This really needs to be addressed.
If they want to separate it on mobile, that’s fine with me since I use the two media types differently.
But on the TV, it makes no sense to a) remove a foundational feature from the Plex UI, but then to ignore being able to play music from your home’s media hub from a separate app (yuck) makes no sense.
Photos? I’m fine with a separate app.
Except when you want to show a slideshow of an album on your TV. (Obviously you might not want to, but that’s a pretty common request).
Right, a separate Photo app for the TV would work out great for me.
I don’t think photo albums benefit from the audio/video interface and selections that work so well for video and music.
Photos need multiple filters used simultaneously - location and date for example. Or linking people data collected from Microsoft OneDrive, Some, Google, etc.
These things, IMO, is better served with it’s own app.
so i am curious, am i the only one that is having issues with the home screen not displaying things? my tv section not only is pinned but fails to load and is at the bottom of the screen when it is the top over all the other categories , why change the interface when it works? glad i am not updating it yet to this
Just a couple initial things I noticed that felt awkward and an “okay, not as bad as I thought it’d be”. 
All my settings from the previous Roku Preview version transferred just fine to this version. That was nice.
When it first loaded defaulted to HOME it said the admin hadn’t loaded any libraries and even leaving and coming back in or navigating to settings or along the top bar changed anything. It wasn’t until I navigated into one of my libraries the first time that Home then populated. That was a little odd. I have all discovery stuff disabled so only had Search, Home and Libraries so maybe that was part of it.
Two similar navigation hiccups:
1st: When I go to my libraries and I want to “heart” them. I put a heart on the first library and then I click “down” on the remote to click the heart on the next library… but it doesn’t take me to the heart it takes me to the library name to navigate to it. Same thing happens if I’m on the hearts and click “up”.
2nd: Similarly, if I click on my profile picture and then click “down” it doesn’t take me to the profile icon below my profile picture, it takes me to my “details” box on the far right instead. I have to click down and then left to get to the left side navigation for the profile stuff.
In both cases It isn’t going up or down in the column I’m in, it’s going to a different column instead - if that makes sense? The focus moved vertically and horizontally when I expected it to move only vertically. It’s not intuitive and it made it awkward.
It’d also be nice to re-arrange the favorited libraries - or maybe put a note in some of that expanse of blank screen space saying something that the order they are favorited will set the order of things on the Home Screen. It is particularly irritating redoing favorites to re-order them when it doesn’t go up and down the hearts column directly.
That top navigation:
I do not like the top navigation - my TV is wide, not tall, and it feels like wasted screen use taking up a dedicated top bar pushing some info down when there’s blank space on the left hand side of my screen under my profile picture for those buttons using those icons.
Speaking of the top navigation… here’s the "not as bad part … hitting back on the remote (the dedicated button next to home, not the left arrow on D-Pad) does jump me to the navigation no matter where I am - including leaving the libraries open while I navigate - and hitting back again jumps to home. That is working better than what I saw with the AppleTV Experience so I’m glad it’s working this way here. It still feels weird to have a left facing arrow on the remote go to a top menu instead of a side menu but… shrug.
A back button oddity that felt awkward as well. If you hit BACK enough times Plex opens a pop-up asking you if you want to exit or switch user. You can hit back again to exit that screen but that doesn’t feel intuitive. If you give 2 options to select on an overlay it might confuse people who won’t think to select neither of them and back out by hitting the button that got them there again. Maybe move the switch user option to somewhere else and let that be a “don’t exit” or “stay in Plex” or something… or add that as a 3rd option. I’m not really sure where that works best but I think something a little more clear would be helpful.
Lastly… for now:
I’m with @cmpegeek that finding some happy medium on the preview image layout would be appreciated. In the current Plex I’ve learned to pick my backgrounds knowing the right side will be cut off in the preview display on Roku so now cutting off the other way feels weird and messes with my chosen backgrounds a bit now. I assume some of this adjustment maybe is to address people with background art with a focus on the right side - common so it works well with text summary\titles on the left (which also seems common default options too) - and complaints about art getting cut off so from that assumption the change makes sense… just… would like it to not cut anything off if possible?
Edit: Sorry… one more pro column thing; was showing the new layout to the wife and it is definitely snappier. The transitions are clean too. My RokuTV is not very powerful either and it’s is noticeably snappier moving through the interfaces.
That blank left hand section on the screen just looks odd still though… just a profile icon? The profile icon disappeared after Roku went to sleep so it looked even more weird.
I installed the new Preview over the previous Preview and so it carried over most if not all of my existing settings.
So I didn’t go though the initial setup process, but it sounds like you need to Pin your favorite Libraries to your home screen.
I think this is my biggest gripe about top nav on a horizontal interface. It takes up way too much space where valuable content can be displayed. Meanwhile there is all this extra space on the sides. Doesn’t make sense.
Even less sense that a left nav DOES appear later for… reasons.
@jfreiman that’s the thing, they are all pinned, i unpin and repin shut the app and it does it again, that is the only library that is not behaving right and the continue watching will not show up till after that decides to appear like a good boy lol
Speaking about the UI designed for talp or wide screens, I think Plex needs to address different sized, larger and larger screens or viewing distance - depending on how t you look at it.
Larger screens or close to screens shouldn’t be larger, they should adjust to the size and display more or less on the screen depending on user preferences.
