to allow for different arrangements and items in the Continue Watching.
Playlists now obey the Auto Play preference when they didn’t use to. Please consider making a separate Auto Play option specifically for playlists. I would argue that the whole point of playlists is to play the list in a way that’s different from playing a show or season. However, I’m sure there are folks that want a playlist to stop at the end of every item. Perhaps make it a global option that can also be controlled per playlist.
Lefthand menu navigation is very hit or miss. Often appears to be moving the content in the background instead of the highlight in the menu.
Lefthand menu navigation control is inconsistent and back/directions do different things in different areas. Seems to be a bit of an issue with the UI in general. Sometimes the directional press just doesn’t go where you’d expect. Left press doesn’t always reverse a right press, down press doesn’t always reverse an up press. Sometimes it feels like a gamble what’s going to happen when trying to exit the menu or even navigate.
Titles of things don’t scroll or wrap when too long. Long titles at the top of the info screen cut off even though half the screen is still available. e.g. Long playlist titles just look weird when viewing the playlist contents. There’s essentially just no way to view some longer names/titles.
“Edition” info from the file naming convention doesn’t appear in the Home screen.
Skip Intro/Credits buttons should have the option to be transparent. It’s a bizarre design choice for any player to have a glaringly bright popup for an extended period during the viewing experience. Imagine any other sort of popup for any other context and how out of place that would be. And the only way to resolve it is to disable an often useful feature everywhere? At the very least it should be always available in the player UI with the other buttons even if disabled. (Not really an issue with the redesign, but while we’re all dog piling. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
The UI has always been slow when I open my movie library and try to move to a specific letter, so the lag isn’t new. BUT, say I select “Q” on the right side to skip to those titles. When it finally loads, I am not able to navigate up in the library (to the “P” titles). The use the up button on the remote and it jumps from the media row to the Sort/Filter options. I press down and it goes right back to the row of titles I was on.
Also, using and clearing filters is … not great. For a while yesterday, my movie library was limited to a single actor filter and I could not make the app clear that filter option. I watched a movie and after that, it was working normally again. I have no idea what changed other than using the search function to find the media I wanted.
This severely limits the usability of my plex server.
I also had issues with a TV Series only available in “EAC3 + Atmos”. At first, it would “crash” or something. (I couldn’t even Direct Stream.) I triggered a “Download” for an episode on my Pixel 9a, which weirdly transcoded the audio into “ALAC” if I remember correctly… Now, whenever I try to Direct Play this TV Series, it Direct Streams with everything passed-through except for audio, which is transcoded into AAC 5.1. (It’s as if downloading the episode gave some kind of transcoding recipe to my server…)
I don’t know whether my Chromecast 4K with Google TV can decode EAC3, but I think it can, so that would be a bug too since my PMS obviously transcodes EAC3 instead of sending it to my Chromecast…
Google says, it can’t – it can only pass-through (in the right circumstances and with the right combination of audio/video codecs). That’s assuming, their information is correct as I cannot verify at the moment.
I just wish Plezy was available for LG WebOs TV’s.
I was able to revert back to the working version of Plex 10.26.1.123 on my Android TV and on my Nvidia Shield, but that can’t be done on a WebOs device (someone, please prove me wrong and tell me how)
Since I’m at the mercy of Plex to fix this disaster and that looks like it’s going to be a wait, I’m ordering another NVidia Shield to run on my LG Home Theater system.
Currently running version 2026.16.0 on the Shield Android TV
I imagine this is still in beta / preview but it’s rough, buggy and in some instances just broken.
I’ve been a PlexPlass member for a long time now and this feels like a huge step back in functionality.
The biggest drawbacks for me are in a few categories
UI size: everything is just too big. I have three rows I’m interested in. Continue Watching. Movies. Recently Added. I can now see just one of those on the Home Screen with the top 50% being taken up by the name of the thing I already see the poster card for.
Promoted Content: I bought and use Plex for my own content, nothing more. This too heavily blurs the lines of what I have hosted vs all the Ads / Live TV and Rent Movies and Shows that I have zero interest in. I have 3 rows of my own content and then 7+ of others that I will never use and don’t want to see.
Performance: This has already been said a few times but it’s horrible slow and I can often hear clicking yet the highlighted item doesn’t move for a second or two
Sidebar / Menu: It’s effectively broken. More than half the time I get to the sidebar or the “more” menu to select something, what’s highlighted stops moving while the menu is still open and somehow I’m controlling the blurred out background behind it. The only way to get out of it is to press “back” a few times.
Transitions: When inside a show / movie and going left to right to mark as starred or click to the more menu lost all their UI transitions. It feels like it jumps
Slider: For TV shows that you can slide left or right to see the different episodes, episodes can become “stuck” to the left of the sidebar and makes it look like it’s broke off screen. Somehow there’s even a “Season” card to the left of the first episode of a show. Which just seems to play the first episode. I don’t understand why that’s necessary at all.
Player Experience: It looks jumpy, spins too fast and feels unpolished. Did we entirely losing scrubbing? Accessing the menu is slow and feels clunky.
Overlapping icons: On top of the half broken sidebar with episodes overlapping, a highlighted episode overlaps the “resume” and other function buttons
Trending: I don’t want it. Not my content. Don’t put it in my face. Activity isn’t needed on the home page. That whole top bar doesn’t need to be there. That belongs in the sidebar.
Sidebar > Home: It should reset where you are back to the top. If I go to the bottom of “Home” and then go to the sidebar > Home I would expect to bring me to the top.
There’s so many more areas that just took a huge step back
Where can we see the current known issues Plex is aware of and working on fixing? This feels like an alpha build that wasn’t meant to be live yet.
Please tell me this isn’t going to stay this way.
Let me customize to only show me the content I want to see and fix the usability and performance because it’s just not there, not even close.
