At this point, I want my money back. You’ve created a media server that can’t play my music without skips and jumps and (on the Xbox, constantly cutting to new songs in the middle of the current song), you can’t sync my music to my phone without endless hangs and reboots, and then deleting all my artist artwork and some of my album artwork, with no ability to repair the corruptions. You can’t sync; you can’t play… What can you do? I grant my music plays fine in direct play on the PC on which my music is stored, but I didn’t hire you for that: Windows Media Player would have been just fine if that’s all I’m getting from you.
Your software has never worked properly. I am now told by your billing department that I waited too long to request a refund. Why am I being punished for giving you all a chance to make good?
If I’m a fool for trusting you (and I probably am) then you’re thieves for taking my money and not delivering even a minimally working product. I’m not a mind reader, but if you never intended to make a working product, then you’re liars, too. Of course, it’s not illegal just to be incompetent. Either way, your business model is based on contempt for your customers. You’re non-responsive to bug reports and requests for help. You think it’s the user community’s job to work for you for free providing the support you won’t. You don’t care about the hundreds (collectively: thousands? millions?) of hours we waste trying to work around the deficiencies in your product. You take our money, then move on to new half assed features to bilk new customers out of money while never delivering what we paid for.
The funny thing is, until two days ago, I would have been happy to work for you for free, recreating all the errors I’m running into following whatever logging instructions you want, etc. if only you’d been responsive and acted like you gave a damn. But you never followed up, and frankly, you’re dead to me now. You have lost all my trust and goodwill. You’ve hit my breaking point. I am sick of companies who take customer’s money and then treat them with contempt. You’re a class action lawsuit waiting to happen. Just give me my money back.
I understand your fanboys with Stockholm Syndrome will now try to defend you. Save your collective breaths. If the software works for you, or you’re ok wasting days and days and days trying to ekk a little functionality out of this turd, bully for you. I’ve wasted hundreds of hours trying to get this to work. I’m done.
Xbox and Plex is a complete mess with buffering issues all over the place on the video side as well. Devs should be properly communicating here as to the status of all the issues it is having. Don’t care if it’s MS’s or Plex’s fault Plex devs should be talking more about how they are working on fixes for the Xbox version.
True, true. The android app is a complete mess, too. I had my phone tied up for at least 10 days trying to sync my music, and it constantly got hung up where restarting the server didn’t even help. I must have rebooted my computer a couple hundred times, and when it was done, the artwork was all corrupted, the songs skipped and jumped (pretty sure a transcoder bug with lossless wma files), and I couldn’t even see all my albums when I clicked on an artist.
Contrast just using Windows Media Player (which hasn’t had any development in 7? years) to sync over a USB cable… the same amount of music took 10 hours. And it did those lightening conversions without adding all the skips and jumps that Plex’s transcoder adds. I wouldn’t mind if Plex’s transcoder was slower if it could do a better job, but it can’t. Unfortunately, WMP was limited to 192 kbps (which I can live with, but I wanted about twice that), and then using Google Play Music to play the files drops half my track numbers (don’t know if this is just a performance hack on large libraries, but it renders that a poor solution for me).
Funny. I just tried Emby. I can’t do squat on most of their apps unless I fork over for a subscription, but I was able to stream lossless WMA to my Android and it sounded lovely. (wish I could find a link to the thing I read where some Plex person was bragging that their Android app ‘plays everything’ when it is still transcoding WMA. It’s obviously possible to direct play WMA on Android if Emby can do it.) I still don’t know if Emby’s transcoder or offline sync are any good and I’m gunshy about giving money to another company without a free trial. But just hearing quality music come out of my phone for the first time in so many years is heartening.
You will quickly discover, once and if you fork out money, it is not all good and working in there either. Both systems have shortcomings, but Emby does annoy me in terms of a number of functions Plex has not being accessible.
That’s certainly a disappointment I’m mentally prepared for. So many software companies producing half baked crap these days.
From looking at the limited free functionality, I can already tell I’m going to have to do a mountain of work to get artist images into Emby. Though I can do that before I try their subscription. Lol. They’re happy to let me submit images to them before I can even so much as play a song on my PC or anything but direct stream to my phone. Free labor!
And I think their UI for playing music on the PC is functional but a bit flaky, though their UI on the Android seems sufficient. Won’t know until I commit.
But all I need it to do is sync and play music on a few devices, so maybe I’ll get lucky. See? Somehow I’m still an optimist. Plex hasn’t completely crushed my spirit.
The biggest difference between Plex and Emby is attitude of the support team.
Plex: it works for me, therefore it’s you. You are nothing but a very vocal minority anyway, so do your whining elsewhere. Not happening, locked. Your concerns will be ignored. Here is a picture of a cute cat to distract you from your real problem…
Emby: follow the guidelines to report your problem in a certain way. Once you do, we will acknowledge it, look into it and fix it. Here, try the latest beta, is that better? Btw, your idea is excellent, it will be implemented with the next update. Have a nice day!
So even if both products were equal (which in many ways they are), I much, much prefer the Emby approach over how Plex deals with their customers…
One thing that does bother me with Emby is that with the same content, almost all of my video content is being transcoded for some reason, whereas with Plex is streams directly. The feedback from support was that it is my problem and the issue of the content. However, how come it can be streamed in Plex and has to be transcoded for Emby
True story. The last email I got from “Chris” trying to get a refund through the only department that accepts email (billing, of course), said there are ‘thousands and thousands’ of customers who don’t have any problems, so I must be an edge case.
I can reproduce an issue at will with my Xbox X where it buffers at exactly 3 mins for 4k HDR videos. I can do this with at least a dozen different video files. This should be easy to at least have me upload logs and have a dev look through it to see where the problems is even if it can’t be currently resolved it should be put on a bug list to resolve.
I can’t even get a plex Dev to contact me to have me upload logs, this is not a random issue, I can reproduce it at will
In cases like this, what they should be doing is getting with the person on a Webex to sort it out and observe the issue live, collect logs, etc. At least that is the way I would run the show in cases where and if there is a reproducible issue to be isolated in the wild.
I started thinking of switching over to Emby a year ago when they messed the Android client.
Then I pulled the trigger and paid for Emby premier late in 2018 after Plex had done away with Plug-ins, deployed Web Shows, deployed Tidal and Podcasts, and messed the Roku client. It was just clear that they are going in a different direction with so much focus on web delivered content straight to the client app.
In my own experience Emby has been far superior to Plex.
Look, I do not sync much to my phone or other mobile devices, so I had not had a need to try out sync on Emby and I had only used it a few times in Plex.
So, before composing this reply I tried downloading a single album from my Emby server to my phone. The songs are mp3s encoded at 256kbps, nothing fancy. Every one downloaded super fast and playback just fine.
It has been a while since the last time I tried to sync something in Plex (and I no longer have the client installed so I’m going by memory); I seem to recall the process being much slower and sometimes failing… or rather, the sync becoming stuck.
Yes, absolutely agree that there is not a perfect system and there are bugs and shortcomings in Emby.
Other than that I believe my experience with Emby has been far, far superior to my experience with Plex.
Yep I can reproduce the issue at will I just need a dev to reach out to me, I can also play the same 4k HDR videos on my Galaxy TabS3 which support 4k HDR and they play fine.
This would be a great chance for Plex devs to get info on this particular issue
plenty of them (issues) out there where a quick session with an end client would help developers figure out what is going on … @elan, maybe that is something you should consider?
