I hear you, but if they need to add this card to comply with their service provider, funny you think it’s on everyone’s best interest to have ALL TV series/sessions look and act the same?
I totally agree with everyone that the Season Card should use the season artwork if it exists - that’s a no-brainer.
While I DO GENERALLY I LIKE the new UI, there are still actual bugs and and other UI quirks like having several more button presses to accomplish the task as the old UI and Live TV, re-integrating Music back into the UI so it doesn’t feel like an after thought, etc, etc.
I’m happy to hear you understand that in the scheme of things, this isn’t harming or breaking anything - in fact, even though the Card isn’t really doing anything or adding to the experience, it isn’t negatively impacting the usability either.
This is often a bit jarring to me when I start a new season. I would expect the first episode of a season to appear first. I still don’t understand what the purpose of having this new Season Card is for. I instinctually hit right to get to Episode 1 anyway.
So… is it a second way to launch the first episode? Because if you’re deep into a season, navigation begins on the episode you’re on. So… is it just there to add space? I don’t get it.
The reason why I want it fixed:
The problem is that the background of the card (if blank in the season poster) does not use the background selected by the user in the Library Poster
Not using what the user selected as a background in the Library Poster (unless chosen by the user in the Season Poster) is lazy coding
They haven’t fully answered the question and didn’t come back to it when asked for more, but in that other thread, they mentioned they are investigating ways to manage show\season level stuff but they use their Movie\TV service as the example. On the Plex Movie\TV service they really don’t have a way to manage show and season level stuff - you can’t navigate the hierarchy because there’s no “season” or “show” level at all. So I do get why it might work as a solution for there. I just don’t get what it’s supposed to be improving for the local media side of things because as far as I can tell it’s redundant and more awkward than what we already have - particularly since they improved what we already have by adding the “show” navigation (and please just add the navigation to all detail screens even if we have “don’t show seasons if only 1 season” enabled).
If they really wanted to seriously test\feedback this new layout function they’d do it on the bigger Preview clients - AppleTV for example. So who knows… maybe they’re using Roku Preview to test because it’s easier to flip it around or reverse things (like adding Photos\Music back in on Roku before the other clients).
I don’t think we’ll get an actual response though… based on lack of responses to other UI\UX things. The whole situation just feels weird to me which is why it’s kinda come to represent “new Plex business” and bugs me so much even though it’s ultimately a minor thing… it’s become representative. Probably because it reminds me of some of my own work experience and what those “weird” decisions actually meant for the business.
I don’t know if this was mentioned/requested elsewhere, but I’m again to the Season Card using the appropriate artwork, it should also act like other areas in the UI where it plays the next unwatched episode.
Currently, if you select the Season Card, episode 1 of the season plays regardless of whether it was watched or not.
I appreciate that the app is being constantly worked on, but the latest update (Ver 8.5 build 3) is rather frustrating. I can see why the Libraries hub in the row just beneath Continue Watching has been ditched; it wasn’t really necessary. But now when I click on Libraries it doesn’t tell me which server a particular library is in. I have two servers which basically mirror each other and over 50 libraries. It wasn’t too bad in the old system as I could choose which server’s libraries I wanted to look at and quickly scroll down through the individual library titles. (And it was easier as it was an alphabetical list, not broken up into ‘types’ of content.)
Indeed, it would be great to be able to switch servers easily or to at least see them more plainly.
Please give some thought to those of us who use Plex to manage their home media library.
A second thing I’d like to note is that when I go directly into Plex, it often fails to find both servers, Then I must go back to the general Roku screen and tap the asterisk button under Plex Preview and ‘Re-start app’. I never have to do this with the old standard Plex app. Additionally, when I first start the Plex Preview app there about one-third of the time I get a screen with no visual material. I re-start again and it is usually okay. But frustrating.
It may help to say that this my servers are up-to-date: Version 1.41.9.9961. And this happens on both my Roku Ultra and my Roku 3 (4200X).
I really appreciate some of the developments and I know you are working to make the experience of using Plex as seamless as possible. I am grateful that you are still working to improve the interface and will look forward to what happens next.
Thanks
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Saturday, 9th August
Thanks for addressing my point about indicating the server name in Libraries. It is great to know these posts can have an impact!
I have done this once, let me try again. The first time it didn’t land super clear, so hopefully this is a bit better, we will see.
There are three levels to a TV show:
The show itself
Seasons of the show
An episode of a season of the show
On TV clients we have always had a show level view and an episode level view. We haven’t had a season level view on TVs in the past. Why is this important?
each level has individual metadata that we want to show. There are show synopsis, season descriptions, and episode descriptions
while less important, there is usually individual artwork associated with each level here
more important: there are functions that are relevant at each level. Let’s take ratings* for example. The ability exists to rate a show, rate a season, or to rate an episode.
*Note - I specifically used ratings as an example here. Ratings exist both on a PMS and also as part of our Discover feature. So they are relevant even if you have some of the online sources turned off and are only interested in PMS content.
In addition to ratings, another good example here is “Mark as (Un)Watched”. I want to mark an entire show as (un)watched. I want to mark an entire Season as (un)watched. I want to mark an episode as (un)watched. While the show and episode actions exist today, season actions were previously not available on our TV clients.
We have also worked on the logic for when the first “season” card is highlighted/focused vs when an episode is focused. Nav should go to an episode card when landing on the page from something like Continue Watching. Any other specific episode nav should land on the specific episode. When navigating from one of the top “Season” buttons or from the show screen it will land on the season card.
I hope this helps a bit in explaining the “why” it is here. We are exploring the treatment on it as while it does show a season-level image, often those don’t look a lot different than some of the episode images. And we are reading the feedback here and considering it. Thank for all of your comments!
Definitely still going to happen, but no timeline to give here. I just double checked the ticket on this one and it is definitely still active but won’t get attention until we start getting the TV clients released.
This latest update seems to have removed the labelling of servers in the libraries on the ribbon bar. If one has multiple servers it becomes harder to identify which server to browse. For example, just having in my case 3 listings for movies and 2 for tv might be OK for me when I know which order I added them to the App in and how they’re sorted, for my wife and others on the other hand it’s not real user-friendly.
@McWanke , Season Card make sense, and my only problem with it is that if a Background is not chosen for a season, or is blank, it will choose the first background in the Series Poster, not the one chosen by the user. And when there is an unselected background image in the Season Card, even that is ignored (but it will be used if selected by the user.)
It would make more sense when the Background is not chosen for a season, or is blank that the Background chosen by the user in the Series Card is used.
Well… you have it in the wrong spot. I wouldn’t expect more info about a Season to appear as the first card of the episodes.
What I WOULD expect, is that when I click into a show, I am taken to Season cards where I would then see the information available by season. I could then select the desired season, and get the Episode cards. I would also expect to roll back through the layers until I got back to the show level.
The page is there. It just doesn’t do what it should do. You’ve created a new behavior to solve a problem that doesn’t match the rest of the structure. I don’t understand why we’re not properly layering our layers?
Also, all of this would be way easier to look at if we weren’t so opposed to vertical stacking of information. Each level could easily slide off to the left as you dove deeper in.