This ‘concept’ isn’t new and it’s a feature of many development platforms - heck, Windows 10 did this a decade ago for Windows Phone apps, desktop apps and screen size/dpi capabilities. 
I was hoping that a new UI, especially one built from the ground to (iOS/Android) would have this in it’s scope of design.
Whether that could be applied to the Roku app is a different question.
While I am not justifying the UI layout (I actually didn’t hate it yet) it is definitely not a design that would be applied to touch screens
A touch screen UI would place the top menus at the bottom of the screen, not the top. Closer to your body and fingers, not at the furthest part of the screen.
IMO, this UI is designed for a mouse with the classic top menus found on all desktop apps on every platform.
on roku is there seprate settings for that? it seems like it is only on my roku and a samsung tv right now it started about 3 days or so ago now, the web app is fine, but like i said everything is pinned and it takes forever to load for the television library and for it to show up and at the very bottom at that… i have issues with ios app with the gui but not related to this
GUI oddity when browsing episodes.
Switching between episodes of a show, if the summary is empty, the whole episode list and cast etc jumps up or down to account for it. Seems like it’d be better to have the summary block be static size?
Maybe the dynamic function was to keep from having wasted blank space?
Here are two episodes and you can see how the display changes when you switch between them - it’s very jarring when it happens.
With Summary:
Without Summary:
You can tell how much it shifts looking at the cast\crew row visibility. Going through a bunch of episodes it jumps up and down if there’s some with no summary.
Works better side by side… maybe video woulda been better… you get the idea.
Edit: Okay… video here with dropbox link.
The order (from top to bottom) that things are displayed on your home screen is dependent on the order your libraries are pinned. In the old interface it was top to bottom pinning. With this new interface it is left to right.
Hover over your library and press the * key on your remote and reorder it from there.
ETA: It orders by library group based on pinning. Then within the group it orders based on the screenshot @jfreiman posted above in server settings.
Tiny thing… in the MORE menu on a movie title there is an option for ‘Mark Season as Watched’ … it’s not a season.
This “new interface” reminds me of when we were first promised Live Guide on the ROKU but it really wasn’t there . Lot of button pushes, lot of wasted space, lot of things missing. Seems like another major change tossed against the wall for users to debug and scream to get designed back to what it was. Meanwhile, timeshifting of live TV still has very repeatable flaws from those days long ago. Once again it would appear we’ve been asked to beta test a bad idea.
PLEASE save us all a lot of aggravation and go back to what was mostly working. Focus on fixing the things we’ve been waiting YEARS to work (cough timeshifting cough).
I think the easiest solution that would preserve the artwork would be for Plex not to crop the image at all!
I don’t think you have to think the image to entirely fit in the upper right hand corner. I think the around could be kept larger, but the bottom must be covered (but not cropped) by the season/episode posters as you scroll.
Have now been trying to figure out the new Plex interface, but some things are escaping me. All of my comments below are about film/video as I do not use the music or photography functions.
For context, I am a Plex Pass user and have been since 2014. I have two main servers in my home and I use both–although the contents are generally identical. This allows me to do rewatches of earlier seasons while keeping my place on the other server. I have over fifty libraries (on each server). Instead of pinning them to my home page, I would just go to “More”, then to the server and each server then showed me my recent usage. Although I know I could have set Plex to synchronize the two systems, I found this unhelpful, but can understand why many would find it useful. Also the three Roku devices I use have wired connections. They are Roku 3 and Roku Ultra.
The updated Plex Preview channel has some good stuff, I’m sure, and it may be quicker–although I’ve not experienced that yet–but I’m finding it a bit frustrating.
Although I have now put every library from both servers on the home page, I miss seeing the Continue Watching category. Or rather I miss the On Deck category as it now has been subsumed into Continue Watching. I recognise that by looking at the combined list I will be able to tell if I am in the middle of something by noting whether there is a gold/yellow line at the bottom of the tile, but it is somewhat frustrating.
I can no longer tell which server is a tile is from.
I cannot see my Playlists or Collections. Have they been aggregated on the Home Page? I cannot see how to activate them if that is what I need to do. I can Collections in individual libraries by cursoring left, but that’s limiting. But playlists I have yet to discover. Perhaps they could have a row on the homepage?
I recognize that Live TV, On Demand, and Discover are mainly there to lead users to using more ‘Plex’ content, but I would appreciate Playlists being placed there. I can see that the bookmark icon functions to replace Watch Later, but not everyone will get that immediately.
On a different matter, If I go into an individual library because I’m deciding what to watch, there is no longer the ABC… down the righthand side of the screen so I can hop to a particular letter. In some libraries I have over a thousand films and this was very helpful.
Thank you for considering some of these issues. I know that no update goes smoothly as I’ve been through several already. And at least we still have the regular Plex for Roku app to use in the meantime.
Just tried re-creating this, but did not see a “Mark Season As Watched” for a movie. However - there are multiple places to get to a page for a movie so can you provide some context as to how you got to the movie page where you saw this so that I can get it into a ticket to address? Thanks @Insomnic_1 !
Both Playlists and Collections should show in the left menu right under Collections. However, these are scoped to the specific library at the moment. Is it possible that you don’t have any playlists for the specific libraries that you were looking at in this example?
Thanks for the writeup @Harkaway ! I commented in a thread the other day that it is always fun to see the many use cases that people have and yours is a pretty detailed one! There is a bunch of other good feedback in here like the callout of not having the ABC nav within the library browse screen. I am passing it along for review.
