Just wanted to start a friendly discussion to see how the community views some of the recent design choices Plex has made over the last few months. From the new web dashboard to PMP replacing PHT and all the different mobile clients, how satisfied are your with your personal Plex experience and the design of the applications you use?
I personally am growing concerned with the design choices of some apps and user control over certain features that seem to be disappearing in updates every so often. I myself have always been a huge fan on controlling the software you use, rather than being forced to work within the limitations of the software being used. The ladder is the current state of Plex for me. If I choose to use all the latest PMS/Web and PMP updates, I am forced to work within what feels like a “restricted area” if that makes sense. This is a feeling that I’ve never felt with Plex before until the recent months.
My opinion certainly isn’t the majority here, but this place to ME now feels less about people passionate about a unique software project, and more like a company who is mostly concerned with maximizing the revenue streams and lowering cost/time of development cycles. This happens often when companies start trying to make more money. If that’s what you guys are after, then I can’t blame you for that. But as a longtime user, just know the charm about Plex was never about how big of a brand it was, but about how great it was as a user to have so many options available to you while using the software.
Plex does not like choice except where absolutely needed. The moves lately have virtually all been directed at increasing the appearance (sometime successfully and sometime not) and increasing the sameness between clients while at the same time removing choice and customization.
This is so strongly ingrained in the “Plex” vision that Plex never responds to any questions about “why” as they do not seem to think it is possible to have “customization,” “functionality” and “pretty” at the same time.
Plex is still the best of the media managers for my use but forcing everyone to use Plex in the same way is not conducive to further advancement.
Plex needs to realize that pretty does not equal good but the it is possible to have pretty and good together with proper design including the ability to customize.
Plex was first designed for the more intelligent part of the streaming population but now they abandoned that group and are designing for the low end of the intelligence scale. The are embracing the “it is OK to be stupid” view of technology.
Plex has lowered their view of the streaming world and that lowering is adversely impacting the usability and functionality of Plex and trying to make everyone view their media in exactly the same way.
On most clients the Plex interface has become very pretty but quite reduced in usefulness.
I would like Plex to return to their earlier vision but that is EXTREMELY unlikely and Plex has not recently shown any indication that they have any desire to actually listen and interact with their user community and, to my knowledge, the Plex user community has had no say in the design process beyond reporting bugs.
The developers are just that, they receive direction from someone else, perhaps that someone else should get the wake-up call, he seems to have been conspicuous by his absence for the past couple of months.
I have never seen so much bad feeling in every section concerning the direction Plex is heading in any other software application forums I have ever known (and that goes back to BB’s, as they were ‘in the day’)!
@NedtheNerd said:
The developers are just that, they receive direction from someone else, perhaps that someone else should get the wake-up call, he seems to have been conspicuous by his absence for the past couple of months.
I have never seen so much bad feeling in every section concerning the direction Plex is heading in any other software application forums I have ever known (and that goes back to BB’s, as they were ‘in the day’)!
Regards
I see a whole new direction to this thread, and others, if this is true. and I wonder who “he” is that works behind the scenes and forces the whole of of Plex into a direction that is resisted by, apparently, a large number of users.
This could be a boon to conspiracy theorists Plex wide.
Does this mysterious “he” have additional hidden agendas and/or is he aiming at world domination? Are subliminal messages being embedded in the Plex software and maybe even in the actual media streams or is this even a deeper more insidious plan.
Have aliens actually arrived on earth and are hiding among us? They do not actually look like us but they are making us believe they do via signal that are embedded in the airwaves all around us. However they have a weakness: They can be seen by wearing special glasses and those glasses also reveal the hidden messages all around us. (If that is familiar to some maybe it was intentional?)
Plex is just one more way the aliens have to force conformity on the world. Once they are done the world will be their docile tool and they can move on to their real goal of control and what they really want is our water. (Also intentional from another source)
So stop the invaders NOW!! Resist the control. Keep your media yours so use Plex in the way you want to and resist the coercion in all its forms. And it is also clear that all the developers are not totally behind the plan so support those. And to the developers in the resistance: You are not alone and you will be supported in your resistance to the world takeover.
