Plex seems to be going backwards.

General Discussions
1

Lately it seems that Plex’s focus on getting more clients up and running has resulted in a loss of support for things that are already there. For example here is a non exhaustive list of the issues i see on a regular basis on clients for XBOX ONE and Amazon Fire TV.

  1. The XBOX One app is woefully slow to browse.
  2. The XBOX One App doesn’t seem to have been updated in eons. You can just binge on a series you have to mess putting next episodes on.
  3. No ability to adjust Audio Sync on Xbox One or Fire TV.
  4. On the Fire TV you can be browsing about and suddenly Plex starts playing a random Program. Last Night it was determined to make me watch Frasier when i was marking some stuff as Watched. Everytime i selected Watched it would flag the status and then play Frasier. Now i like Frasier but not that much.
  5. On the Fire TV if you pause and are away long enough that the Amazon screen saver comes on then you press any button. Instead of displaying the thing you were watching the app reboots and you then have to browse through all the sections then the browse button then find the program then find the season then find the episode then select it then press play. Its so tedious its ridiculous.

Thats all i can think of for now other than to say that this method of support sucks beyond words.

I want to log a ticket with you. Especially as a plex pass lifetime person. I want to know that my concerns are being dealt with. The way it is at the minute i have to keep finding a stupid forum post to know if you have bothered checking into my issue.

I am seriously considering a refund based on the crap support alone. Stop worrying about getting plex onto every device there is and fix it so it works on the ones you already have. We don’t all have massive erections for Apple you know. There are other manufacturers out there.

Rob Fullard

2

I’ll edit this out myself.

3

He’s got a point point though. While Plex aims for larger pastures and hosting their own crusade of device availability, they also seem to be letting everything else go.

Photos section is nothing more than a rough draft.

The Premium Music is nice, but the actual music player is nothing more than an after thought.

Sonos beta is woefully out of date and malnourished

Their plugins need an official API to reference for development

Plexit! Browser extension needs RSS feed capabilities

Shared libraries still cannot be merged with your own local library view.

Mobile apps still don’t have a server admin view

Still no audio book support

They still don’t have a statistics dashboard (similar to Last FM)

General file sharing hasn’t been included, so you still need to run an OwnCloud/Tonido instance to handle files

E-Books aren’t even on the radar as far as I can tell

Per-File sharing (or sharable links) haven’t been implemented.

Still no ability to post messages/alerts to connected devices from an admin account.

You cant recommend local files to your friends’ queue - only from online sources…

The mobile remote doesn’t work with any of the clients I have tried so far. It connects, but doesn’t actually control anything.

You can’t grab new subtitles on the fly

Web client can’t adjust audio delay

Blah, blah, blah, blah ad nauseum …

4

While much of what @wwwizzarrdry mentions is of zero interest to me. There are some points on my “Plex should do/fix this” list. But even though I have no interest in say “Still no ability to post messages/alerts to connected devices from an admin account” and many others listed does not mean that Plex should not do it. It just means that I have no dog in that fight.

Plex, it seems, has no interest in having a finished product or even finished parts of their product. They also do not really seem to care about what their users want. They do care about what they (Plex) want and they do care about adding stuff and functionality without any apparent concern about existing pieces of the product being finished or working properly.

I doubt that we will ever see much of many of the things mentioned here like true audiobook support or E-books but we can be assured that Plex will spend time and effort solving fringe desires that do not exist or exist for just a few users or exist only in the minds of the Plex pundits.

There is a high likelihood, from previous performances, that we can count on nothing getting finished or nothing that is truly wildly requested getting implemented.

We just have to use the Plex we get and accept the fact that there will be long term unfixed bugs and new ones will be introduced in the core when a fringe feature is added and the features many users want will never be included.

It is unfortunate that there is no real viable competition for Plex as that would make them be more user oriented.