What is the purpose of that season thumbnail anyway? It’s confusing and unnecessary.
6 Likes
No clue, I just found that when I click that thumbnail, the app doesn’t work any longer. If you do happen to get something to play, you will not have control of pause, FF, or reverse.
Completely uninstalling and reinstalling “resets things”
1 Like
I will probably go for Emby Premiere with a lifetime pass. Even though Jellyfin is free, I need to use it as a DVR for my HDHomeRun. Jellyfin requires a subscription to a guide service which is $35 a year. I hate subscription services that can raise their prices for no good reason. I would rather do the Lifetime option with Emby, which does include the guide and be done with it. The payback would be a little over 3 years unless the guide provider jacks the price up.
4 Likes
(1) I’m sure there’s a big learning curve with that (2) ensuring that it works correctly across a myriad of devices and screen sizes would be problematic (3) I’m sure Roku is pretty strict with approving apps for its devices
Good point, I forgot about how they butchered the mobile app.
4 Likes
Yep. This is a trash update. Makes me glad I resisted getting the Lifetime Plex Pass. I knew one day they’d fark it up.
I’m switching back to Kodi for local, and looking into Jellyfin for streaming. This new Plex UI makes me think they hired the guys who developed Windows ME to do it. Utter garbage that’s barely useable.
3 Likes
Does Plex even care that we all hate this update? I have been using plex for years and this is seriously making me think about finding another app. This update is horrible.
12 Likes
I really want to know what they have against playlists at plex? No downloads of playlists, no dedicated library for playlists anymore. What the hell, I could set up my entire evening of tv and movies and just hit play and enjoy my night before, now I have to go god damn library spelunking to find my playlists.
4 Likes
Been running dual Plex and jellyfin for several years. Plex is literally unusable at this point. Will be using jellyfin. Since I’m a lifetime Plex member wonder if this is a tool to weed us out. Thankfully Nvidia shield still in the old Plex at this point
4 Likes
That would be ideally the case. However it will take ages for something reasonable to come to the masses.
1 Like
I’m feeling the same honestly. I’ve had lifetime pass since 2018 and I’m wondering if they just want more money by letting us off the bus and attracting new folks.
6 Likes
I finally figured out how to get rid of the “On Demand” and “Discover”. I use Live TV with my HDHomeRun but I don’t want to see any of the useless Plex TV stations that you can’t pause or rewind. This is actually done on the server through the web interface. Use the Wrench Icon and select “Online Media Sources”. Set “Movies & Shows” and “Discover Source” to disabled. Setting “Live TV” to disabled will still show the guide for your antenna but not all the online TV stations from Plex. The interface still sucks but not quite as much.
4 Likes
This sucks.
My family uses playlists almost exclusively, mostly as a sort of replacement for cable by shuffling a bunch of media, so we had “playlists” at the top of the sidebar.
now it takes about 90+ seconds.
Is it unreasonable to ask for a choice of UI?
Unfortunately, about 3 weeks ago I paid for lifetime Plex pass so I cannot boycott this as I otherwise would, it’s very frustrating that I paid for a version of Plex that has been removed. Very much bait and switch.
This layout improves nothing and makes navigating much less intuitive. This is not an issue of just having to get used to it. This is objectively worse, UI improvements should make getting to content faster, not several times slower.
It’s not as terrible on my phone, but it’s god awful on streaming boxes.
5 Likes
Visually, this looks nice, but I honestly don’t think the Plex people understand what most people use the application for. I can guarantee that most of us use Plex to watch and organize our OWN content or to share that content with friends and family, not to watch Plex provided movies or Plex live tv. Those are nice to have, but significantly less important than the functionality of managing our own content.
And probably the bulk of us have more than two libraries of our own content, so the navigation needs to allow us to smoothly function between our multiple libraries (as many as that may be). Moving the navigation to the top instead of having it all available at once on the left is the first major problem.
The new interface also freezes quite frequently during navigation, and it requires using the BACK function over and over to get back to the navigation from within a series or collection. And what happened to remembering the last library view? I have several libraries, and I don’t want one default view that applies to all of them (some I preferred Collection view, others Browse, NEVER Recommended— that’s already on the Home Screen)
I think we all understand that Plex has to evolve to keep from being eaten up, but the focus of the updates is misguided. Please, Plex developers, updates should focus on smoothly navigating and playing OUR user content within our multiple libraries. For most of us, content provided directly by Plex is secondary. I understand that your On Demand content is what keeps you viable, but it can’t be at the expense of the functionality we actually care about. It’s not why your customers have Plex.
7 Likes
Not going to bother reading everything. Just adding my voice that the UI does not work. It gets stuck often and will not play shows. We need a rollback ASAP.
Don’t try to fix it. The UI is too different from ALL OTHER streaming apps. It makes for a confusing mess.
6 Likes
Beta testers tried to tell them from day one that this was the wrong direction. They don’t care despite them claiming otherwise. Actions over words at this point.
They are going to do what they want, which is being driven by non plex users in a venture capitalist boardroom.
If the sentiment in this thread is anything to go by….
RIP Plex.
15 Likes
I don’t understand what is so hard about not screwing with a UI/UX that worked. I agree, this new version is prettier, but like Frank Loyd Wright famously said, “form follows function.” This redesign is “function follows form,” and has made it extremely confusing for people to navigate to what they want access to.
I feel for the Plex organization because it seems clear to me that their business model is not meeting investor expectations and they need to force users not only to streaming their online content, but to being logged in for doing so in order to eek out ad revenue by making it easier to find content they get ad revenue for and harder to actually access your stored content. Clearly PlexPass income is insufficient, and they want (need?) more income.
However, that is no excuse for making the UI worse for those of us who are focused on our local libraries. Making it easier rather than harder would cause me to recommend Plex to more of my peers. Right now the new Roku interface ensures I will be recommending against Plex for people who want a streaming solution for their local files on Roku.
3 Likes
Dam, now im scared to go home. Last i saw my tvs still had the good ui. Now im seeing this post. I will say i saw the new ui on my phone a few months ago, i believe, but disregarded it because i rarely use my phone to watch content. When i used it for the first time i remember thinking “ this is too complicated. I must not be using it right, there is no way the plex team would make something this bad without there being a way to easily get to your content, ill figure it out later” now im filled with dread to find to that ui will come to tvs as well and is actually as bad as it seemed back then.
2 Likes
You realize this was a deliberate choice and not just incompetence. They very likely did considerable research and testing to see how much they could antagonize the userbase and have the number of paying customers leave outweigh the number of people that clicked an additional paid service by burying anything but the menu options that earned them money.
This isn’t “bad for no reason.” It’s bad because you are their product, not their customer and they believe that this will earn them more money at your expense.
6 Likes
I came here to add how much I hate the UI change. Missing simple functions such as “File Info” which i used a lot. Top scrolling is a dumb idea.
2 Likes