I’m going to mostly disagree. The standardization across applications is a welcome development in my eyes. Customization is all well and good for us power users…but customization can add unneeded complexity and unreliability for the mass-market. To call that the “low end of the intelligence scale” is silly. Most people just want something that works with minimal setup and recurring troubleshooting sessions. If it looks nice on top of that…even better. Not wanting to spend time customizing your media consumption interface doesn’t make someone dumb…it probably just means they have far better things to do with their time.
When you add in friends and family to the mix…the cost/benefit ratio gets even more skewed. I don’t want get stuck as tech-support after my nephew tried to install a custom skin on his client and borked something in the process. I don’t want help my brother in law try to install some sketchy plugin he found online. No thanks. Just make it work with low barriers to entry…I have better things to do than become an unpaid sys-admin for my plex ecosystem.
Aah, nostalgia…went and fired up an ol’ version of Plex (really old). Man, I remember how fun it was. It felt decades in front of the pack, even with the old weather feature :).
PHT seemed to appreciate that niche enthusiast audience that thrives on their media collection, and loves a theater experience, with credits, actors, summaries, etc, all in a clean, sexy interface they could customize, personalize.
No longer. Its crude, boring, and most startlingly, more buggy than ever. The newest features, what they are, don’t make a lot of sense. It feels like “great” has been replaced with “good”.
I say the road to standardization is paved with good intentions, but many would’ve just like to have stayed home.
Plex, build the default experience how your vision (or whom ever vision it is) sees fit but throw in options to allow people to change settings/options. Best example of this was blur. Users had dim for so many years then bam blur and only blur. 5+ thread pages and finally Plex relented and kept blur default (GREAT) but had the option for dim (Awesome). During those 5+ thread pages Plex was very adamant to accept blur and that they would see what could be done to lessen the effect. Plex was adamant that dim would take too much effort and would be hard. A day later the Plex developer had it in the preview.
Now having one GUI for all devices is a very good thing but it does not mean the experience has to be the same for all people. I do not see how a setting such as one that puts “Discover” in back of Movie or TV Library instead of in front of it can hurt. Some people find Discover useful, some do not. I want my library front and center and someway to access Discover the 5% of the time I might actually use it. Another one would be labels/text next to icons. The roku plex channel during preview had words next to all the icons on the preplay screen. Then after an update they were gone. Why not throw an option in for those and keep it on by default. Hard to tell what all those meant without clicking on them (for new people). Once you get to know it you could turn it off if you wanted.
The part I do not understand is that Plex seems to want the experience all the same. Then the Apple TV version comes out and it looks quite different. To my above example Apple TV has text/labels next to icons. Roku has it removed.
To sum up, Rarflix for Roku was amazing. It surpassed the original channel in so many ways (at the time) and gave so many options which many users loved and became sad when they saw the new plex channel moving the way it was. You will always get the people who complain about gui but the majority of us power users just want the settings to manipulate the current gui in a more optimized way. I do see a lot more options/settings coming into the current roku plex channel (woot) and I just hope more come especially to control the gui. Let us make the big tile into 3 more smaller ones (less likely to have to click more). Let us move discover to the back of our main library.
@jmeehan11 said:
Exactly what features have been lost. I see a lot of complaining, but not one example. You guys sound like my wife.
Bad choice in mates, I guess. Anyways, how about the feature where Plex didn’t bork some existing functionality over each new release? I can tolerate a stagnant product that works every time, or a product that brings valuable new features even if buggy, but here we have the worst of both worlds. And let’s try to drop the ad hominems, ok?
I think long time Plex home theater users have a legitimate gripe. The product that they supported and funded through its continued development as a best in class home media center, has been diverted into exactly what has been described earlier in this thread - a middling, crippled client catering to the lowest common denominator of the most limited devices…phones. Im not denigrating those use cases, but in trying to be all things to all people, it has ended up somewhere in the middle.
@pjmorley said:
Good thread. My only question at time point is: which competing product will I eventually move to?
