No More Manual Home Screen After April 22nd?!?!?

Plex Players
61

I updated the server and tested the new Automated home screen a bit. While I appreciate the fixes for the CW limit and combined RA, for now, the changes are mostly disappointing for me, sometimes feeling like a downgrade.

You can’t reorder individual hubs anymore.
I have one Movie and 3 different TV libraries. I’m used to my manually managed home screen. I prefer always seeing those lines first:
Continue watching
On deck
Recently added tv (combined)
Recently added movies

Now, after the update. I’m mostly ok with merged OD/CW. And the library management on the server looks interesting, so I added “Top Rated” of each library to Home.

That’s where it started to disappoint.

Now I see this:
Continue watching (combined)
Recently added TV (combined)
Top rated TV
Top rated TV
Top rated TV
Recently added Movies
Top rated Movies

First of all, as with multiple RA rows from issues reported before - there is no indication of which Top Rated row belongs to which of my 3 TV libraries. I could only guess by content and pinned sidebar order. I think this will create too much confusion for inexperienced users.

And second, a complete downgrade: since all hubs of each library are “glued” to each other now, there’s no way to mix them up in any way. If you have 5 Movies hubs for one library, and 5 TV hubs for another, you’ll either see 5 hubs of Movies first or 5 hubs of TV library first. You can’t mix them now in any way. You can’t group by category, i.e seeing Recently Added for every library and then seeing Top Rated for every library etc.

This made my desired setup completely impossible now with new hubs added. I can’t set it like that, to my current knowledge:
Continue watching
Recently added TV
Recently added Movies
Top rated TV
etc in whichever order I desire.

The order is tied to the library order in the sidebar, so there’s no way to split or mingle so that I can get what I want.

This takes out the usefulness of the new hub management features completely for me. I had to turn it off and pretend it never happened.

Also, now server owners will be unable to pin sources they just often need to manage without being forced seeing them on the Home screen, but I think I mentioned that one before.

Also somewhat related:
Really nice to have that middle Home column in the recommended management, which I suppose is for customizing Home for the server owner only. However, it’s useless to me since I stopped using my server account years ago to watch things, because there was too much clutter from trying to manage (and notice) everything for everyone while trying to watch something for myself. I use a managed user for watching, limiting its data to what I want for myself. But now I guess I can’t even customize my own recommended hubs individually due to that.

As for the new Collections update:

I really wished for the collections to become pinnable for a while now, then I saw the changelog, which made me really happy. Until I found out that users can’t pin collections. Only admins can. I had a few personalized collections created for some of my users, with things I recommend them individually. And there’s no way to display it to only one of them. And no way for them to pin any collection they want themelves, apparently.

I find it really sad I can’t use most of the new exciting features on my small family server with just a few users that are very different in their tastes and needs with this “one size fits all” direction Plex seems to be going into.

@DaveBinM I really appreciate your work with the community in the recent threads, thanks for that! I found out a lot of useful info from your posts. Could you please tell me if I’m misusing the features somehow, maybe I missed something? Is there still a way to do the things I described? Or are there still some customization updates coming for transferring from manual to auto home screen? And if not, could you please relay my feedback on the lack of customization? I don’t think that my wishes are too unreasonable or rare, it just feels like the importance for some of the things wasn’t even accounted for when the decisions came, with estimation that most of the userbase does not need this. But I hope if there will be enough users sharing the same opinion, we could get some of the customizations back and have some of the new features be more usable than they are now.

62

@DaveBinM Thanks for the quick reply.

Each Movie library has three ticks against “Recently Added Movies” under Manage Recommendations.

They’re all pinned to the sidebar.

I actually upgraded the server to the latest version just in case that fixed it but alas to no avail.

Not sure what you mean by “refreshing” the home page, how do I do that?

63

I do feel as though the past 4 months all we are trying to do is get back to what we had in December. That ain’t happening.

64

I came across this article which confirms what I had suspected:

These new changes are a continuing shift in Plex’s focus away from home server use, to making it a platform to push sponsored and paid video on demand content.

Plex is using their car salesman pitch to try to convince users why these charges are what we want, but you will not find any response to the question of why not leave the choice for manual home screen layout.

From Plex CEO Keith Valory:

As with many tech companies, Plex no longer sees their users as their customers, the users are the product.

If you aren’t already familar, check out Jellyfin (open source). You can run Jellyfin along side Plex to give you time to transition. Jellyfin may not be as sleek as Plex yet, but it has a much brighter and user-centric future.

https://reddit.com/r/jellyfin

65

May I suggest reading what we had to say directly? https://www.plex.tv/blog/one-giant-step-for-plex-kind/

First of all, our commitment to our millions of customers with personal media collections is rock solid. We can confidently say that we will continue to support, develop, and innovate even better methods to help you organize, curate, and enjoy your media collections with beautiful interfaces and dashboards that take the headache out of managing all those different formats, sources, and media types. We are stoked that we’re able to keep the media nerd flag flying, and we have some awesome ideas up our sleeves to make the Plex you know and love even more powerful, personalizable, and elegant.

66

This is so confusing, your saying Plex is listening. All I can see is your not on many levels. I understand things need to change, then all I see is subscribers are so disillusioned at present. The question must be asked why? When the customization is taken away. Plex good luck as your going to need it from what I have witnessed in the forums.

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67

You did leave out the last part;

Plex will be putting funds toward developing the interface to bring all of your media to one place, including movies, shows, music, and your personal media collection. The goal is to include all major streaming services, along with premium titles available to rent or buy, by 2022.

