So, it’s been a week and this “improved” UI is still pretty awful. Nothing but complaints from my wife and other users. Still takes 3 to 5 seconds to update watched status for each episode. Clunky, awkward navigation. Incorrect metadata showing while viewing episodes. Inconsistent sizing of title cards or whatever the logo for each series/film is called, with no way to change it. No easily recognisable icons to see at a glance which kind of library you’re about to browse like the old side menu had.
It’s just worse in almost every way, and not improving.
It’s called a “clear logo” I believe and there is a third-party tool that you can use to change the logos. I’ve been using it for a while now, along with Photoshopping my own logos when needed:
While I believe the return of partially horizontal menus is a positive, I am becoming more and more aware of how much I have to dance around the Dpad to use them. I have to really think about what I’m doing because I press the wrong button a LOT.
I really miss everything being in a straight list up and down. Now more than ever.
If you’re running the current beta PMS you can just leave your desired logo in the folder for the show/movie now. I haven’t tried it myself but it’s an official supported way of changing the logo at least.
He’s not alone in this… For collectors, it is important to present their Star Wars collection (change the name with your personal top 20 movie collection) along with other movie collections in a stylish way (that is the reason why steelbook blu ray releases get sold). Here’s my use case which results in a couple of hundreds of collections….
Different users… different use cases. It’s all about having a choice.
This whole text as a graphics concept is a strange concept for a multi-language home entertainment system. I can understand the logo part, but apart from some main movie universe brands and their logos, this often has a visual representation of the english title.
With my around 11k movies… guess how many have a such graphics that make sense in a German library? In percent? Why center a home entertainment movie presentation page around these logos?
How about Hungarian logos? How aout chinese logos?
Who could ever think of this to be the future of presenting a movie or TV show this way?
I guess, for most of my 3k German movies, this will never happen at all.
And I am right, what’s the sense of presenting 5-10% of my movies this way? Is this coherent? Can it be switched off if it’s not? Does the whole design of the page look still good if no logos are around? Does it fallback to background or banners then?
I am not against including them if it makes sense. But pushing this down my throat does not fill good for me personally. And it does not look nicer than before. The current design gets me the distinct feeling as if something is looking good if no logo is around. But I don’t want my movies and TV shows not being presented this way. Especially on my mobile, where the logo is eating up much space (which is not that much of a problem on a Roku, but you hopefully get the idea).
I consider the new Roku navigation cumbersome when it works correctly, and additionally, there are times where the buttons don’t fail the correct content, which is poor quality - to clarify, when I load the home screen, I navigate up to Home, to the right to Libraries, down to Movies - at this point 1/3 things could happen
movies are loaded without clicking (just focused on)
movies are loaded when I click
movies don’t load at all after clicking, I’m moved back to the home screen and need to restart and try again
Having reported that feedback, I have one additional thought about this rollout…the method of rollout was poor because it was unrequested and mandatory. It would be better to leave the legacy navigation in place and offer users the option to preview a top navigation, with the option to revert. I believe most users would revert.
Appreciate the updates. It’s still cumbersome, but improved.
Since the update, the app crashes if I try to click on any season of any show. I can’t get past the main TV show page (it will play if I just hit the next episode button, but I can’t open a season). This issue isn’t happening on the main app, just the preview version.
Also, seasons can’t be hidden for single-season series that are entered into from a collection. It is showing a poster for season 1 even though the settings on the show say to hide seasons.
Thirdly, is there a reason my local background art settings are being overridden by default Plex artwork for a series?
Overall, I appreciate cosmetic updates, but I would love to see future updates focus more on improving features and functionality (example: Playlists) rather than promoting on-demand.
It’s not obvious, but in the release notes topics about Plex Preview there’s a link: (which keeps “autoformating” to “Roku” by the forum) https://my.roku.com/account/add?channel=plexpreview. You add the channel to your Roku using that link and when your Roku checks in you’ll have a 2nd Plex listing with a “Preview” flag on it.
I have to agree with the many others here, that the new UI is not an improvement over the old ‘left’ navigation panel. I’ve given it a chance so as not to think that I was resistant to change but still don’t like it. It’s not as intuitive as it was and doesn’t lend itself to as much customization either. I’ve read a lot of other critiques of the new UI and agree with most of them. I am requesting a way to roll back or give us an option to select which UI we’d like to use.
That’s an huge and beautifully organized collection. Also, thank you for the link to your other post in that thread. There started to be so many topics thrown around in there it was hard to parse out key details I needed to be able to document and share.
Overall, I give the Preview build a solid ‘meh’. So far it’s not enough to lure me back away from Emby..
I mean seriously, Plex… you thoroughly horked up the whole home media experience for SO many loyal customers and sorely underestimated the quality of your competitor’s offerings. Now you’re attempting to lure us back with a 50/50 mix of old coke and coke classic?
Sorry, but having tried it out it’s not faster than the original app, or even Emby. And I don’t like the dropdown nav.
I’ll check back periodically to see if y’all can regain your place atop the home media servers, but I’m not going to hold my breath considering how poorly this “upgrade” was managed,
One suggestion - add a persistent selection option that lets your customers set the Home and Nav to the Classic UI, or the “random streaming crap we think we can monetize”.
PS - the automated retrieval of subs in Emby is a game changer in our household. You should look into it sometime.
Also, thank you for the link to your other post in that thread. There started to be so many topics thrown around in there it was hard to parse out key details I needed to be able to document and share.