As of right now the only really viable competing product is Emby. However Emby is rather far behind Plex in most phases of use and is not even as functional in many areas functionality.
This is actually what makes Plex’s moves recently more disturbing. Instead of moving forward to meet new needs and wants of the media using community Plex seems to be moving backwards to the standard set by the inferior product that is its nearest competitor.
In fact that could be part of the problem. Plex is, and has been for some time, the leader in its field and may be falling into the front runner trap of thinking that nothing it does can be wrong.
Plex will have to deteriorate a good deal further to lower itself to Emby’s level but I am sure that Emby is working to improve so Plex’s fall will not have to be as far as Emby may meet them half way.
I REALLY like Plex and the few times I have tried Emby I found it harder to use and MUCH clumsier to use than Plex but the last time I looked at Emby I did find it better than the first and decided that if it ever turned out I could not use Plex I could use Emby.
It is not so much that anything is currently better than Plex but the gap is narrowing and it could, at some point, develop that Plex is no longer number one for me. The gap is narrowing and if that happens then I will reluctantly move on.
Plex needs to rethink their direction and vision because if the current trend continues the fail point will be reached sooner rather than later.
Recent developments have almost moved me to the point where I will try Emby again to see how they are coming along. There are advantages to having a lot of truly free time and being old enough where going out is difficult. I have time to test whatever peaks my curiosity.
@latweek said:
I think long time Plex home theater users have a legitimate gripe. The product that they supported and funded through its continued development as a best in class home media center, has been diverted into exactly what has been described earlier in this thread - a middling, crippled client catering to the lowest common denominator of the most limited devices…phones. Im not denigrating those use cases, but in trying to be all things to all people, it has ended up somewhere in the middle.
But you don’t have to settle for some ‘middling, crippled client catering to the lowest common denominator of the most limited devices’, stick with OpenPHT, most of the long standing issues and features have been already addressed, with more on the way.
Plex’s success has been it’s downfall. The more success they have the less they listen to their users. They’ve made some good business moves and currently no real competition so they can get away with it. This may work great for them in the short term but I suspect once there is a competing product, PLEX will quickly learn why it’s not a good long-term approach.
Emby only real close alternative. Emby gets newer features a lot quicker than plex. Plex usually gets those features 1-2 years later. Plex has the better client gui for a wide range of devices and better transcoding. I would not mind waiting so much if I did not see so many other features come before it. Plex music was big and I did not know many people cared about downloaded music anyore. Most have switched to pandora, apple music, google music (Who really wants to download, store, organize and tag music anymore?). Once alternatives became available for a low fee many buy into it. The video market is still very volatile with so many exclusive shows/movies going to one service or another. Many services pop up overnight and some die. I would give up all my media if there was one place that had every movie and every tv show (including current seasons day 1) and would gladly pay a larger fee for that.
@pjmorley said:
Good thread. My only question at time point is: which competing product will I eventually move to?
I suspect that Plex’s design decisions are now driven more by their monetization plans than functionality.
Plex’s financial future is not based upon income from Plex Pass subscriptions. We helped get them this far, but now they are taking money from venture capital investors. They are looking to provide return on those investments. In this interview https://motherboard.vice.com/read/plex-streaming-app-future-plans Scott Olechowski, Plex’s co-founder and chief product officer states, “Over time, we expect to do deals with various content providers in order to enable them to use Plex as a distribution platform,” adding that Plex sees itself as a possible destination for “folks who want to get their content out to users around the world on any streaming device.”
I believe Plex design will focus more on providing opportunities to monetize with “content providers” and less on functionality for Kodi-like home video library geeks.
A simplified GUI familiar to the smartphone generation is probably seen as more accessible to new users. This would provide value to content providers.
The “Discovery” section (which many of us centered on home libraries dislike) could allow Plex to offer “premium placement” to content providers. Allowing users to disable it would lessen its value.
I’m still using Plex for now, but if my suspicions are correct and it focuses more on becoming a distribution platform for outside content, I may be looking for an alternative that concentrates on providing the best experience for home libraries.
