It seems hopeless.
I keep installing new servers (Windows 7 Pro) and NVIDIA SHIELD clients (latest). I keep hoping that all the bugs I’ve mentioned in these forums and I know about will get fixed. Some are more than a year old. Here are the top ones that are driving me nuts BUT FIRST I want to make something clear. Apparently different hardware platforms get different sets of features (or conditional code generation is all goofed up). For example, I recently ran PLEX on a TCL ROKU TV, and it behaves differently than the PLEX client under NVIDIA SHIELD (see specific example below).
. By far the most aggravating (and long-term) bug is CHAPTER SELECTION scrolls off the screen most of the time. I don’t know why. But it never used to do this under the old interface. There does not seem to be any method to the madness. I can, for example, (as a kludge) mark something as PLAYED, then try PLAY again, and maybe CHAPTER SELECTION will be there.
. I cannot get back to the old interface. There used to be a setting for it, but the old interface stopped working, so I was forced to stick with the new. And now (NVIDIA SHIELD) there isn’t even a setting to revert to the old interface (but it’s there on other clients). This is a regression.
. When I am done with a movie and I go to the SHIELD home screen, SHIELD still thinks the movie is still playing (it shows up in a Notification). I have to navigate to STOP to get it out of the way. This is a regression.
. On my server, I discovered a cool feature – I can double-click the icon for someone in the movie (or TV show) and it brings up a screen that shows the other movies (TV shows) that person is in. This does NOT work on SHIELD. I just figured it wasn’t available in the “client.” However, I was shocked to see the TCL ROKU client has this working. It’s as if PLEX is going out of its way to disable and/or break PLEX features for the SHIELD client!
. I have SINCE I STARTED WITH PLEX tried to get dual-NICs and so-called Remote Access to work. All inquiries I know of have gone ignored. I never got Remote Access to work until recently. (Dual NICs – I just gave up. It would’ve been useful.) The following SEEMS to be the Remote Access bug (among probably others I’ve muddled through): even though the interface allows me to specify an alternate port [why open a well-known port when I can change the port to something less likely?] IT WOULD SEEM when PLEX goes to VERIFY the port, it still uses 32400. In other words, once I opened both ports, PLEX thought Remote Access worked. I don’t know how many hours I’ve wasted on this alone. I didn’t report this “bug” until now because I know it will likely fall on deaf ears. Figuring this out was not high on my list because I have a complicated network of LANs and firewalls that made it a lot of work to test.
. Along these lines, now that I have Remote Access working [with an Internet connection that is not even close to supporting the bandwidth I would need for 1080p, 7.1 video], I notice that the IPs that PLEX requires me to allow in connect routinely all hours of the day and night. I have no idea what they’re doing. The connections do not last a long time – they are perhaps checking to see if the server’s up. I’ve seen nothing in the documentation to explain this would happen.
. Further along these same lines, I tested Remote Access with my neighbor’s connection. It was forced to go through a PLEX proxy so was bandwidth-limited, etc. But why? I have the port open! When the neighbor logs in [for testing], the clients goes to PLEX.TV (right?) and looks up their account and connects to my server [or should be doing this, right?] using that account-specific HTTPS domain that we get with PLEX. This should be a direct connection across the Internet, yet it goes through some sort of PLEX proxy? Why???
. Further along these lines, I try to use Alexa to play music (in a PLEX music library). Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve seen all sorts of error messages. When it’s working, it goes through the same above proxy. This is particularly aggravating because PLEX streams MP3’s when the underlying audio is FLAC [which I create en masse from .WAV files] and Alexa is supposed to be able to play .FLAC files. To add insult to injury, my server is on 192.168.x.0/24 and Alexa is on 192.168.y.0/24 [with x not equal to y]. So IN MY OWN HOUSE it would appear to stream from one LAN to another LAN the system goes through the Internet! Why? I may actually break down and “call AMAZON,” but I am not hopeful I’ll ever get a solution. Whatever causes this, it is likely just one of many bugs in some corner of many systems that may or may not randomly get fixed over time, but certainly not because of anyone I talk to. Both PLEX and AMAZON have carte blanche to do whatever they want. And “quality of code” (as proven by the steady stream of bugs in both systems) is not a priority, at least and especially in PLEX.
. Yeah, I’ve got better things to do than complain. I’d even be willing to look at the code myself and finally fix some of these bugs. But nothing I write here ever seems to end in something good. I take that back. IT WOULD APPEAR that someone read something I (or someone else) said about the icons when you DOWN ARROW while watching something. One can then move left or right to get to, for example, SUBTITLES (if you want to turn them off for when you’ve DVR’d something and the captions are not “in sync” with the talking). The cool improvement (unless it was actually just a random “bug” that had a beneficial effect, and will appear the next time someone screws around with this section of code: there seems to be precedent for this line of thinking) is: if the little icon [e.g., sound field] cannot be changed, it is now grayed out. So, when I record and watch the nightly news [yes, I have a 4-tuner Hauppauge in the server], and I watch it in PLEX, I do not have to skip left three times now, just once, to turn off our-of-sync captions.
. I reiterate a needed feature: give the ability to set ZOOM, etc. on a video-by-video basis and to set a default when it’s not set. If you forget to “unset STRETCH,” for example, the next thing you watch will likely be wrong. The simple, obvious solution is to be able to set it on a video-by-video basis.
. I was not born a cynic; nature gave me the ability; nurture brought it out. If you want me to shut up, I will gladly when I can look at the code and recommend fixes. I added my name to a distribution list, and it appears PLEX is looking for programmers. I’ve been doing just that and more for 40+ years, but what PLEX wants is not a fit for me. But if there’s a simple way to inspect code and recommend fixes, I would do that. I’m not interested in remuneration; I just want PLEX to work predictably well. 
Of course a long time ago I got a message from the PLEX system that my e-mail does not work (which it does); I replied to no avail; the system can squawk but does not read or react to replies.
, P…S. As previously mentioned “somewhere else,” I find this forum confusing to use. I suspect posting this message HERE (or perhaps anywhere in these forums) is unwelcome. I am just so frustrated with the steady stream of BUGS, REGRESSIONS, and NO FIXES, especially for the NVIDIA SHIELD client. I’m not the only one complaining! I’ve mentioned I bought the NVIDIA SHIELD box because it was one of the few boxes that could stream high-bandwidth video, and now I find PLEX seems to discriminate against it! (See above comments.) Ugh…