I don’t need Plex to tell me where everything is but I, and the, assume a lot of people do.
I’ll see what Plex has transformed into by 2022. If it’s tolerable I’ll stay with it. If not, as you’ve pointed out, there are other options.

68

As long as I can continue to use plex to view and manage my own media in a useful way then I’ll continue to use it. We’ve loved plex for years in our house but the whole limited number of items on the CW and more importantly how plex handled it had me go and look at the alternatives and see how far they have come since I looked at them last.

They have come a long way and while plex at the moment still wins, I am however sure that if I need an alternative in the future I have very good options now to fall back on.

There are two main things I’ll want to keep a very close eye over next few months/years as plex look to integrate other streaming services into their platform:

  1. can I disable/hide it so it does not come into our plex experience.
  2. are they sharing any of our viewing habits back to other platforms they have integrated with. Even anonymously would be bad IMO.

So will certainly wait and see how plex moves forward but my trust in the brand and how they treat their long standing customers HAS BEEN ROCKED in recent times.

69

Ok I’ve now also reset the home screen completely and have the same problem still. With the merge recent option enabled, I only get Recent TV, no Recent Movies at all.

How do I report this as a bug?

70

Indeed, it appears the manual ability has disappeared! I sincerely hope it will be returning soon as I have 85 categories (I have in excess of 41,000 movies and TV shows and have them broke into categories). This results in the “automatic” setting having 85 “Recently Added in…” on the screen rather than just having one “general” recently added as before. Makes for a crowded and uncomfortable screen.

71

Is one of the movie libraries configured in the advanced library settings to be excluded from the home screen? That would cause it to disappear

72

Manual will not be returning, but there is an option on the server-side to combine the recently added hubs together as they were.

See: Manage Recommendations | Plex Support

73

When you say “excluded”, do you mean no tick against “Recently Added Movies - Home” under “Manage Recommendations”?

If so then yes I have two movie libraries with this unticked.

Very bizarrely, if I tick this box, it won’t stick at all and clears again the moment I revisit it.

74

Ah ok got you now. I had two movie libraries which were set to “exclude from home screen” in their settings, which is obviously why that setting in “Manage Recommendations” wouldn’t stick.

So I edited both libraries to no longer exclude them and that tick box is back in “Manage Recommendations”.

Now I do indeed get the merged “Recently Added Movies” so all is good right.

Not quite!

If I again exclude one of these libraries by unticking the Home option in Manage Recommendations, the entire merged section vanishes again from the home screen.

Please tell me this is a bug and not by design! I need to be able to exclude some libraries but still have a merged “Recently Added” which amalgamates the remaining included libraries.

75

Yes, that is a bug, I’m afraid, but we will be addressing it in future

76

Ah ok that’s not a problem then, I can deal with it in the meantime :slight_smile:

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77

NEAR future I hope. :slight_smile:

Also, it would be nice to have the option of pinning Plex Movies & Shows and not have it add to the CW and three rows on the Home screen.

78

I have a missing feature since the update that I haven’t seen addressed yet. I use Roku’s to watch my Plex and I was using Manual until yesterday to get around this but have now lost that option.

The issue is that with On Deck I was able to hit * (Menu) and choose to view On Deck on a grid instead of a single horizontal row. This allowed me to see all of my choices at once. Now I have no option for that any longer.

Will anything like that for the new combined Continue Watching feature be introduced?

Thank you

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79

I just do not understand how forcing this new, non-editable layout upon your paying users is ok? If you want that to be the default for people who can’t figure out their media or your run of the mill plug and play crowd, thats fine, but allow the majority of us to have the option, like we had before to disable.

Seriously, not all of us want a cluttered home screen with suggested this and recently added that nonsense. Why would anyone want to scroll down past all the B S to look through “shows on now” when they could have just clicked on the "Live TV & DVR? Even then, when you go into DVR content, you have to click and click and click (especially when you have season content) just to watch an episode. Do you guys somehow get paid every time we click?? (Don’t even get me started as to why we can’t watch content locally when the internet drops) Anyways, back on track…

Looking at the new forced layout on a TV of any size, is still a mess. Nothing is formatted correctly to fit the screen and for the older generation, they are especially confused as I have had MANY calls regarding “what is all of this JUNK on my screen now and how can I get rid of it”? I don’t blame them, it is JUNK. (Back story) I had those clients set up with simply the “continue watching” and anything else they wanted to watch, they clicked on the pinned sources. Just a nice CLEAN interface…Noticed what I mentioned there?? I was able to TAILOR the settings based upon the END USERS NEEDS! But now, thankfully, you guys have determined a one size fits all approach is best. That definitely is what has proven to work well with companies.

I’m looking forward to the future to where other current and new developers make a better streamlined product so I can finally migrate away from this clunky chaos known as PLEX. I mean seriously, Windows Media Center had better functionality and usability, (minus windows normal headaches) especially in their DVR form and function and they had a normal TV grid out the gate and that was 15+ years ago.

All I’m trying to say is focus on getting the simplification part refined, then build on that, but its like you guys just toss it all at the wall, somehow, it all sticks but none of it is really all that good…REFINE your product and if its a bottom line issue, get more investors and even raise your Plex pass rates so long as we the users know its going towards serious development to make it better but don’t cut off all customization, that should be a given.

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80

Anyone affected by the restrictions of the new Automated Home screen management, feel free to vote here: Give users more control over their hubs / compensate the removal of the manually managed Home screen

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